Ask a motor carrier what it wants from government and the answer would be: reliability. Government can’t control the weather, the carrier would say, but it can provide good roads with sufficient capacity and it can give clear rules on when and why my trucks should be stopped. With reliable transit times and reliable rules, I can plan how best to serve my customers.

Twenty-five years ago government and trucking industry leaders agreed on one aspect of reliability for trucking: safe and compliant fleets should be able to bypass state weigh stations and inspection sites and continue down the road. That improvement came courtesy of PrePass Safety Alliance (formerly HELP Inc.) and its electronic bypass system, PrePass. Today, there are multiple technologies used to accomplish bypass. As a motor carrier, how do you compare today’s bypass choices? Not surprisingly, one answer is: reliability.

Commercial bypass systems utilize two different technologies: RFID or CMRS. RFID – Radio Frequency Identification – is faster and more reliable than CMRS – Commercial Mobile Radio Services. RFID is used by the PrePass transponder. At highways speeds, RFID can identify a truck in traffic and confirm its safety, compliance credentials and WIM (weigh-in-motion) reading in a few hundredths of a second. The PrePass transponder, utilizing RFID, does this with 99.99% accuracy.

CMRS is the same cellular wireless signal we use to run our cell phones and other mobile devices. We know from personal experience that wireless signals are not 100% reliable. A study by the Texas A&M Transportation Research Institute (TTI) looked at trucks equipped with the most modern CMRS bypass app under optimal operating conditions and found that CMRS reliability – its accuracy in identifying trucks and reading their information at highway speeds in traffic – may vary depending on the site location, weigh-in-motion scale placement, device model and cellular carrier. .

A free whitepaper describes why this difference may be important to your fleet. It also describes other benefits of both RFID and CMRS and how to make a proper ROI comparison.

For example, RFID requires overhead readers at weigh stations, which are not always cost-effective where there’s not a lot of truck traffic. Or a state may set up a roadside inspection site. In these cases, the areas may be “geo-fenced” and CMRS bypass apps can allow qualified carriers to legally drive on by.

For some fleets, complete reliability may come with having both – the PrePass transponder for ultimate accuracy and the PrePass MOTION app for extended bypass coverage. PrePass is the only bypass provider to offer both RFID and CMRS.  And motor carriers with the PrePass transponder pay nothing more to add PrePass MOTION. You can rely on that.

Read more about this in the free PrePass whitepaper entitled “Comparing Weigh Station Bypass Technologies.”