TELEMATICS: Zoned out

Date: Monday, October 1, 2018

Telematics -01

Use telematics to keep higher-polluting vans out of city centres that will penalise them

The snag concerning the yet-to-be-defined LEZs outside of London is a lack of information.

The capital’s Congestion Charging zone and well-defined North and South Circular roads make for easy viewing, but according to Hemming, crucial geographical details have been “very patchy” for the other five cities.

Though it won’t be difficult for telematics providers to tweak their mapping when the definition appears, they are forced to make do with what he describes as a “best guess” until then, basing their assumptions on the location of major arterial and ring roads, which are expected, but not guaranteed, to form the borders.

As enforcement of such zones grows closer, operators should use any data they can glean to redistribute their vehicles and rejig their routes. Most fleets of any size are likely to have a mixture of LCVs, and engineering deployment so that the newest, most efficient models are tackling the inner-city work will pay for itself.

“Make sure you know which vans are going to have a problem if they go into the low-emission zone,” says Beverly Wise, sales director at TomTom Telematics. “It’s then about re-assigning those, maybe to another depot that doesn’t have a low-emissions zone within their service area, and making sure that you get the lowest-possible-emission vans to operate in that area.

“Look at the routes that people are taking and try to force a route onto the system that stops them having to go into that zone by accident. People might say ‘I’m just going to pop down this road because it’ll save me time’, and that road could well be in the low-emissions zone and you could be in it before you know it. I would put geofencing on to make sure that you are alerted when people go in [before the zones are active], so you can re-educate your drivers to avoid it.”

No choice

As much as it makes sense to avoid LEZs altogether, some businesses will inevitably have to enter them. If all of your vans are Euro6 or electric then it won’t be a problem, but that likely applies to a select few, rather than the majority. The thing to do is plan accordingly, and make every conceivable adjustment based on the available telematics data.

“You’re not going to be able to stop vehicles travelling in there per se, because they’re doing a job – whether it’s servicing a lift or delivering a fridge to a restaurant – and you’re not going to be able to carry a fridge on a bus,” says Hemming.

“It’s about using the data that you’ve got available to see how you’re going to maximise your operation in those areas. It could be that, for example, you base your operation outside of the low-emission zone and then you only have specialist vehicles operating within the low-emissions zone.”

“In some situations, it’s impossible [to avoid LEZs] because that’s where they’re going to deliver,” adds Wise. “So it’s about trying to minimise the number of vehicles or optimising that delivery vehicle to make sure it is the only one going into that zone.

“What you don’t want are four high carbon-emitting vehicles going into the same zone to make four deliveries.

“If you can optimise your routes to make sure that you’ve only got one vehicle going in to do those drops, you’re therefore reducing what it’s going to cost you as much as possible.”

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