Speeding - a major safety violation

Speeding is generally considered to be a major safety violation that can lead to accidents, injuries, and even death. As such, it is important for fleet managers to ensure that their drivers are aware of the dangers of speeding and to take steps to prevent speeding from occurring.

There are a number of ways that fleet managers can prevent speeding. One way to prevent speeding is to educate drivers on the dangers of speeding. Drivers should be made aware of the potential consequences of speeding, such as being pulled over by the police, getting into an accident, or causing an accident. They should also be taught how to drive safely and how to avoid speeding. Educating drivers is good, but mostly that would not change the situation dramatically and obeying the speed limits should be somehow enforced.

One way to enforce speed limits is to set speed limits for the vehicles. This can be done by installing speed limiters on the vehicles. In some legislations use of speed limiters for specific vehicle classes is mandatory, however speed limiters can be helpful only for a static limit of speed. Installing a speed limiter, which limits the vehicle speed at 90km/h does not help that much if a driver is driving at 90km/h in in the city. Modern vehicles, which have road sign recognition capabilities can be configured in a way that the driver can receive notifications in the vehicle dashboard if the speed is over the road sign speed limits by some certain margin. This is a good improvement, but still applies only to the latest vehicles.

Another important point is that mostly the speeding is invisible to the fleet manager in the office unless drivers receive fines or get into an accident. Telematics can be used to monitor driver behavior and provide feedback to drivers on their speed. Fleet managers can also use GPS to track the speed of their vehicles and to identify areas where speeding is a problem. By using technology, fleet managers can identify problem areas and take steps to address them.

Most of the GPS tracking solutions provide ways of creating alerts about speeding events. The basic GPS tracking solutions provide just an option to set a static speed limit, which does not take into account the actual road speed limits, whereas more advanced solutions work in a way that they map-match the GPS coordinates to the roads the vehicle travels and retrieve the actual road speed limits on the roads and generate an alert if the road speed limit is violated.

Apart from speeding, things like unsafe driving should also be monitored. Most modern vehicle telematics systems provide solutions like driver behaviour analysis, which can trigger alerts for unsafe driving patterns.

Finally, it is critically important to implement a policy against speeding. Make sure your drivers know that speeding is not tolerated by your company. Implement a policy that prohibits speeding, and make sure your drivers are aware of the consequences for violating the policy, like paying the speeding fines themselves. Additionally, make sure your drivers know that they may be subject to disciplinary action if they are caught speeding.