Along the Lines Promoting Progress in Real Time

By Bill Spencer, Safety Manager

Building a stronger motor vehicle safety program at CNUC has often required an “all-of-the-above” approach. Certainly, any initiative that has the potential to better protect drivers and reduce vehicular incidents is worth investigating. The work we do every day involves a high degree of technical driving skills, navigating, and split-second decision making when behind the wheel. Motor vehicle incidents are by far the most common type of incident that occurs in our industry, and they also carry the highest potential for serious injury or fatality.

Several years ago, Geotab was introduced to the CNUC fleet as a core component of our motor vehicle safety improvement plan. Since that time, we have had tremendous success in reducing safety exceptions across the fleet and have taken the necessary steps to ensure the trend remains steady as our company continues to grow.

The trend has started to flatten over the last 18 months, and progress is likely to become more difficult as the company expands. Further, drivers are requesting more details about where and when safety exceptions occur. Providing this level of insight helps support incident reduction, but doing so can be cumbersome without automation.

To help foster continual improvement of driver safety and reduce at-risk exceptions, we recently introduced a new feature to the fleet: Audible Alerts. Now, drivers will be notified of at-risk behaviors in realtime through an audible beep from the Geotab device. We believe this addition to our program will help reinforce driver awareness and improve our ability to work safely where we need it most.