Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell recently authorized the elimination of state-level safety inspection requirements for interstate trucks.  Interstate trucks will still be required to comply with Federal-level safety inspections, assuring that Virginia drivers are just as safe as they were before the proclamation.

While this may seem like a seemingly insignificant item, it is actually a big help to Virginia based businesses engaged in interstate commerce.  Prior to the elimination of the requirement, if you registered your interstate trucks in Virginia, once a year each registered vehicle would have to come back to the state to be inspected.  That is in addition to the federally mandated safety inspection.  Depending on the size of your fleet, you may have registered trucks that never even enter the state in their normal route patterns.  However, those trucks would still have to find a time to come back to Virginia to undergo the duplicative inspection.  For the larger companies, that is an expensive and inconvenient proposition and could drive them to register their fleet in another state that does not have that requirement, thus taking registration fee revenue away from Virginia.

Now that the state-level inspection requirement has been removed, trucks will still need to have their annual federal inspection, but will not need to also have an inspection performed in state.  For a UPS Freight or Estes Express Lines, both with headquarters in Virginia and large interstate fleets, that is a huge time and cost saver.  In addition, as Virginia pursues new companies to locate within the state they have now added to their competitive position.

“To us, it’s a fairly important step,” UPS spokesman Norman Black told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “It avoids a duplicative inspection that didn’t make things very friendly for transportation companies in Virginia.”

All in all this is a very low cost, high impact move for the state.