Keep Your Drivers Safe with 6 Simple Tools

Whether your fleet consists of five or 50 vehicles, keeping your drivers safe while they’re on the road is one of the biggest challenges faced by fleet managers in any industry. Formalized fleet safety policies can help create a culture of safety by outlining rules for safe driver conduct, but as soon as your drivers leave the lot, you lose the ability to directly observe their behavior and ensure their safety behind the wheel.

To help keep drivers safe, many fleet managers rely on easy-to-use tools like GPS tracking systems. Comprehensive GPS tracking systems offer a number of features that act as your eyes on the road by giving you real-time insight into location and driver behavior—including unsafe driver behavior.

Here are six of the most powerful tools to look for in a GPS vehicle tracking system:

1. Real-time GPS location tracking

With updates up to once a minute when a vehicle is moving and once an hour while it is off, GPS tracking devices enable you to quickly and easily locate any vehicle while it’s on the road or at a job site. You can also review direction and speed of travel, current address, and the nearest driver to any location.

The best GPS tracking devices also provide live traffic updates so you can route your drivers around traffic jams or accidents. This can help alleviate scheduling issues, which will reduce stress and ensure your drivers can operate their vehicles safely without worrying about falling behind schedule.

Read more about tracking vehicle locations in real-time using LoneStar Tracking GPS tracking devices.

2. Interactive route replay

With this tool, you can review each vehicle’s daily driving history using an animated, interactive visualization of a vehicle’s daily route. You can even break each day down into detailed segments, including indicators for stops, unsafe driving activity, wasteful idling, and other key driving events.

This data can help you identify and avoid problem areas in your service region, such as busy intersections or construction zones, as well as eliminate dangerous driving patterns such as speeding or harsh braking.

3. Landmarks and geofences

Landmarks indicate valuable locations on a map, such as customer addresses or your home office. Geofences are imaginary boundaries created around landmarks or customized geographic areas.

With this feature, you can set up and receive alerts whenever a vehicle arrives at a landmark or enters or exits a geofenced area. These alerts can help you prevent theft and unauthorized use by immediately notifying you if your business’s vehicles leave your service region or enter prohibited areas.

4. Unsafe driving alerts

In addition to landmark and geofence alerts, GPS tracking devices are also able to send immediate notifications to your smartphone or email inbox whenever unsafe driving occurs, including:

Fleet managers can use these alerts to take immediate action or address common unsafe driving patterns by creating customized driver safety policies or training programs.

5. Driver safety report cards

GPS tracking devices monitor unsafe activities in real-time and use this data to generate a daily performance score and report card for each driver in your fleet, as well as a score for your entire fleet’s safety performance.  This, and many other customizable reports are available to you.

Driver safety report cards can be used to:

6. Automated vehicle maintenance schedules

Driver safety involves more than monitoring how your drivers operate their vehicles. It also depends on keeping your vehicles properly maintained. With a GPS tracking system, you can automate maintenance schedules for your entire fleet and make sure you never miss a tune-up again.

LoneStar Tracking GPS tracking devices make it easy to monitor and schedule common routine maintenance, such as:

You can also keep a history of all past service and base automatic maintenance reminders on your fleet’s established service schedule, including:

Make driver safety simple

Keeping your drivers safe on the road is easy when you have access to real-time driver tracking and behavior data. GPS tracking systems give fleet managers in any industry the power to review powerful driver safety data with a few clicks of a mouse, enabling them to take immediate action or create customized driver safety training programs.