Virginia Total Screen Program

The Virginia on-road remote sensing program started in 2004 as a high emitter program collecting roughly 1 million on-road exhaust measurements (about 300,000 unique vehicles) in the Northern Virginia I/M area with one RSD4000 operating from dawn to dusk four days per week.

The Virginia program is a turnkey service to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VDEQ) that collects, manages and processes data, and issues about 15 official VDEQ notices each month, requiring those that have registered the two highest readings within a 120-day period to be re-inspected at an I/M station.

Although the volume is conservative at this stage, the Virginia program makes full use of the RSD data by applying all three authorized RSD applications (high emitter testing, clean screening and fleet characterization). In addition to issuing high emitters notices, the same number of clean screen notices is issued to cars registering the two lowest clean readings. Finally, data is collected in three non-I/M areas so that Northern Virginia’s inspected fleet may be compared to an un-inspected control fleet as a USEPA-approved measure of the I/M program’s effectiveness.

“Total Screen” is the most efficient utilization of RSD, maximizing all three applications for concurrent use.