How Tenstreet Helps Fleets Track Driver Habits for Improved Safety, Efficiency
Most commercial fleets typically include safety and compliance as top areas of focus every year. But when it comes to creating a practical plan for improving in these areas — and choosing real-world metrics to track progress — the prospect can seem daunting. How does a fleet measure the strength of their safety culture in deeper ways than just incident rates and infractions?
Tenstreet, partnering with Platform Science, now offers fleets practical and easy-to-implement technologies to track and respond to the driver habits most closely associated with crash likelihood. Monitoring these leading indicators — along with increasing training, timely responses, and overall communication — helps fleets improve driver safety and compliance rates. Insight into real-world data points allows fleets to benchmark against competitors and peers, realizing improvements in other related areas like fuel efficiency.
In 2022, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) updated its well-known study on predicting crash likelihood based on driver habits. Researchers designed and tested a predictive model that identified statistically significant relationships between truck driver safety behaviors and future crash probability. The 2022 update used the same statistical methods as the original report, and was based on more than 580,000 individual truck driver records.
Notably, the research showed that 45% of the most frequently occurring violations were directly related to driver behavior. It makes sense, then, that fleets can reduce the rate of crashes by driving down the frequency of poor driver habits.
By tracking and training against these poor habits, fleets now have a practical way to directly reduce the statistical likelihood of crashes for their drivers.
According to the ATRI study, the top 10 predictors of future crashes are:
- Failure to Yield the ROW violation
- Failure to Use/Improper Signal conviction
- Past Crash
- Reckless Driving Violation
- Failure to Obey Traffic Sign conviction
- Improper or Erratic Lane Changes conviction
- Failure to Keep in Proper Lane convictions
- Reckless/Careless/Inattentive/Negligent Driving
- Improper Lane/Location conviction
- Fair to Obey/Traffic Signal/Light conviction
With their own measurable data set, fleets can start to build systems and automated actions to help create a safer fleet and identify areas for improvement. Using tools like Tenstreet’s Pulse at Work, integrated within the Platform Science operating environment, fleets can identify the most helpful driver metrics to track, setting up monitoring to near-real-time frequency. Reviewing these metrics over time helps a fleet develop more efficient training programs, KPIs, and realistic insurance rate forecasts.
Improving driver habits also has related benefits for fleet performance, such as improved fuel efficiency, since many drivers with a fair number of CSA violations tend to have poor fuel efficiency—in some cases, wasting as much as 20% more fuel than safer drivers.
Additionally, tracking and responding to fleet metrics reduces fleet liability, helping protect companies from potential “nuclear verdicts” in the event of an accident by demonstrating the fleet is proactive in implementing training, safety, and compliance measures.
Additional key benefits of Tenstreet’s technology include improved communication with drivers and more customized, accessible training. The functionality provided by Pulse at Work — allowing fleets to track and work with their own real-world data — helps them to adhere to best practices associated with a strong safety culture, such as consistent communication, timely responses, easily accessible training, and regular monitoring of fleet performance (both individual drivers and top fleet metrics).
By setting concrete, real-world benchmarks and goals for drivers, and being proactive in training and responding to performance, fleets can help their drivers excel at their jobs while simultaneously benefiting fleet safety and compliance rates. The end result: safer roads, more efficient operations, and improved bottom lines.
Learn more about Tenstreet’s Pulse at Work app, available as part of Platform Science’s Virtual Vehicle Marketplace, now.
Watch the Platform Science webinar, “What are your Drivers Telling you About Safety?” now.
