Help Inc., the non-profit public/private partnership that provides PrePass weigh station bypass and truck safety screening services, reached a milestone in May, with more than 475,000 pre-screened and qualified commercial trucks signed up for its services, the highest number ever.

With 304 operational sites in 31 states, Help said PrePass is the largest truck safety pre-clearance system in North America. In the next few weeks, new sites are scheduled to open in Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma, with another eight sites in various stages of planning in a number of other states.

“This is a significant accomplishment for Help and PrePass because it illustrates the success of our primary mission, which is to improve safety for all highway users while increasing efficiency for the commercial trucking industry,” said Karen Rasmussen, Help’s president and CEO. “At many PrePass sites, the system also protects our roads by helping officers identify overweight trucks so they can get them off the road.”

Since Help began collecting savings data in 1997, PrePass has saved trucking companies more than 239 million gallons of fuel and more than 49.9 million hours of driver time, resulting in more than $4.2 billion in operational savings, according to numbers cited by the company from Iowa State University and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. It said these savings have also reduced truck emissions by more than 525,000 metric tons, equivalent to taking more than 100,000 cars off the road, based on Environmental Protection Agency estimates.