Opinion: Video Intelligence Can Safeguard Your Business

This Opinion piece appears in the May 2 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

By Jim Angel

Vice President

PeopleNet

If you had an extra $2 million to spend on your fleet, what would you do with it? I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that most fleet owners would earmark the cash for capital expenditures or personnel development.

Angel

It’s doubtful any fleet owner would say they planned to spend that $2 million on an accident settlement. But that’s the average amount earned for plaintiffs by a Georgia-based law firm specializing in commercial and passenger vehicle accidents.

We can all agree that any accident, whether minor or severe, will cause stress and strain to all parties involved. But in a litigious society, the burden rests more heavily on drivers and carriers — and it’s only growing.

According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Large Truck Causation Study, the collision cost for property damage, injuries and fatalities each had triple-figure percentage increases over the past eight years. For property damage alone, costs jumped nearly 400% to $73,500 in 2013 from $15,000 in 2005. And that’s only direct costs. The indirect costs of an accident — from government investigations and customer perception to employee morale — are incalculable.

With the financial stakes already so high, it’s crucial that fleet owners not only find ways to reduce accident-associated costs but potentially avoid accidents altogether.

Video intelligence, a solution that’s already revolutionized safety and security for multiple industries, can safeguard your business and employees, too.

Every story needs a villain, and when a truck-car collision occurs, the mainstream media is quick to cast a truck driver or carrier in that role. Whether it’s sharing Compliance, Safety, Accountability statistics without context or relying on archived footage of reckless driving, too often who’s at fault is decided in the court of public opinion before all the facts are available.

While drivers remain an easy scapegoat, years of data don’t support the media’s negative perception. In a February 2013 fact sheet published by American Trucking Associations data from four major studies of relative contribution/fault in car-truck crashes found:

• Car drivers were at fault in 81% of 8,309 fatal car-truck crashes studied by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

• Cars drivers were at fault in 91% of head-on crashes, 91% of opposite-direction sideswipes, 71% of rear-end crashes and 77% of same-direction sideswipes in 10,092 fatalities studied by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2003.

• Thirty-six percent of car drivers were cited for two or more unsafe acts versus 11% of truck drivers in an American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety study of 10,732 fatal accidents.

• From 2007 to 2009, FMCSA cited car driver factors in more than 80% of 6,131 car-truck fatal crashes.

Still, as the UMTRI study noted, in the absence of tangible proof, such as video evidence, it’s difficult to exonerate truck drivers who are involved in road accidents. The only way we can recast the role of the villain is to create impartial proof that will show all parties the reality of a situation.

Video technology in trucking is not a new concept. It’s been around for more than a decade — but adoption has been slow. Of the nearly 11 million large trucks reported in FMCSA’s 2015 Pocket Guide to Large Truck and Bus Statistics, only an estimated 6% have a video solution installed.

However, the utility, benefits and return on investment of implementing a video intelligence solution have evolved in ways unimaginable at the start of the in-cab digital video recorder movement.

From a prevention and protection point of view, video intelligence is your fleet’s secret weapon. With a reduction in accident claims and costs associated with onboarding new drivers, a video intelligence system can recoup its annual investment in three months or less.

While forward-facing cameras already serve as a neutral eyewitness against at-fault accident claims, the new generation of video intelligence can trigger video from company-controlled settings in a truck’s onboard event recording giving an accurate report of what happened on the road — not what an accelerometer thought happened.

But video is only one part of the story. With 10% to 20% of a fleet’s drivers representing 50% to 65% of the entire fleet risk — commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule — a powerful analytics platform allows managers to identify the most at-risk drivers based on metrics, including CSA scores, hours-of-service violations, speeding and behavior.

The combination of OER-triggered video and driver-specific analytics allows fleets to build a culture of safety from multiple vantage points. For safety managers, it removes the guessing game, and for drivers it offers an unbiased report that can protect their job. For all parties, it leads to improved communication.

When the industry is facing the daunting task of recruiting and training thousands of drivers — ATA’s latest projections state nearly 900,000 new drivers are needed by 2024 — any tool that can keep professionals safely on the road is one we should welcome with open arms.

Because of this, video intelligence should not be perceived as a “big brother” approach to business. It should be seen for what it is: fact-based data and video that leads to tailored coaching, better training, positive reinforcement and better protection for both driver and carrier.

Angel is the vice president of Video Intelligence Solutions at PeopleNet, a leading provider of fleet mobility technology for North America’s land transportation industry.