Motorists traveling on the freeways in Arizona can rest assured those new cameras going up along Interstate 10 aren’t monitoring them. Unless they’re driving a commercial truck, that is.
The Arizona Department of Transportation told the Casa Grande Dispatch the cameras are being placed along the Interstate on towers between Casa Grande Valley and Phoenix to monitor big rigs rolling through.
“The state mandates that commercial vehicles have specific types of equipment that they are required to operate physically, and we are mandated to enforce that along with the Arizona Department of Public Safety,” ADOT spokesman Harold Sanders said.
The cameras are being installed to ensure commercial trucks are following regulations as part of a plan to make safety inspections on the vehicles more efficient. The plan involves sensors in the pavement that can tell if the trucks are complying by weight standards at the same time that cameras film the tucks and send the information to a database.
“It is impossible to stop every truck to do an inspection. It is just a waste of time,” Sanders said.
The new commercial truck regulation program is a $7.5 million plan, with $4.5 million of that going to the technology alone.
Fox 10 in Phoenix reported that the state once had a speed camera program, but that it expired in 2010.
“It has nothing to do with speed enforcement,” Sanders said. “This is not photo enforcement. We get so many calls on that from the general public because once upon a time photo enforcement did exist. But it has absolutely no ability to capture that type of information.”
