GPS Insight Blog » Identifying and eliminating speeding

Jul 03 2012

Unsafe Golf Cart Usage by Rob (with alert follow-up)

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Alerts,Arizona,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,GPS Fleet Tracking,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Reports,Safety — rdonat @ 5:59 pm

We have a golf cart and our house is near a really steep hill.

Doing 16 MPH up to the top of the hill in my golf cart

The golf cart is limited to 25 MPH, even downhill (it engine-brakes to keep you from going too fast).

Unless you turn the ignition off…

Then you can zoom down as long as you have guts before stomping on the brake or turning the car back on:

racing to the bottom of a hill in my golfcart

But when you turn the ignition off, you lose your speedometer, so you don’t know how fast you’re going.

I was curious how fast I could get it to go down the hill, & realized I could just look it up in GPS Insight:

Running an Activity Detail Report for my golfcart

And I can easily see the max speed of 45:

Going 45 MPH in a golf cart meant for 25

The reason the device keeps reporting even though the ignition is off is because I wanted an easy install & just wired it straight to the battery and programmed it to only report when the vehicle is moving.

This helps me to see that my golf cart hit 45 MPH max on the way down the hill. And notice that it interprets 5 minutes of non-movement in my garage as “Off” and stops reporting.

And the next step? Create an alert to let me know any time this is happening so that if my kids try it, they’re in huge trouble:

Alert to let me know any time the golf cart goes > 30 MPH

Any time “Rob Gemcar” goes > 30 MPH (only possible down a hill with the ignition turned off — otherwise it hits 28 or so absolute max), WITHIN our subdivision called Forest Highlands, I will get an SMS text message instantly, as well as an email, alerting me to this fact (along with a map of the location in the email). I included it in our subdivision so that if it’s ever put on a flatbed for transportation to the dealer or something, it won’t alert as it’s going > 30 MPH on surface streets outside our community (it’s not licensed for streets > 35 MPH).

By the way, we’ve worked with companies in the past to prove that their vehicles were going DOWNHILL when they exceeded the supposed maximum set by them in their rig — they did it by putting the truck in neutral and coasting to more than the max allowable speed. That’s where I got the idea to check GPS Insight to see how fast the vehicle was actually going (it felt more like 50!). I promise, it wasn’t that unsafe though… I value my life.

Don’t try this at home!

Rob.

[Update: I was late for dinner last night & at a friend's house, & in a hurry, so I performed the "go fast downhill" trick and predictably, got an alert emailed and via text to my phone -- here they are:]

GPS Insight alert email for speeding down the hill

And here’s the text I got:

GPS Insight SMS alert for speeding down the hill

Note that the actual reporting time of the point as 6:47:32 PM, and it was sent at 6:48:30 PM, which is why the alert appears to be 2 minutes later [it was only 58 seconds, which is typical]. We round “down” and the email/sms round “up” with dates:

Raw GPS Data for golf cart speeding event

Running an alert report shows it was sent at 18:48:30:

Running an alert report

Alert sent at 18:40:30

Just a good example of how much information we have available to support the alerts we send.

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, golf cart tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking system, gps vehicle tracking, speeding, unsafe driving, vehicle tracking system

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Aug 14 2011

I got caught speeding to Sedona

Category: Alerts,Driver Accountability,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Safety — rdonat @ 6:54 pm

Thankfully not by the police, but by GPS Insight.

I was heading to Sedona this afternoon with my family and got this alert by email, showing that I was doing 61 in a 35 MPH zone, along with a map showing I’m coming up on a curve:

Posted Speed Limit alert for me

I thought there was no way I would go that fast over the speed limit so when I got home from my trip, I checked GPS Insight to see if we had the right posted speed for that area.

We have an internal-use-only “pincushion” tool we use which shows the various speed limits based on which direction you’re traveling, relative to the roads nearby and some reasonable assumptions.

The pin says it changes from a 55 to a 35 a little way before my vehicle location was sent with instantaneous speed of 61:

GPS Insight "pincushion" posted sped limit tool

I thought that was unlikely, so I went down to street view, and found a 35 MPH speed sign right there (above, it’s the yellow pushpin):

Proof that it's a 35 MPH zone

I guess I was speeding.

So what’s my defense? I didn’t see the sign? At least I can measure the distance until the turn and see that there was LOTS of room to slow down before the curve that 35 MPH zone was put there for:

Rob speeding (61 in a 35)

You can see I measured 600 feet before the BEGINNING of the curve, which is plenty of time to get from 61 to 35. That’s 2 football fields. And since my prior max was 65 (in the info bubble) I was slowing — just not fast enough for the speed limit… But at least you can drill down and get some better context for the posted speed alert. That’s ideal — without the ability to easily drill down for more information, you don’t know the context of the speeding alert, and can’t make good decisions on how to approach (or not to approach) your drivers about these alerts.

So even GPS tracking company owners speed. Maybe it was so I had some good material for a blog article? Yeah, that was it.

Here is a picture from Sedona, by the way:

Sedona, Arizona

And I didn’t speed on the way home, as evidenced by the alerts report I ran for today for my vehicle (Nav2):

Run an alert history for my vehicle for today

But I did idle for 8 minutes while we stopped for snacks for the ride home (and my device went out of range when I pulled into the garage, since I live in the middle of nowhere, and my oil change and rotate tires maintenance items never got updated…):

My alerts for today

This is the point of having a GPS fleet tracking solution — set the alerts, and wait for your drivers to do something you want to be alerted to.

I’m paying for my own tickets and gas, and I know I’ve got a 4×4 and 600 feet to slow down before a curve in a pretty desolate area, so no real issues here. But you certainly want to know these types of things about your drivers.

Especially if it’s your money for fuel, drivers’ licenses at stake, and your liability should they be driving too fast.

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps speed tracking, gps tracking devices, posted speed alerts, truck tracking, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking systems

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May 18 2011

New Harsh Braking/Rapid Acceleration Reports

Category: Ease of use,Graphs,Identifying and eliminating speeding,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Safety — rdonat @ 9:44 pm

We have added a new report in beta to GPS Insight which details your drivers’ aggressive driving habits.

[ This report ONLY works with the GPS Insight 3900 and 4000, and if you are an existing customer, you will need to ask your salesperson or support to turn it on, as it requires a firmware upgrade to your devices, which we are happy to do remotely (over the air). ]

You run it here:

Run the new GPS Insight Acceleration Reports

(Note there are both Acceleration and Acceleration Summary reports)

Here is the Summary Report, which helps you to identify your most aggressive accelerators (“gunner”) and decelerators (“braker”):

GPS Insight Acceleration Summary Report

As always, you can sort by clicking on any of the blue column headings. By clicking on one of the histogram graphs on the right you can compare the average acceleration/deceleration profile to a single vehicle:

GPS Insight Acceleration Histogram comparison

And last, you can click through in the “Avg” columns to get detailed data about where the acceleration/deceleration took place:

GPS Insight Acceleration Detail Report

Hovering your mouse over any address or location will then show you a map of that activity’s location.

In this case, I am accelerating very quickly to get onto the freeway from an on-ramp.

You can also (as always) export the locations to either a browser based map, Google Earth, or a spreadsheet, and scheduled the report to be sent to you automatically per your exact schedule.

With our GPSI-3900 and GPSI-4000 we will be adding more acceleration and deceleration capabilities, reports, and alerts, and will also support an accident “black box” functionality where if a significant G-force (e.g. accident) happens, we buffer and send the last 15 seconds of exact location/speed/acceleration/deceleration/direction information as well as the 15 seconds following the impact. This should be available later in the year, but purchasing a GPSI-3900 or 4000 will ensure you have that capability when it becomes available.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking reports, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking harsh braking, harsh braking, rapid acceleration, safety, truck tracking

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Apr 05 2011

3 BILLION alert checks and still checking!

Category: Alerts,Identifying and eliminating speeding,New Features,New Features — rdonat @ 11:11 am

We just hit our 3 billionth alert check yesterday. Alerts have become a preferred way of using GPS Insight for many customers. All you do is set your alert up, and we will let you know when someone triggers it.

Of all those checks, only 3,573,734 yielded an actual email/SMS message to the supervisor or driver, or about .118%. You set it, and we check it — and about once every 847 times we check for you (on average), we’ll let you know that something isn’t right.

GPS Insight alert types

We have very configurable alerts – you can combine most in order to be really specific:

Alert drivers when their vehicles idle > 7 (or whatever you specify) but ONLY when the vehicle is not at a maintenance yard, and only during business hours
Alert security whenever a take home vehicle is started, but ONLY if it leaves the driver’s home
Set a speeding alert which is different for daytime hours than nighttime hours
A nighttime warehouse landmark alert — for when your vehicles should not be “getting supplied”

And we are almost ready to release our posted speed limit alert. It’s been ready for a while and available in beta, but due to the occasional inaccurate piece of posted speed/road data, we don’t want to send out false alerts and are working on a system to ensure each alert is “triple-checked” before it goes out. That will be available soon, along with the ability to “override” certain speed limits where you know better than the data we have.

We are also working on route-based alerts to let you know when a vehicle is “behind schedule” — more to come soon!

Rob.

Tags: 3 billionth alert checked, Alerts, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Dec 18 2010

Use it or lose it! (ROI that is…)

Category: Alerts,Driver Accountability,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,reduced idling,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 2:38 pm

I was looking at one of our customers’ accounts the other day. They have 23 vehicles. Many people with that many vehicles think they “have a handle” on what’s going on.

I was thrilled to see that this company was using GPS Insight to see what was going on with their fleet.

Specifically, they were using our:

Alerts
Scheduled Reports

I call these 2 features “Unattended ROI” since you don’t have to do anything except let US monitor your fleet for exceptional situations and alert you to them, as well as run a summary report automatically and look at it in your inbox in the morning.

Scheduling Reports to alert to exceptions

You can see there are landmark, idling, speeding, and “long stop” alerts set up here. This customer wants to know every time a vehicle gets to the office “late” which is between 6 PM and 5 AM. That can be used to identify people working late as well as people sneaking into the office when it is not manned in order to load up on parts for side jobs.

We have checked this for them 728,641 times since they set up that alert. We’ve alerted them only 820 times (which is typical — usually 1 in 1000 alert checks results in an alert).

They have also set up a number of scheduled reports:

Scheduling fleet tracking reports to automate your job

Just by setting up these 8, we have sent them 1300 reports and all they have to do is read them in their email every day. They come as .html, Excel/CSV, and associated maps (for speeding, idling, and odd-hours violations).

I wish all our customers (and users of GPS Tracking in general) were this diligent about setting up MEANINGFUL alerts and reports. It drives significant ROI knowing in real time what is going on with your fleet. If you don’t use them, you are throwing away this return on your investment.

Use it or Lose it!

Rob.

Tags: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, fleet tracking devices, GPS Tracking, scheduled reports, vehicle tracking software

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Nov 04 2010

GPS Tracking is also cheap insurance! (which even pays off if you let it lapse)

Category: Company Efficiency,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Stolen Vehicle Recovery — rdonat @ 10:46 am

Last month we had 2 customers benefit from their GPS devices, even though they had canceled service to save money.

One customer’s vehicle was stolen, and within an hour of us reactivating the device and giving them access, the police found it and it was recovered.

The other customer needed proof of their having performed service from the year prior when they were tracking their vehicle. It was needed to be paid out of a bankruptcy distribution, and we were able to run the report for them that day.

Obviously we prefer that customers don’t cancel with us, but even when they do, GPS tracking can still benefit them.

The moral of this story is that companies and fleet administrators need to ALSO think of GPS tracking as an insurance policy as well as an operational tool.

Knowing where your vehicles are currently is ESSENTIAL, as well as knowing where they have been historically (we store 5 years of history).

Unfortunate “insurable” events include:

Vehicle theft/recovery
Proof of delivery/service when there is a billing dispute
Proof of delivery/service when there is a LAWSUIT
Proof of speed and time whenever an accident takes place with a company vehicle
Proof of driver actions during termination
Investigation into illegal/competitive actions such as side jobs or selling of company materials
Finding a driver who has been stranded/wrecked in a remote area

Many of these types of situations aren’t considered when GPS tracking ROI is estimated or computed. But they have a tangible “lottery” effect on ROI when they occur. Quickly recovering a vehicle, proving service to end legal action or get paid, saving a life, or having data to refute a lawsuit are MASSIVE wins for a company. Simply tracking vehicles BEFORE these things happen makes the difference between a major financial or legal problem and a quick and hopefully painless resolution.

Think of GPS tracking as a mobile surveillance system for your fleet — you wouldn’t dream of doing without security cameras in your warehouse/sensitive areas for theft prevention and safety/security. Why do without the equivalent for your mobile assets and drivers? A GPS tracking system is very inexpensive insurance against many unthinkable possibilities — take out a policy as soon as possible.

Every vehicle, every 2 minutes of every day — you’ve got complete proof of where they were at and how they got there.

Week History for a fleet of vehicles

Rob

Tags: Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking discount, gps vehicle tracking, insurance, insurance discount, travelers insurance, vehicle recovery

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Aug 14 2010

GPS Insight has sent out over two million alerts based on driver behavior!

Category: Alerts,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,reduced idling — rdonat @ 5:06 pm

We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.

This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.

Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”

Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.

So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!

This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.” You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.

We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so! They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.

Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.

Good examples include:

Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours

Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight. We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, two millionth alert

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Feb 02 2010

HUGE safety addition to GPS Insight — the Speed Summary Report

Category: Driver Accountability,Identifying and eliminating speeding,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Safety — rdonat @ 6:24 pm

This new report shows the speeding and “slow-poke” tendencies of your individual drivers.

It can be run for a month at a time, and is available here (we are running the report for just the OKL group for the month of January):

Launching the GPS Insight Speed Summary report

Here is the part which allows you to rank by any of the major columns (click on the column heading) and you can see that OKL-69633-Service-Jasoncb is the top speeder on average. This is relative to the speed limit ONLY when he is exceeding the speed limit.

Ranking your speeders using GPS Insight's new Speed Summary Report

Conversely, you can click on “Laggard Avg” which will give you the top “slow-poke” (tie between the Manager and Chadc). This is ONLY when the driver is going LESS than the posted speed limit.

This is useful because both activities are undesirable. Padding hours by going slow is just as bad as being reckless and wasting fuel by speeding.

Clicking on any of the “at a glance” graphs to the right brings up a graph which compares a single driver’s speeding profile to the the entire group:

Graphically showing differences between a driver and the group average

This is the 4th in a series of enhancements to our speeding reports and graphs.

Since occasional discrepancies between GPS Insight’s data and actual posted speed limits occur, we have found it much more useful to run on a month-by-month “Macro” level to indicate undeniable trends in speeding.

Future enhancements will include posted speed limit alerts, group-by-group comparisons of speeding/lagging trends, and historical comparisons to prove that progress has been made in improving efficiency and curbing speeding using GPS Insight reports and alerts. Additionally, certain fields within these reports will launch supporting reports (e.g. a speeding report for just that single vehicle, to include violations on a map, etc.). Rapid acceleration and deceleration will be detected and reported upon for certain GPS Insight devices (notably the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000).

This report is available for all customers immediately, and currently has data going back to December 2009. We will add support for earlier months as we add functionality.

Click for information on the other reports we offer.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Jan 14 2010

New Graphs showing speeding relative to speed limit

Category: Company Efficiency,Identifying and eliminating speeding,New Features — rdonat @ 4:31 pm

Next week we will release this new capability which will be part of the Activity Detail Report. Next month you will be able to run it for all the vehicles in your fleet and sort in a way that you can identify your Lead-Foots, your Slow-Pokes, and your efficient, safe drivers:

Identify which drivers are going too fast or too slow relative to the speed limit

This is a really useful report, and is just the beginning of many new graph-oriented capabilities we plan to release in 2010.

Here is a close-up of just the graph area which shows the driver efficiency — within 10 MPH of the limit 44% of the time:

Efficient Driving Graph in GPS Insight

To see more intuitive reports that we offer, please view our Sample Reports.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Jan 04 2010

2 major new additions coming in January 2010 to GPS Insight!

Category: cell phone capabilities,Driver Accountability,Identifying and eliminating speeding,mobile mapping,New Features,Safety — rdonat @ 5:52 pm

Well, the holidays are over, and we’re getting back to business at GPS Insight.

There are 2 MAJOR additions coming in January.

We will release our Posted Speed Limit Report late this week or early next week
We will release an iPhone App toward the end of January (although Apple may take longer to approve for the App Store than that)

The Posted Speed Limit Report will let you know where your drivers are driving fast relative to the actual speed limit. It will come with other graphing enhancements to our regular speed alerts which will let you graph the 30 minutes before & after the speeding event in order to better understand what your drivers are doing. Additionally, if you use GPS Insight’s 3D Mapping with Google Earth, you will be able to click on the graph for an instant download of that vehicle for those 60 minutes.

Here are some screenshots:

Running a Posted Speed Limits Report on the “Robgroup” (my vehicles, and “Rob” has several devices installed):

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Disclaimer!!!*** — I was not really doing 28 MPH over the speed limit — I’ll explain this after the report:

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Clicking on the “Google Earth” button shows this:

GPS Insight 3D Posted Speed Violations View

That street is actually a 40 MPH zone (although I was definitely speeding — I live in the middle of the desert and it was 50 MPH when I moved there so I’m grandfathered in — is that a good excuse? How about I only needed some sample data for this article? My scofflaw COO borrowed the car? How about I have big brakes? Either way, I was speeding and this report picked it up.)

What is important to know is that the standard speeding report wouldn’t have really called attention to it so much. I was only doing 63 [65 max]. It’s 65 MPH standard on the highways out here. What’s important is the difference between ACTUAL and POSTED speed limits. 28 (really 23) in this case.

So how do you check to see what the real speed limit is? Just quickly go into street view in that area & find a speed limit sign:

Finding Stop Signs in GPS Insight's Google Earth Mode

Soon we will allow our customers to “override” certain street speed limits in order to accurately report on violations. Not every speed limit in our system is 100% up to date. It’s the ease of using it which makes this a quick and powerful tool. We plan to begin a “sanity check” service on our customers’ behalf where the most flagrant speeding will result in our double-checking the actual speed limits in that area.

Even if they are off by 5-15 MPH, this report is REALLY good at finding your opportunistic speeders.

Note the “inline” graph in the 3D “bubble” will also show up in the report for an instant check of recent/subsequent activity. Clicking on it gives a 30 minutes before/after map in Google Earth.

Speed Graphs in GPS Insight

[we're still working on the best way to graph it, so this will change soon]

Here is the 60 minute “quick map” you get when clicking on the graph:

60 minute "quick map" around a speeding violation

This is useful in order to get some context for what the driver was doing.

So this report will be EXTREMELY USEFUL to companies, and comes with a lengthy disclaimer that you need to put some time into investigating the speed limits initially before going off and firing drivers. It will also come with a follow-on report which “ranks” your drivers with graphs which show their typical speeding patterns. Since speed limits differ from our data equally across drivers, you will quickly get a feel for which of your drivers are speeders, which are ideal, and which intentionally go slower than they should in order to pad hours.

Moving on, we have an iPhone app coming in January. It will do a nicer job of mobile fleet management than the current GPS Insight Mobile Mapping option. Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight iPhone App coming soon!

You launch it from the iPhone like a normal app.

You are then given a set of options to choose from in terms of moving/stopped vehicles, various vehicle groups, etc.:

List of vehicles within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Choosing one will give you various information, to include a map of just that one vehicle (or choose “Map” to see them all):

Vehicle location within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Quick View lets you choose just a few vehicles at a time

And you will be able to set certain settings (right now they’re pretty limited):

Settings tab in the GPS Insight iPhone App

So that about covers the 2 new exciting features coming soon in January 2010. Based on licensing restrictions, both capabilities MAY have an additional cost, either now or in the future. If they do, it won’t be much, and chances are they’ll both be free to customers or cost the same as the existing mobile mapping capabilities.

Happy New Year everyone!

Rob.

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