What Will Be Your Final Hour?

I’m busy with the multi-part teen GPS series of posts but I came across this item which seemed a bit too good to pass up.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a teen or a tottering old man as I am, there’s little doubt that fatigue plays a significant part in the risk factor.

One thing many managers and business owners overlook when thinking of GPS fleet monitoring is the manager’s role in fatigue-related accidents.

In egregious cases some business owners have been fined or even jailed for hiding the fact that their drivers have been exceeding the hours of service rules.

But even if there’s no direct liability, simple business sense (an humanity) dictates that on the road fatigue is something a business owner needs to keep on his radar screen.

For businesses with local delivery fleets the driving rules are significantly different. In some cases drivers can put in 16 hour days … and often can’t work that long again for a period of time. Do you know the rules?

More importantly, can you document what your drivers have been doing? If there’s a fatal wreck and one of your drivers is charged with being the cause, how would you go about proving his or her hours of service .. you might need to go back two weeks or more?

Something to think about when you are wrestling with the GPS/non GPS cost benefit analysis asnd calculating your ROI period.

Measuring what you manage might turn out to be cheaper than you think.

159 Miles per Hour? Not Likely

Here’s a nice little news item to brighten a Monday morning. A trucking fleet owner has one of his trucks captured by an unmanned speed camera at 247 km/h … that’s about 159 mph for the Metrically challenged.

The fine and subsequent insurance problems could have put a real dent in his November profits and the driver .. he probably would have been lucky to get away without jail time.

the ace in the hole was an on board GPS tracker that showed the truck was doing on 80 clicks .. about 50 mph.

You’ll notice the weasel wording about how the court wouldn’t have accepted the proof from the owner unless the device had been calibrated, yada yada yada, but guess what? The charge went away. years before I was in the GPS business I used to calibrate radar speed guns and was often called upon as an expert witness. Even in cases of obvious malfunctions of equipment, courts almost never acknowledge them. They just dismiss the case or find another excuse to let the driver off.

Many GeoTab customers have had the same kind of experience. The use of these speed cameras is rampant in England and other former British colonies and the horror stories about their inaccuracy abound. A simple on board device that tracks speed to GPS accuracy (within a 10th of a mile per hour) can often mean the difference between profit and loss for a month.

Perhaps it’s only coincidence that my flagship GeoTab product originated in South Africa … tracking diamond carriers and gold ore trucks?

Great opportunity for Open Source mashers

My last post regarding making progress on integrated E911 … putting cell phone locations on maps for emergency response has led to a thought for the day. The world is full of highly talented programmers, Always endeavoring to “show off” their “stuff”. There are great tools available, such as Google earth that are free, or very cheap to use.

When a community decides to implement E911 response they need two main things, A feed from the phone provider giving the coordinates (lat/long, UTM, etc.) of the calling phones and a map to display the location on.

A thought for those working on the next tweak to some arcane command in Linux, yet another free content management system or still one more plug in for Firefox … what about a simple interface to put the phone location data into a KML file and a network interface to Google Earth?

Seems like all the info needed is readily available on line and putting just one location on G-E can even be done manually with a click of the mouse.

Sounds like an interesting project to me.

More By The Mile’ or ‘By The Use’ Ideas

Vehicle technology could be used to nab unregistered cars and to collect tolls and taxes based on when and where motorists drive.

Roads could soon start paying for themselves, as vehicle technology companies roll out new systems that could charge higher tolls during rush hour, allow lone drivers to pay for carpool lanes, or automatically send out vehicle fines, experts said Wednesday.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

  “People really want more of this to keep traffic moving,” said Jonathan Dinh, marketing and program support specialist at Scientific Technologies………..

Read more

Panel, police chief at odds over fleet costs

http://tinyurl.com/exdkq

According to the Police Fleet Implementation Working Group’s draft report, buying 293 specially-equipped patrol cars would cost $111 more per car per year.

But the county would save $2,658 a year on each of the 76 non-patrol cars through fleet ownership, the report said.

Police Chief Lawrence Mahuna complained in a letter that the panel ignored costs associated with fleet ownership, overstated how long the vehicles would last and overlooked the need for a reserve fleet
……

The county owns just 37 of 376 vehicles used by the police department, and pays for liability insurance, one gallon of fuel for every 10 miles of driving on duty and a quart of motor oil for every 500 miles driven.

—————–

Well I promised more background and then here I am off on a rant again… but it can’t be helped. It’s just amazing to me to believe that educated, intelligent and responsible people could manage their vehicles this way in this time and century.

You should really read the whole article if you want to see a lot of specious reasoning. I’m just going to address the mileage thing here.

First of all, how do you reimburse employees for mileage without some form of control? Dishing out money in this way is like paying people by the hour without owning a watch. I’m not only talking about the potential for employee cheating (which certainly can’t be ignored), but what about cheating the honest but forgetful employee who forgets to log miles for important county business?

Examples like this point out, more than ever, how important it is to measure what you manage.

If you’ll notice the amounts in dispiute, they are talking numbers like $1200 a year that one side says will be saved and the other side claims will not be saved. It doesn’t matter whose GPS system these guys chose, it would be hard not to make a Return On Investment in well under a year. Why bicker, hesitate and flip flop on important decisions? You wouldn’t keep time without a watch, you wouldn’t keep track of your money without an accounting program … so measure the miles that you manage.

Guest Editorial

Welcome to the new home of my GPS Tracking blog. Blogger has given me fine service and gotten me throughly bitten by the “blog Bug” but I decided to move to my own dedicated server in anticipation of future growth,

Today I’d like to mention a great fleet manager resource, Business Fleet magazine. The current issue features a rundown on the latest trends in wireless location and telematics for the real-world fleet manager.

If you don’t read the whole issue (free subscription or read on line), I suggest you ate the least read the Op Ed by Chris Brown … Welcome to the Wireless Revolution.

http://www.fleet-central.com/bf/t_inside.cfm?action=article_pick&storyID=741

Chris speaks with authority and he isn’t a salesman trying to sell a particular product. The fuel prices have hurt many this last quarter of 2005 and I don’t see any magic bullet that will make 2006 any better. Read, learn and apply the modernization that fits your operation.

Freedom to Choose

An interesting lawsuit came to my attention today:

Looks to me as if North American Van Lines has been operating on the old tried and true ‘company store’ policy.

Can’t comment on the merits of the case but one thing that caught my eye was the independent owner-operator’s claim that North American forces the drivers to buy Qualcomm tracking equipment and service through the company.

Some years ago, Qualcomm was the pioneer in this technology, and on the one hand, I have a great deal of respect for Qualcomm … they are certainly the world’s largest player in the tracking world.

However, their equipment, service and customer relationships are 20 years old now and grown rather ‘long in the tooth’. There is plenty of choice in the equipment world for individuals or small companies to choose from that can meet or beat Qualcomm in all aspects, particularly price.

One suspects that the alleged requirement from North American is a sort of phony requirement, driven by the fact that Qualcomm denies the existence of competitors and refuses to let companies integrate different brands of tracking equipment. They are very literally a “my way or the highway” kind of firm.

Individuals who are looking into tracking ought to think very long and hard before getting “married” to an all or nothing sort of provider. Do a little searching and/or contact an independent consultant before embarking on a decision like this. There are many services out there that can integrate different manufacturer’s services and equipment into the same dispatch center.

Once upon a time IBM tried to tell all their customers that they had to buy IBM hardware and software .. or else. We all know how that ended. It’s you business, run it wisely.

Dave

www.satviz.com 

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