Fall is a time for cooler temperatures, falling leaves and a whole lot of organic mess in municipal streets. While those beautiful yellow, red and orange leaves look great in trees, they’re not so great when they fall and end up covering the streets, leaving sweeping crews with a big cleanup on their hands.

Keeping your streets clear of fallen leaves is an important job too. It requires thoroughness, efficiency and dedication. But, when you have a large fleet and a tight budget, it can be challenging. This is where GPS fleet tracking for your street sweeping operation comes in.

How GPS Tracking Can Help Municipal Fleets

Here are some ways GPS tracking can help your municipal fleet during fall lead collection season.

1. Improving Accountability and Efficiency

GPS tracking technology can help improve your municipal fleet’s efficiency in various ways. It can help you plan efficient routes through the review of location, speed and route data, minimizing this expense.  You can use GPS data for a number of ways, including:

• Identifying areas that haven’t been swept yet (or those that have)
• Rerouting around traffic delays
• Locating and monitoring vehicle activity

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The decision to invest in GPS fleet tracking solutions for your organization can improve safety, cut costs, and build better relationships with your customers and your employees. Before you dive in, though, there are seven questions you need to ask.

1. Will it be easy to use within your organization?

You need to invest in a GPS fleet tracking system that is not only intuitive and easy for you to use, but one that can be used widely by drivers and other team members to help keep everyone on the same page.

2. What kind of customer support can you expect as you set up and once you go live?

Many companies offer outstanding customer support through the sales and set up process. Far too many, though, leave businesses, like yours, on their own when it comes to actually using the services they pay for month after month. Make sure you work with a company that offers ongoing customer support, so you have access and assistance when you need it most.

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Today’s fleets involve many moving parts that most operate in harmony to achieve optimal results. When any one of those moving parts is out of alignment, the results can be costly for the entire fleet.

Listed below are a few of the top challenges fleets face that GPS fleet tracking can help fleet managers tackle to achieve more ideal alignment for better results throughout the entire organization.

1. Out of Control Fuel Costs

Fuel costs at the pump constantly fluctuate. There is nothing fleet managers can to do resolve that problem. However, the fuel consumption of your fleet is something you can manage. You can manage it more effectively, however, with GPS fleet tracking which can help you eliminate fuel waste and manage consumption in the following ways.

• Reduce idling and eliminate unnecessary idling in fleet vehicles.
• Plan more fuel efficient routes.
• Notify management when vehicles deviate from prescribed routes, without instructions to do so.
• Route around traffic jams, weather emergencies, and rush hour traffic when possible to reduce traffic-related fuel costs.
• Improve maintenance scheduling to ensure vehicle is burning fuel optimally.
• Notify management of speeding, hard braking, and other driver behaviors that needlessly waste fuel.

Any one of these things can save your fleet money and GPS tracking for your fleet helps to tackle all of them. The savings simply add up.

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The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) produced a recent report revealing that you see more all-terrain vehicle (ATV) thefts at the end of summer. In fact, July and August are the months when 19 percent of all thefts occur. This figure is based on theft data the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) contains in their database for the District of Columbia and all 50 states.

However, overall the report cites the number of reported stolen ATVs are down through January 1, 2016 to December 21, 2018 period. The least reported ATV thefts were in 2018 with 19,363 thefts — the most were 21,255 in 2016.

Fall is actually a popular time for people to go ATV riding, and many head out to the trails to look at the fall foliage. The spectacular autumn leaves and cooler temperatures make for great ATV riding all over the country.

Take New England, for instance. It’s well-known for its visitor attractions and fall colors. The perfect place to go ATV riding in New England is “Ride The Wilds” which, in northern New Hampshire, has more than 1,000 miles of interconnected trails. It’s terrain varies from trails that wind and curve through scenic pastures and woods to easy-riding gravel roads to routes for experienced riders who barrel up into the New Hampshire mountains to enjoy the fall colors and scenic panoramic views.

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Graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws help to save lives. But, a lot of parents aren’t ensuring their kids are following these laws. Actually, some parents even ignore the laws.

One survey, through Insurance.com, of 1,000 parents and their teenage drivers found almost a third of the parents state they aren’t always enforcing GDL laws. When compared to a survey in 2018 asking the same question, this is a drop of nine percentage points.

According to traffic safety experts, it’s the GDL laws responsible for the drop in teen driver death over the past couple of decades. States:

• Don’t give younger drivers full driving freedom
• Might limit the hours teen drivers can drive
• Might limit who can drive with them
• Restrict younger drivers from texting and using cell phones (nearly all states)

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