Five ways telematics increases road safety for everyone

Ensuring the safety of all road users and getting drivers home safe at the end of their journey are priorities for fleets of all types and sizes. Telematics can help to increase road safety for everyone on the roads. Let’s take a look at five ways how -

1. Measure hours of service with ELD

By accurately monitoring and enforcing the amount of hours truck drivers can spend behind the wheel, ELDs help to ensure the safety of everyone on the road. Tired and overworked drivers can be a hazard to all road users. As opposed to paper log diaries, with electronic log diaries all HOS timings are worked out automatically, making drivers jobs a little easier and letting them know how long they until their next work or rest periods.

This means drivers are more alert and less likely to be involved in an incident, and fleet managers can see the status of their drivers, letting them create safe schedules for their team.

2. DVIR makes maintenance easy

Digital Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIR) are digital checklists that drivers fill out at the beginning and end of the workday. They check a number of mechanical and safety issues on their vehicles such as the steering mechanism, lights, brakes, tires and more to ensure that everything is working up to the correct specification.

DVIR can be synced with your maintenance team, so that when an issue on a vehicle is flagged, they see it. Appropriate action can be taken to fix the issue, downtime is reduced, and your fleetwide safety standards are kept high.

3. Quality concrete every time

Ensuring that roads and bridges are built properly in the first place is a great step towards greater road safety. Having the correct spec’d concrete is part of this, and where telematics can play a helping hand. By using sensors on ready-mix trucks, data can be gathered for drum rotations, water add, slump and more, ensuring the correct, high-quality concrete is delivered to the job on time.

4. Driver scorecards

Telematics can record instances of driving behavior in real-time across your fleet. This includes high-risk actions such as excessive speed, harsh-cornering, harsh-braking, and behavior that should be encouraged such as defensive driving.

This data can be used to create Driver Scorecards. The different driving events are weighted with points depending on severity, which is customizable by management. The points are tallied up with the aim for drivers to get as low of a score as possible. Prizes or rewards can be given out to the drivers with the best scores at the end of a time period, helping to encourage road safety across your organization.

5. Dash cams and driver coaching

Whether your drivers are veterans of the road or they’ve just started out, there’s always room for improvement. Dash cams streamline driver training by allowing for remote coaching, which means that more drivers can receive high levels of coaching in a shorter time period.

When combined with data from the on-board accelerometer, footage from a dashcam provides the ultimate coaching tool. By picking up on any particular areas that drivers may need coaching in, you can benefit them the best you can as individual drivers.

 

To learn more about how Coretex can help your organization increase road safety, get in touch with our team today.