According to the Department of Transportation’s latest Significant Rulemaking Report, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) will pursue several rulemaking proposals in 2023, including speed limiters, which also landed in the top 10 of the American Transportation Research Institute’s (ATRI) 18th annual Top Industry Issues report this year for the first time.
Schuster Trucking Co. recently installed an intelligent speed assistance (ISA) technology on nearly all of its 460-unit fleet that has helped improve the Le Mars, Iowa-based company’s CSA scores and lower traffic violations. As of July 6, all vehicles in Europe are required to be equipped with ISA technology and while not a prevalent (or mandated) in the U.S., ISA has emerged as a solution to a potential speed limiter mandate while also offering fleets and drivers speed flexibility.
The company’s biggest problem area was in 55-mile-per-hour zones, but now that the company has implemented the E-SMART speed limiter, drivers are automatically slowed to 3 miles per hour over the speed limit in any given area.
“Our 6 to 10 (MPH) and above speeding tickets have dropped drastically. We allow the driver to go three miles an hour over the posted speed limit, and then on interstates that have 70-mile-per-hour or higher speed limits, we allow our drivers to do 72,” said Schuster Director of Safety Chad Hogrefe. “We are under the threshold in all (CSA) categories now, and we were above the threshold prior to E-SMART in unsafe, which is where your speeding tickets would be.”
The E-SMART speed limiter uses proprietary advanced position systems technology within a GPS embedded into its onboard device to accurately locate vehicles and actively manage the maximum allowed speed. Its customers can customize allowances for over the posted speed limit, and the limiter bases that around the speed limit on the road the unit is currently traveling. E-SMART gathers speed-limit data for U.S. roads across multiple databases, including location platform company HERE Technologies, Google and Microsoft and USDOT and state transportation departments.
Hogrefe said he expects speed limiters to soon become regulation and wants to stay ahead of the curve.
Schuster previously limited its trucks at 68 MPH across the board with no way to change that setting for city streets versus interstate speeds, resulting in speeding violations mainly when drivers would max out at 68 in a 55-MPH zone, Hogrefe said. He said drivers can still get tickets when, for example, a truck is going downhill or changing speed zones. That’s because the E-SMART system has no interface with the brake pedal, limiting speeds using the acceleration position sensor.
