In October of 1995, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) contracted with San Jose State University's College of Engineering to study the use of biometrics for the identification of commercial motor vehicle drivers.  This is not the first FHWA study to address this issue, but rather is one more part of an initiative started over 10 years ago by Congress to improve the safety of commercial vehicles and their operators on our nation's highways.

In 1986, the U.S. Congress passed the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act establishing a "one-driver, one-license, one-record" policy for commercial drivers.  To enforce the act, which made it illegal for a commercial driver to be licensed concurrently in more than one state, the Commercial Drivers Licensee Information System (CDLIS) was established, becoming operational in the early 1990's.  In 1988, after hearing testimony from the American Trucking Association that the CDLIS system of identification was too weak to deter licensing fraud and that "unique identifiers, such as fingerprints or retinal images...should be used in the licensing system to make identification foolproof", Congress passed the Truck and Bus Safety and Regulatory Reform Act requiring the Secretary of Transportation to establish, by 1991, "minimum uniform standards for a biometrics identification of operators of commercial motor vehicles".

On the basis of a commissioned study of fingerprinting and retinal scanning completed in 1990, the Federal Highway Administration concluded that "more time is needed (for biometrics) technology ...to develop to meet the functional requirements.  In 1995, San Jose State University was retained to re-study the issue of biometrics and commercial driver's licenses.  This study was completed and published in December of 1997.

The San Jose State study was divided into several sub-tasks.  We worked actively with the Federal Highway Administration and the Departments of Motor Vehicle of the various States through the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrations to:  1) define, specifically, the application of biometrics technology to the national commercial driver's licensing system;  2) establish a general methodology for determining the best biometrics technology for any specific application;  3) establish criteria f or selecting candidate technologies for this application;  4) select candidate technologies;  5) suggest candidate standards for a multi-State system based on these technologies;  6) obtain cost and operational data from existing systems employing these technologies in a similar application;  7) discuss implementation issues, such as system design, cost/benefit, and estimated system performance.

We determined that there are two potential applications of biometrics technology to commercial driver's licenses.  The primary application is to prevent the issuance of multiple licenses to a single driver.  A secondary application is to verify that the license presenter is indeed the authorized holder of the license.  Using a taxonomy scheme we have developed, the first application can be classified as a non-cooperative, overt, non-habituated, supervised, standard environment application.  The second is classified as a cooperative, overt, habituated, supervised, non-standard environment application.

We established criteria for selecting candidate technologies for each of these applications.  The selected technology must:  1) be claimed by vendors to support all of the required applications;  2) have been used previously in a similar large-scale application for which an independent performance/cost audit is available indicating that the revised functional requirements can be met;  3) be available from multiple vendors supporting a single image collection, compression and storage standard.  At the time of this study, only fingerprint system vendors could demonstrate use of their equipment in the primary, non-cooperative application.  Additionally, independent audits of performance of non-cooperative fingerprint identification systems were available.

This study recommends that fingerprinting be established as the biometric for identifying drivers pursuant to Section 9105 of the "Truck and Bus Safety and Regulatory Reform Act."  This study further defines the minimum required scope of the system and recommends specific "minimum uniform standards" for the biometric identification of commercial drivers using fingerprinting.  We have included results of a large-scale fingerprinting test showing the feasibility of two-finger systems at a scale comparable to the current CDLIS enrollment.

Our research effort concluded in June, 1997, and the final report documenting our conclusions, outlining additional technical work development of national, industry-wide standards for all selected technologies is available through this website.

Final Report

Executive Summary