Joliet Mayor D’Arcy backs truck traffic enforcement technology

Mayor Terry D’Arcy on Monday voiced his confidence that a new technology will deter wayward semitrailers from going where they don’t belong in Joliet.

The City Council votes Tuesday on a portable detection system designed to spot oversized trucks in residential neighborhoods and other areas of the city where they are not permitted.

“It’s a really good system,” D’Arcy said a council workshop meeting where the system was reviewed. “Long term, I think this is going to replace a police car out there.”

Residents for years have contended that Joliet does not deploy enough truck enforcement officers in a city where logistics has been the fastest growing segment of the local economy.

The city plans to lease a Portable LIDAR-Based Vehicle Detection and Warning System for three years at $156,000 to get better control of the situation.

“A lot of these trucks go wherever they want whenever they want,” D’Arcy said. “We don’t want that.”

The system appeared to enjoy support from council members who asked a number of questions with most making positive comments.

“If we had a police officer who could sit there all day, we would do that,” council member Sherri Reardon said of the challenges of truck traffic enforcement. “The remote access is what we would use.”

Sensors and cameras in the system measure the size of trucks, record the license plates, and collect other data that could be used by the city to issue citations after the fact without an officer on the scene when violations occur, said John Caya, chief executive officer for HyPoint Solutions, the Wisconsin-based company that would lease the system to Joliet.

“It will automatically identify: here’s the vehicle, here’s the size, here’s the time, and here’s the place,” Caya told the council.

The system collects a range of data the city can use to analyze truck traffic and other vehicle traffic going through certain areas, Caya said.

The portable system can be moved around the city, which Police Chief William Evans said is what the police department wants.

“One of the reasons we wanted the portable model is we wanted to be able to move it around town to target areas,” Evans said.

The system did face questions from council member Pat Mudron who among other things asked whether it could be used to collect enough fines to pay for itself.

Evans said the police department was unable to do an analysis that would answer the question.

It’s also not clear how soon the system would be put to use for traffic enforcement.

Interim City Attorney Chris Regis said the city will first use the system to collect data while it develops an administrative process to enforce citations that would be issued to individual violators detected by the system.