Improve Safety By Monitoring Driver Behaviors With Telematics Software
On an average day, hundreds of drivers are speeding, slamming on their breaks at red lights, and weaving in and out of lanes. Whether they are running late to work, or they have just become accustomed to rushing everywhere, their driving style poses a danger to themselves, their passengers, and everyone on the road around them.
WHERE DO UNSAFE DRIVING BEHAVIORS BEGIN?
So where do these behaviors begin? Think back to your high school driver’s ed class: were you taught to speed, to leave ten minutes before you had to be at that doctor’s appointment 15 minutes from your house, to drive 10 mph over the speed limit? No, you were taught to obey traffic laws, practice safe driving and time management. So, what happened between now and then?
Did you ever put those safe driving techniques into practice outside of the classroom? We may learn the rules of the road and the basics of driving in those classrooms or the driver’s seat of a student driver car, but we learn driver behavior from our parents, movies, TV shows, etc. For most of our lives, we are exposed to aggressive, rushed driving. We learn that to drive above the speed limit, to listen to our music too loud, to compete with drivers in the lane next to us, and to cut someone off to catch the tail end of a yellow light.
Driving has become a game. And that game is one of the most dangerous games we will ever play. Did you know that approximately 40,000 people died in car accidents in 2016? That number is a 14% increase from 2014. That is a horrifying number that not even the newest safety technology could significantly lower. Luckily, driving behavior can improve with fleet safety management programs.
CAN WE UNLEARN BAD DRIVING HABITS?
The only way to improve this statistic, save thousands of lives and make this very ordinary means of transportation safer is to re-learn safe driving techniques. To do that it helps to understand the breakdown of driving behavior.
There are three domains of driving behavior:
- Affective- feelings, needs, motives, and goal-directed actions
- Cognitive- thoughts, reasonings, and decision-making
- Sensorimotor- experience is drawn from sensory and motor channels, or the actions of the individual
These three areas explain the mechanics behind the learned driver behavior. Drivers need to understand their own thoughts, reactions, feelings, and actions to correct how they react to specific situations. They should be able to understand what situations make them drive over the speed limit. Are they late to a job, listening to loud music, or feeling anxious? By understanding these, we can work to create safer driving instructions and training plans.
IMPROVE DRIVER BEHAVIOR WITH FLEET MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
Though safe driving education can benefit all kinds of drivers, we focus specifically on how proper safety training can positively impact commercial drivers. While it helps to understand the psychology behind driver behavior, we have a software that does most of the work for you regarding identifying bad driver behaviors and patterns in your drivers. Once you determine these behaviors, you can create training plans catered to the needs of your entire fleet or individual drivers.
SILENT PASSENGER FLEET MANAGEMENT AND TELEMATICS SOLUTIONS
Silent Passenger’s Driver Behavior and Safety modules will monitor and report on the habits of your drivers. These insights will allow you to create new training plans to teach your drivers to be safer on the road. This training could not only save the lives of your drivers and other people on the road around them, but it can also save your company thousands of dollars on damaged vehicles repairs and replacements caused by these deadly accidents. Do your part to make the roads safer by investing in a fleet management and telematics software technology that will benefit not just you and your drivers, but the world around them.
Can your drivers benefit from fleet safety management? Take our safety quiz to find out.
Originally posted on the Vehicle Tracking Solutions blog.
