One of the biggest challenges facing any city is the challenge of maintaining sanitation standards throughout the entirety of the municipality. From basic tasks such as trash collection and disposal, to street cleaning, to tracking and logging all sanitation activities, municipalities have a heavy load to bear in keeping up with their sanitation standards.
Municipalities need all the help they can get to make everyday operations such as city sanitation faster and more efficient. With this in mind, how can sanitation GPS vehicle tracking help your city?
Here are a few ways:
Basic sanitation services such as curbside garbage collection are a critical part of maintaining a citywide sanitation standard. When trash pickup services are late, citizens tend to notice very quickly.
However, when municipal operating budgets get tight, you may end up having to try to provide the same level of service with fewer vehicles and pickup crews. If this happens, your municipality will need each crew to be more efficient to keep up with the demand for basic trash collection.
Here, having a GPS fleet tracking system for your sanitation vehicles can be an enormous help. With live GPS vehicle tracking, you can plan out your trash collection routes for maximum efficiency, with updates to help sanitation workers avoid getting caught in traffic or lost from a detour.
By comparing the routes of each garbage collection truck, you can eliminate route overlap, increasing the area each garbage truck covers on its route.
If your municipality offers bulk trash collection as a special service with a surcharge attached (or if you’re a private company contracted by a municipality for such service), being able to note exactly when and where that bulk trash load was collected can be very important.
With GPS tracking of your fleet of sanitation vehicles, you can log where each vehicle’s been, and establish clearly if the vehicle was present for pickup and when.
This can help with billing individuals for these extra services, as it provides objective, verifiable evidence that services were provided.
It can also help if a citizen complains about their regular trash not being collected.
For example, a special event log can be established for when a garbage collection arm is raised for a collection. Combined with the time and location log for the vehicle, you can definitively establish whether or not garbage was collected at that property.
From roadkill to cargo truck spills, keeping streets clear of driving hazards is a constant struggle. These roadway hazards can create more problems, as bones in animal carcasses or shrapnel from a wreck can damage a vehicle’s tires, leading to yet more cars stranded on the side of the road waiting for a tow.
When an incident is reported, the faster the road debris can be cleared, the safer your city’s commuters will be. The longer it takes to clear roadkill and other debris from the road, the bigger the risk there will be of another vehicle becoming damaged.
GPS tracking for street cleaning vehicles allows your municipal dispatch to check the locations of all your vehicles and quickly identify the one that’s closest to the scene. This allows you to respond more quickly to reports of road debris, limiting the risk of more damage being done.
GPS tracking for municipalities allows you to track not only a vehicle’s current position, but its total idle time and how fast the vehicle is accelerating/decelerating.
With this information, you can identify bad driving habits that increase your municipality’s fuel costs, such as excessive idling, speeding, and hard braking. Knowing this info, you can address these bad habits with your drivers and curb them, helping to reduce overall fuel costs.
GPS tracking will also allow you to immediately spot when a vehicle is off it’s assigned route, helping you curtail the use of municipal vehicles for private errands while the driver is on the clock.
Sanitation vehicles are at a high risk for theft. Whether thieves are after the vehicle or the tools and equipment loaded onto it, sanitation vehicles pose a highly tempting target for theft.
GPS tracking devices help reduce the impact of theft by giving you the location of a stolen vehicle, and can aid in recovery by disabling the starter of a stolen vehicle, preventing the vehicle from being driven too far away.
Knowing that your vehicles are GPS-tagged can help deter thieves from making the theft attempt in the first place, as they'll know that there's more risk of getting caught.
Overall, GPS tracking for sanitation vehicles helps to make your vehicle fleet faster and more efficient while improving responsiveness.
Improve your municipal sanitation fleet with a comprehensive, yet easy to use, fleet management system today!