by Jonathan Hubbard, CEO, SpeedGauge

Any professional driver who drives a million miles without an accident deserves respect and praise. Fleets know this, and they take the time to acknowledge the achievement. In fact, the “Million Mile Safety Bonus” is an important part of many fleet safety programs.

But should it be?

At SpeedGauge, we believe that all long-term drivers deserve our praise and recognition. It takes great self-discipline, focus and commitment to drive a truck, day after day for miles on end. Anyone who can maintain such professional focus year after year deserves praise.

That said, I would argue that statistically-speaking it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to assign special praise to the drivers who reach the million mile mark without an accident. In fact, statistical probability shows that high-risk drivers are very likely being recognized for accident-free driving thanks to simple luck, while safer drivers are passed over for years at a time without recognition simply because they haven’t logged the same mileage or enjoyed the same luck.

Don’t get me wrong, individual driver performance plays a huge role in the overall safety record of a fleet. However, the accident rate of an individual driver provides little insight into the safety of his driving behavior.

According to the US Department of Transportation, heavy trucks were involved in 275,484 police-reported crashes in 2010. If there are 3.5 million commercial drivers (and we assume everyone covers roughly equivalent mileage each year), the chances of being one of the unlucky few to be involved in a crash is less than 8%.

If we project that accident risk over time, we see it go up with mileage, but not as much as you might think:

Once upon a time, you could define “the internet” as something you used to send email - it kept your computer busy and your phone line tied up. But as phone lines gave way to cable, wireless, 3G, 4G, and whatever’s next, it’s time to think about the internet using a sort of Murphy’s Law of connectivity: whatever can be connected to it, will be. 

Welcome to the Internet of Things — and as a fleet operator, you’re going to start hearing from your trucks more often. They’ll be checking in to tell you where they are, how fast they’re going, whether they’re low on fuel, need air in the tires, or are just passing through particularly cold or hot weather. Thanks to the emerging field of fleet telematics, managers and drivers get feedback that allows them to change their practices for the better: improve route planning, change resting points for better driver alertness, even suss out the most fuel-efficient speed for specific loads on specific road surfaces. 

Imagine predictive maintenance schedules, with trucks rolling into shops where the mechanics have known what work would be needed before the engine was even purchased — based on usage data mined from the rest of your fleet and updated as the truck in question moved through its service life.

If it all sounds like science fiction (and perhaps a great way to save money), it’s a bit of both; adoption hurdles remain, not the least of which is building (and supporting) the infrastructure that will allow an exponentially-growing number of machines to talk to each other. 

But improved knowledge about your assets will make your fleet work better. That’s the promise of widespread telematics, a future where collecting and analyzing fleet data is more than just a competitive edge — it’s practically compulsory.

Knowing what to do with it is key to improving performance…

There's a sense that the more data points we collect, the better decisions our fleet managers should be able to make; by all rights these days we should have the most efficient fleet operations ever.

But the truth is far less glamorous: as more data piles in, we seem to be sorting it increasingly poorly -- expanding the gap between data and information. A survey of fleet managers found nearly 1/3 of them had little faith in their organizations' ability to use collected data to make good decisions -- rating the process ineffective or extremely ineffective. Worse still, during a period of unprecedented expansion in data collection, just 1 in 5 think they're getting the data they need to improve their operations.

The term here is "information overload." Just as the psychological condition leads to an inability to make decisions in people, the business condition does the same to organizations. To fix it, start with figuring out what's important. Are you looking to improve safety? Decrease driver turnover? You can't chart your course without some idea of where you want to go.

Data is like the ingredients in a recipe. You don't need to know how to grind flour to tell whether a cake is any good. Likewise, you shouldn't need an advanced degree in statistics to interpret reports about your fleet data. Avoid the temptation to watch data as it's streaming in and trying to improve numbers in real time. Instead, watch trends for a better understanding of effective changes you can make going forward.

Fifty-nine percent of all large truck travel in US happens on non-Interstate roads, and large truck crashes on these roads occur at nearly three times the rate of crashes on Interstates. Everyone agrees that reducing speed reduces the risk of crashes on all roads. More importantly, these first first two statistics reinforce the growing industry perception that controlling speed on all secondary roads and locations where fleets operate is crucial - for public and fleet safety, as well as the bottom line.

Let's first look at the dollars and cents argument for controlling vehicle speed. Direct costs such as fuel consumption and maintenance downtime may not be as significant at the lower speeds typically associated with non-Interstate miles travelled. Crashes on the other hand (nearly three times more likely on secondary roads on a distance-traveled basis), affect the bottom line in both immediate and less tangible ways. Depending on severity, who is at fault, court costs and judgments, these unforeseen and widely variable costs can spell the end of careers and even move a year's profits to the loss column. If reducing speed reduces crashes in the higher risk non-Interstate zones, then managing speed in these higher risk zones becomes a significant operational requirement for any fleet manager.

A longer-term financial consideration is the impact of crashes and citations on a fleet's Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) score. These public scores for all fleets are determined using the safety measurement system recently put into place by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association (FMCSA). See more at: http://blog.ryder.com/2013/04/the-importance-of-your-csa-scores/#sthash.foVHfdQm.dpuf

As the industry begins to accept speed management as the easiest driver behavior to control, fleet wide speeding trends as well as the number of crashes make up two of the seven categories that the FCSA uses to determine your score. A higher score is not good, and the math is simple on this one.  Higher score = higher insurance premiums and perhaps more importantly, lost customers. While fleets may not be able to control the cost of fuel, they can control and improve their CSA scores over time. This makes insurance premium costs a more controllable and foreseeable line item for the operation of your business.

From a pure public and fleet safety argument, there is a reason that crashes on side roads and frontage roads are more likely. Interstates are controlled access environments, with traffic moving in the same direction, at generally the same speed, with no sharp turns or unknown road conditions. Secondary roads on the other hand have pedestrians, schools, animals, bicyclists, safety zones and usually traffic coming in the opposite direction or crossing at an intersection. Public perception of driver behavior associated with specific fleets is more likely to gain momentum, good or bad, in a local community that regularly sees fleets that use its local roads. This makes 45 in a 35 a far more compelling event to discover and important driver behavior to change.

SpeedGauge is finding ...