The 3G Shutdown Is Coming – Is Your Fleet Prepared or in the Dark?
It was great to see the recent announcement of the third Safer Journeys Action Plan from the New Zealand Government. Associate Transport Minister Craig Foss said that the Safer Journeys Action Plan is the third and final plan under the Safer Journeys Strategy to 2020.
“Safer Journeys is about creating a safe system — safer roads and roadsides, safer speeds, safer vehicles and safer road use,” said Mr Foss in a statement.
The first two Action Plans focussed on advertising campaigns, lowered blood alcohol levels, installation of hundreds of kilometres of rumble strips and median barriers, and mandating electronic stability control for light vehicles. According to the government’s National Road Safety Committee, the road toll is now significantly lower than it was when the programme began in 2010.
“The third Action Plan is an opportunity to refresh the Government’s approach to road safety,” continued Mr Foss, “and ensure initiatives are targeted to the areas of greatest risk and disproportionate harm, based on the latest data. It’s also an opportunity to embrace and enable the use of new technology.”
High social cost
The latest Action Plan contains figures on the estimated social cost of road crashes to New Zealand. A road crash resulting in injury includes loss of life quality, loss of productivity, medical costs, legal costs, and vehicle damage costs. Between 2010 and 2015, 1,834 people died on New Zealand roads, at a social cost of $7.3 billion, and over 12,550 were seriously injured. The combined social cost of deaths and serious injuries was about $16.4 billion.
Monitoring driver behaviour for safety
The Safer Journeys strategy says that minimising unsafe road user behaviour is one of the three core components to improving road safety. One of the central road safety features of the Teletrac Navman GPS fleet management system is the ability to monitor driver behaviour in real time. With a visual event viewer and driver scorecards, the Safety Analytics software feature enables businesses to monitor and replay unsafe driving events that occur on the road. The real-time scorecard function creates comprehensive reports summarising unsafe road behaviour and provides side-by-side driver rankings – providing motivation for improvement!
Education to improve skills
Speed management is one of the areas of focus for the Safer Journeys Action Plan 2016-2020 and campaigns will focus on awareness of road conditions and improving the ability of drivers to ‘read’ the road.
The Teletrac Navman Driving Academy is a web-based, predictive analysis platform which allows companies to pinpoint the most at-risk drivers and provide a specific training regime to suit each driver’s behaviour. The program’s Hazard Perception Evaluation allows fleet managers to identify risk in six core competency areas including scanning, space management, knowledge of danger zones, speed management, awareness of other motorists, and attitude.
Once the evaluation is complete, drivers are then automatically assigned specific, targeted training modules to address deficiencies.
For businesses that run fleets, thinking about how to improve road safety behaviour and awareness is a critical component of keeping workers safe. The government’s Fleet Safety website has a lot of good resources.