Fleet Management System Prevents Distracted Driving and Keeps Drivers Safe
What is Distracted Driving?
Distracted driving is essentially any activity that diverts attention from driving. It may include eating and drinking, being busy with your phone (texting or talking), talking to the passengers in your vehicle, or fiddling with the navigation system or stereo. Basically, anything that diverts your attention from driving in a safe and alert manner can be considered distracted driving.
Ways to Prevent Distracted Driving:
Education
Education is the main tool to prevent distracted driving. When everyone involved, such as fleet managers, dispatchers, and drivers are educated about the financial loss, injuries and fatalities caused from something as avoidable as distracted driving, they can successfully prevent it.
Regulation
Your company needs to set clear rules as to what is expected out of employees and the consequences for breaking them. Because of this, employee monitoring is important. To have a safe and productive fleet, the management can create a contract with safety clauses and ensure that all drivers sign it. The clauses can include the requirement of drivers having to pull over to the side of the road before answering a phone call, prohibiting cell phone use while driving (covering both hand-held and hands-free calls) and encouraging drivers to initiate calls with dispatch once a delivery is complete rather than waiting for dispatch to contact them.
Enforcement
A policy only works when it is properly enforced. If there is an imposed fine, loss of leave or some other penalty for not following the safety rules of driving, this will encourage the employees to take the policy seriously.
Consequences
Unsafe driving increases liability, puts lives in danger and incurs considerable out-of-pocket expenses, all of which are avoidable. On average, an accident costs an employer $22,000 and an additional $110,000 per injury. This excludes workers’ compensation, vehicle insurance and other operating costs, which could dig deeper into the company’s funds. The threat to lives is the greatest consequence. In 2016, 3,450 people were killed because of distracted driving. It’s our responsibility to make sure employees and other drivers are safe on the road!
How Our Fleet Tracking System Can Help
1. Installation of App on the Driver’s Phone
Installing our app on your driver’s Android phone will help in establishing effective fleet management with GPS tracking services. When the vehicle starts moving, the app monitors whether the driver is following the corporate policies of safe driving. It also alerts you to violations. With strict distracted driving laws in the country, which include fines of up to $10,000 for employers of persons driving company vehicles, this app is a great safety software.
2. Gives Speed Limit Alerts
The majority of the GPS tracking services in Tucson, as in other parts of the USA, can only track speeds over 60 mph. There is no way of knowing if your driver is going above the much lower speed limits prescribed in school and hospital zones. However, our tracking feature alerts the fleet manager to instances of over-speeding with respect to the posted speed limits. It helps drivers reduce unnecessary speeding that is illegal, lowering the risk for accidents. It also saves the company money as it does not have to pay undue fines for the breaking of rules by its drivers. The tracking system goes beyond by sending reports and analytics to fleet managers to identify the problem areas of drivers so that they can be improved.
3. Features Related to Safety
Our fleet tracking system also contains reports that offer a wide range of driver safety event alerts such as sudden acceleration, speeding, hard braking, and hard cornering. All of these are provided in real time, which helps produce safer drivers. It also plays back important driving behavior data when accidents chance to happen.
4. Unauthorized Vehicle Usage
As a fleet manager, you want to set limits regarding the use of the company’s vehicles. Our tracking device has automated alerts to inform you of when a vehicle is in use beyond the authorized work hours.
A fleet tracking system is immensely useful for your company. Be it a car or truck or a mixed fleet for that matter, our company provides the much-needed transparency to ensure that you have the best fleet management system to prevent distracted driving and overall help promote efficiency in fleet management.