“I just go along. No sense complaining.” That was the response of a local resident regarding the state’s fee increase for the required vehicle safety check stations in Hawaii. The cost rose Nov. 1. For cars and trucks, the annual
“I just go along. No sense complaining.”
That was the response of a local resident regarding the state’s fee increase for the required vehicle safety check stations in Hawaii.
The cost rose Nov. 1. For cars and trucks, the annual safety check fees went to $19.19 from $14.70. For trailers and motorcycles, the fees went to $13.24 from $8.75.
So where does the money go? We checked in with John Lovstedt, state Department of Transportation’s motor vehicle safety officer. In fiscal year 2012-2013, the state collected $1,559,392.50 from the sale of PMVI stickers, forms and enforcement fee. The county costs for enforcing the program statewide totaled $1,598,999.69. The DOT spent about $140,000 for stickers and forms. There are 17 county employees in the PMVI program and one state employee.
While we certainly agree cars and trucks on the road should operate properly and an annual inspection seems reasonable, we don’t like to see rising costs for residents.
Is this latest safety registration increase in Hawaii warranted?
In this case, the fees are helping to cover technology upgrades for an improved system for the sticker that go on your vehicle as evidence you passed the safety inspection. Instead of two stickers, there is now one for the vehicle’s bumper. The old system had a sticker for the month, and another color-coded one for the year. The new system condenses both into a single black and white one indicating the month and year.
Also, check stations can print out the stickers on site, whereas before it was necessary to make trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles if they ran out of the stickers. That meant drivers might have to wait around or return later.
The benefit to you, the driver, seems to be this: The system will be more efficient, less waiting and only one sticker, which, by the way, will have the corresponding car’s license plate number on it to deter theft.
You could question whether such safety checks improve road safety. Not all states require annual inspections — Hawaii is one of about 20 that do so. Statistics will show that traffic accidents are primarily the result of driver error, not mechanical problems with the car or truck.
Again, we checked in with Lovstedt and he confirmed that for us.
“We have no empirical evidence that shows the Hawaii PMVI program improves highway safety,” he wrote.
Which leads us to ask this question:
Is the annual safety check necessary? It’s not so much the fee. Our concern is that hundreds of dollars of repairs can be ordered that will allow the car to pass the inspection, but have little chance of affecting road safety, such as a loose rear door handle. Folks that drive older cars generally are the ones who can least afford costly repairs. And we’re talking a lot of cars. About 900,000 are inspected each year in Hawaii.
We also asked Lovstedt if there was an average cost that resulted from an inspection. Say, 60 percent of cars are cleared, 20 percent are ordered to get repairs that average less than $300, and 20 percent are ordered to have repairs done that total more than $300. However, he did not have such information.
“The objective of the program is to ensure that vehicle owners maintain most of the safety equipment that the manufacturers built into the vehicles that they produce. Intuitively, one would expect that the program reduces the incidences of vehicle breakdowns on the road,” Lovstedt wrote. “Each breakdown, such as a flat tire or overheated engine, has potential for causing a crash, or at least a sudden slow down of the traffic flow. Faulty brakes have potential for causing a crash, etc.”
Bottom line, safety inspections may improve road safety. There’s no hard statistics to prove it. We agree there’s no sense in complaining about them. But we also think it makes sense to question whether whether this program is necessary. It would be nice to have some records that show it’s making a difference.
Meantime, let’s give Lovstedt the final word on why they’re necessary:
“When an airplane crashes, a large amount of time and money is spent to determine the cause of each crash and develop countermeasures to prevent future similar crashes. Aircraft crashes are sometimes caused by pilot error and sometimes by mechanical failure. If a similar process was in place for motor vehicles we would have helpful data …
“However, there are so many motor vehicle crashes compared to aircraft crashes, that it is not practical to do detailed investigations of all motor vehicle crashes. Even fatal motor vehicle crash investigations generally do not employ the level of scrutiny used in aircraft crashes.”
“This is not to say that the fatal motor vehicle crash investigations that have been conducted are worthless,” he added.
“On the contrary, they have produced a great deal of information that has been used to develop the existing federal motor vehicle safety standards. The Hawaii Legislature has demonstrated a high level of respect for these standards by requiring the inspection program.”
