Drivewyze Calculates Money Saved by Bypassing Weigh Stations
Drivewyze, which offers weigh station bypass via an app on a smartphone or tablet, says it’s now able to do some interesting analytics of all the data collected from three years’ worth of operation, including how much fleets save by bypassing weigh stations.
Drivewyze, which offers weigh station bypass via an app on a smartphone or tablet, says it’s now able to do some interesting analytics of all the data collected from three years’ worth of operation, including how much fleets save by bypassing weigh stations.
For instance, take the oft-cited statistic that it costs $8.68 each time a truck has to stop at a weigh station, explained Doug Johnson, director of marketing, at last week’s Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky. That number comes from a 2007 study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
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Drivewyze recently looked at its data to evaluate that figure. It sampled more than 13 million weigh station visits over a two-month period, and used the latest updated operational costs data from the American Transportation Research Institute to evaluate not only direct costs but also lost opportunity costs.
It found that the average pull-in (not counting trucks that were put out of service) took 3.37 minutes. A quarter of those took 47 seconds or less. Another quarter took between 48 seconds and a minute and 18 seconds. Another quarter took a minute 19 seconds to 2 minutes and 20 seconds, and the remaining 25% took longer than that.
The resulting cost, Drivewyze determined, was $9.26 average saved per bypass.
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However, Johnson stressed, “there’s no such thing as an average truck or fleet. What interested us were the outliers.”
For instance, they learned that one truck passed a scale in Minnesota 14 times every day, saving that company $2,000 a month.
“What we can do is actually show a fleet the real loss for them. They can plug in their cost per mile or hour and run the analytics on their own trucks.”
This information can help fleets determine if it makes sense to use the bypass system. Maybe it only makes sense to use it on a certain part of the fleet that would avoid a large number of weigh station stops.
This type of analytics, Johnson said, “is the difference between our technology and a transponder. The transponder can only be red or green.”
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