The Mount White Safety Stations, both north and south bound on the Pacific Highway, about 50km north of Sydney have a process of identifying risk in trucks travelling up and down the Pacific.

They are manned by the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator and are always busy, as trucks have to pull off the highway and pass over the weigh-in-motion (WIM) system. If the axle masses detected are suspect, the traffic light system requests them to pull onto the weighbridge. If nothing comes up, the trucks are directed back out onto the highway.

An officer sitting in the control booth or at the desk next to the weighbridge can be watching the various screens with different feeds from the local cameras and has controls allowing them to actually manually direct trucks in.

Image: Prime Creative Media

If a truck looks a bit interesting, maybe there’s something not quite right, they can bring it in, if there’s something they want to look at, they can override the signal which would normally send the truck back out onto the highway, and bring it into the weighbridge. Otherwise, it’s fully automatic, the WIM in the road detects the truck may be overweight and the truck comes onto the weighbridge to confirm whether there is an over loading issue.

On a daily basis there will be consistently over 3,000 trucks passing through the screening lane on each station, northbound and southbound, during the teams’ eight hour day shift. The afternoon and night shift have less traffic coming through, giving an overall 24 hour truck count around 4,500 trucks.

The teams are pulling in 30 out of the 3,000 trucks coming through screening, this equates to a one per cent possibility of being pulled in for some form of check or inspection. The system improves the odds of finding issues through the dynamic scales in the screening lane, plus the judgement of experienced officers who try to pick out possible non-conformances.

It is the more precise targeting possible with modern technology, like rego plate recognition and a national data base consolidated by the NHVR, as well as the Safe-T-Cam data on where trucks were and when which makes the decision to check a truck even more effective.

“There is still a fair bit to be said for the manual override, and using the naked eye to pull a truck in, even with the technology,” says one of the team.

“If we were wanting to target fatigue, for example, they will use the naked eye to look for what they’ve been trained to do, and they’ll be able to have a best guess to pick a vehicle was most likely to have a fatigue related issue, based on the type of vehicle or, if it’s an unfamiliar vehicle.

“Plus, if we have intel on different companies and we see the name of the company on the side of the truck we can bring it in. If we see loads that look a bit funny or if it looks a bit ugly or sticking out on the side or whatever, you can say, we’ll have a look at that.”

The cameras are placed well before the point at which the truck will be diverted back onto the highway. This gives the team the time to have a good look at any truck from a number of angles.

On that screening lane the system does an automatic registration check, which will flag if any defects or any other issues are connected with the particular registration plate. The checks are carried out and any problem alerts are flagged to the roadside team quickly.

Image: Prime Creative Media

It’s only a few hundred metres between the point at which the truck enters the screening lane and when it will be sent back out onto the road with an all-clear message of ‘return to the freeway’ on the overhead message board.

Every time there’s an interaction with a truck, if a notice is issued, if there’s an offence history on the vehicle, it’s fed into the database. When the camera checks a rego plate, it goes through the database and the algorithms assess the risk rating of that truck in various areas, fatigue, mass, maintenance, all those sorts of things.

The system then assesses whether the risk rating meets the criteria for the truck to be pulled in for some form of check. The other parameters at play in the decision to bring it in or send it on its way is how busy the station is and how big the team working that shift are.

The busier it gets the higher the risk threshold for a truck to be ‘intercepted’. If something’s not right, if it can’t pick up a rego plate or it gets confused, it’s default is to bring the truck in for a check.

The NHVR will also put an alert on certain vehicles for some particular if they want to have a look at it. The amount of data coming into the system grows every year and is coming from all of the states involved in the NHVR, plus some data from those not participating, namely Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Safe-T-Cam enables the team to track a truck’s movements, checks at other checking stations are recorded. The NHVR also run a confidential reporting line. This level of data is beginning to make the targeting of those doing the wrong thing easier for the NHVR.

The flip side of this is that drivers working for reputable companies and those doing the right thing are spending less time being looked over in checking stations and are generally receiving a lower level of hassle on the highway from regulators.