The American Trucking Assns. (ATA) has entered into a $19.3 million agreement with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to expand its Highway Watch program.

The program trains highway professionals to identify and report safety and security situations on the nation’s roadways.
The funds from TSA, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will support immediate Highway Watch instruction for nearly 400,000 professionals. The new "Transportation Army" would include those in trucking, including for-hire carriers, private carriers, small carriers, independent owner-operators and state trucking associations.
Others would include commercial, intercity and for-hire bus operators, truck and travel plaza personnel, shippers, driver organizations, maintenance and repair sites, equipment manufacturers and support facilities.
In the public sector, participants will include school bus fleets, highway construction and maintenance, state Departments of Transportation (DOTs), first responders and toll booth operators.
The Highway Watch goal is to link transportation professionals with "first responders" -- law enforcement and the intelligence community -- in an effort that strives to ensure that a commercial vehicle is never used as a weapon.
Highway Watch, formerly a joint project of ATA and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), began operation in May 1998 as an ATA highway safety initiative.
"We are honored to be on duty for America," said Bill Graves, ATA president and CEO. "Our drivers see a lot through their windshields, and now, if something looks out of line, they can quickly get the information to the right people for appropriate action. Working with TSA and our colleagues in the highway sector, we can help to make our roads safer and more secure."
Under the cooperative agreement, ATA will expand the current 24/7/365 national call-in center to handle an increasing volume of calls from highway professionals and coordinate state Amber Alert missing children programs with Highway Watch.
Next, ATA will expand significantly the Highway Watch operations center that coordinates with federal and state agencies and professional transportation companies in preparing event response and recovery action plans for crisis situations.
The original ATA Truck Informational Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) will become the Highway ISAC to better incorporate and reflect the information available among the partnering highway professional organizations. A pool of security-cleared experts with knowledge of transportation operations, law enforcement, and security and intelligence will expand the Highway ISAC. The Center, in conjunction with TSA and DHS, will collate and analyze industry data from the Highway Watch program and prepare reports, bulletins, warnings, alerts and advisories for use in emergency responses, and when appropriate, for dissemination to the transportation industry and to the motoring public.
The expansion of Highway Watch into a nationwide safety and security effort was originally a major goal of the trucking industry’s Anti-Terrorism Action Plan (ATAP) announced in May 2002. ATAP was a coordinated effort of the Trucking Security and Anti-Terrorism Working Group, a task force of organizations representing hundreds of thousands of transportation, trucking, and trucking-related workers in the U.S. and Canada.
Under the expanded Highway Watch partnership, these trucking professionals will be joined by thousands of additional private sector, first responder, law enforcement and government professionals to carry out the program’s mission.
The expanded Highway Watch program hopes to utilize ATA’s fifty affiliated state trucking associations as primary coordinators in their respective states in an effort to spread the program nationwide as quickly as possible.