Flying through the coops in BC

VANCOUVER — If you or one of your drivers have been subjected to a British Columbia roadside inspection recently, you might have noticed that things went a little faster than the last time you had to endure the indignity.

At least it’s supposed to be that way.

Recently, the province’s Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement (CVSE) unit updated and automated its system so information flows much more quickly between the trucker, the inspector and the ministry’s head office.

The CVSE estimates that inspectors conduct about 35,000 roadside checks every year.

Until now, it went something like this: Inspectors completed forms by hand and forwarded them to the nearest regional office, which then sent them to the central office.

This meant the same data was entered by hand three separate times, a process that was time-consuming, costly, labor-intensive and possibly prone to errors.

To make matters worse, accurate data about non-compliant vehicles was not immediately available to enforcement officers, which meant that unsafe vehicles or drivers could be posing continued dangers to other road users.

To solve the problem, CVSE began developing a business case for automating the process and a request for proposals was issued.

The winning bidder: Telus.

These days, a CVSE officer completes an eForm on a specially designed ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook tablet PC. The information is encrypted and compressed for security, then transmitted via the private Telus 1X wireless network to a highly secure Telus Data Centre in Victoria. Finally, a link to the B.C. government’s own data centre makes it available to any authorized CVSE or enforcement officer who needs it.

Information that previously took 14 days or longer to become available is now accessible in mere minutes, with a minimum of manual effort and a significant improvement in the quality of data.

Because data is only entered once, there are far fewer opportunities for error, resulting in greatly increased accuracy.

“Our experience has been very positive,” says Rob Kroeker, B.C.’s Director of Commercial Vehicle Safety. “The solution not only delivers an automated form, it has also allowed our patrol staff to deliver a number of other functions through wireless. For example, they can now look up vehicle and driver data from their truck, which is something they couldn’t do before. There’s been enormous uptake of this from our staff, a complete endorsement of it.”