Limit Mistakes Like Parking Lot Accidents to Keep Your Fleet Profitable

Any opportunity to reduce costs and maintenance is a win for fleet managers. One area of performance deserving extra scrutiny is parking lot accidents, which are responsible for a significant amount of a fleet’s annual costs. In fact, the Insurance Highway Institute for Highway Safety reported that 14 percent of collisions nationwide occur in parking lots, said Automotive Fleet. These numbers stress an opportunity for fleet managers to reduce their total repair expenses by developing performance standards for parking lot driving and implementing accident-reducing technology. The following tips can help you relate safer policies for lot driving to fleet employees.

Frequent causes of accidents in the lot
Trucking Info pointed out that numerous accidents can befall a fleet vehicle in a parking lot – taking the dangers of a parking lot for granted makes your employees more susceptible to a collision, so be sure to brief drivers on the accident threats they’re likely to face on the job. Failure to check mirrors could quickly lead a driver to backing up into a stationary object. Likewise, casually ignoring a stop sign in a seemingly empty lot is a sure-fire recipe for a collision at an intersection. These incidents not only cause surface damage to vehicles but can also contribute to wear on components like tires and alignment.

The newsource also stressed that vehicular accidents aren’t the only danger for drivers to be wary of in the parking lot. Mishaps on lift gates or ramps could cause injuries and subsequent downtime as drivers recover from an accident. Like parking lot collisions, these scenarios can be minimized via proper instruction from fleet managers.

Reduce time in parking lots by minimizing idle time
One way that telematics can help in reducing parking lot incidents is by providing fleet managers with a means of monitoring and deterring downtime. After all, the less time spent in a parking lot, the less likely a driver will be vulnerable to a collision or accident. Reducing downtime also helps to lower fuel waste and help to improve your fleet’s total travel time. These costs reductions help to offset the cost of implementing telematics in the long-term, while the performance benefits of the technology will help your company provide improved services to your customers.

More efficient routes contributes to safer driving
Drivers can reduce their time spent in a parking lot, along with the likelihood of damage to their vehicles, by traveling well-planned, consistent routes. Drivers are often forced to navigate their vehicles into parking lots if they get lost on the way to their destination, and this time spent reorienting themselves puts them at greater risk for a parking lot collision. Telematics deliver additional resources for planning shorter, more efficient regular routes for fleet employees – utilizing these routes to lessen the need for extra parking lot visits is just another way that the technology can help fleets to improve safety across the board.

Stress the importance of focused parking
At the end of the day, it comes down to drivers taking care and making the right decisions in parking lots to reduce annual incidents. That means that fleet managers have an opportunity to influence way their drivers drive by educating them on how unfocused parking lot driving can make a can make a big negative impact on the company’s bottom line.

Telematics can help with this effort as well. Data collected by telematics equipment can be used to identify and analyze drive behaviors that contribute to parking lot collisions. You can develop detailed action plans for drivers to improve on this performance by sharing data collected on their weekly routes.