| The state’s new vehicle inspection technology landed with a thud when the Registry of Motor Vehicles rolled it out earlier this month, leaving hundreds of service stations unable to participate in the program that regulates vehicle safety and emissions.
The RMV should have done a better job preparing those stations for the change, Registrar Erin Deveney said Monday, informing the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Board of Directors that “there are still outstanding issues that we are working to resolve.”
The workers who perform vehicle inspections are constantly adapting to advances in motor vehicle technology, Deveney noted. “It was unfair, however, to rely upon them and their professional expertise and underestimate the support that they still deserved,” she said.
The state switched tech vendors on Oct. 1 from Parsons Technology to Applus, which Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack said offered “higher quality control” and the ability to “reduce the risk of fraud by better control over things like the printing of stickers and the validating of information.”
As of Monday evening, there were still 25 stations that wanted to perform the safety and emissions inspections but were unable to because of Internet connectivity problems, according to MassDOT.
Expired inspection stickers can leave a mark on drivers’ finances beyond the cost of the ticket. The firm Bellotti Law Group notes on its website that if a driver is caught with an expired inspection sticker that will “add surchargeable points to your insurance premium and will count as a surchargeable event for license suspension/revocation purposes.”
While the inspection technology is mostly up and running now, the state has delayed implementing a new video component to the inspection until next year, Deveney said.
“The video was an added layer of quality control, which we’re looking forward to rolling out but it made sense to delay on that to make sure that we could get the core inspection program up and running,” Pollack said.
The day after the new system went into effect, only 531 stations were able to process inspections, according to MassDOT. By Oct. 15, that number had risen to 1,724.
Station owners paid $5,810 per work station for the new equipment, and vehicle owners pay $35 per inspection – of which the station owner keeps about $23 with the remainder going to Applus, the RMV and the Department of Environmental Protection for oversight, according to MassDOT.
Pollack said the state is surveying the inspection stations and is in regular communication with them. Asked if she was satisfied with the system, she said, “I’m satisfied with where we are now. I wish we had been here two weeks ago.”
The rocky rollout of the inspections equipment is in contrast to the state’s implementation of all-electronic tolling last fall – which received widespread praise for its relatively smooth debut.
Providing the board with a roughly 10-minute post-mortem, Deveney said that as workers at inspection stations experienced problems, they called in for help and “quickly overwhelmed the telephone support line.”
The call center staff was more than doubled and field staff worked until 9 p.m. most nights to help address service stations’ issues, Deveney said.
