Managing fleet fines and violations is just one of the multiple costs involved in running a fleet. We will probably never be short of topics related to fleet costs due to the nature of fleet management, but are fleet fines your first consideration when thinking about costs?
Whether they are or not, they can account for a sizeable chunk of global costs, not only because of the actual money initially shelled out for the offence, but also for the back office work that they inevitably require.
We have recently come across this question and answer thread published in the popular website “Honest John”, in which a van driver has apparently been wrongfully named for a speeding offence:
© Honest John - http://vans.honestjohn.co.uk/askhj/answer/74574/i-was-wrongfully-named-as-the-driver-for-a-speeding-offence---what-do-i-do-
The immediate action fleets usually take regarding the problem of fines is, as we have discussed in the past, to try and limit their number. According to some statistics published by Automotive Fleet, tolls, parking, and photo enforcement account for more than 95 percent of the vehicle-issued violation volume impacting fleets. And the majority (56%) of these infractions come in the form of tolls, 22% in parking violations, 12% from red-light cameras, and 8% from speeding cameras.
Traffic violations—and this is connected with the aggrieved employee writing to “Honest John”—are not issued to the driver, but to the vehicle registrant (usually a company in most cases). This can lead to complications: the fleet or fleet management company that actually owns the vehicle is liable for the violation, and they will in most cases pay the violation to avoid further penalties. The process of determining who was responsible is then postponed as in most cases it is a time-consuming process that often doesn’t lead to success or rather to mismanagement like in the case of the person writing to Honest John.
Sometimes, when managing fleet fines and violations, the process of actually linking a violation to the driver responsible can become a real challenge, especially for fleets working with a lot of vehicles or having drivers sharing different vehicles. Some fleets do not have a process in place for this or do not track down the driver and end up absorbing the cost of this. By doing so, fleets are not aware of a driver’s violation record, or of their drivers most at risk and are, for precisely these reasons, unable to educate employees on the consequences of fines, to implement disciplinary actions for excessive fines or establish a proper fines policy.
Monitoring driver behaviour using technology that is able to record vehicle activity 24/7 or using driver identification technology (if you have different drivers using different vehicles) are all solutions you can consider if you want to start setting up a process that identifies driving styles that can incur fines and quickly establish who exactly is responsible for them; not to mention avoiding time wasted on back-office practices.
