Editor's Blog Section

From Hanging Up column issue 41 – June-July 2009

Readers with long memories will recall the fierce opposition to tachographs among truck drivers back in the 1970s and 80s. The so-called “spy in the cab” was anathema to a lot of them, and wasn’t always a popular idea with employers, either. They realised they would have to pay to install the instruments, then keep them running and monitor the records they would produce.

What seems almost laughable now is that those original tachographs, eventually introduced back in the mid-1980s, offered little more than a retrospective record of how long vehicles were driven for, how far they travelled and how fast they were going along the way.

They didn’t show where the vehicle was, or what the speed limit was on that particular road. The best your software could do was make logical assumptions on the basis of the starting and finishing points. Which was seldom worth doing, unless it was done in relation to accidents.

Jump to the present day, and you find a world where drivers seem to accept the idea not only of having all this information recorded, but also of being tracked by satellite wherever they go – in real time.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if your software knows exactly where a vehicle is, and also knows the speed limit on that particular bit of road, its can work out when the driver is exceeding it – again, in real time.

And that’s what Microlise is now offering with its Contextual Speeding system, which is described in this issue’s News Update on page xx. Using location information picked up from its satellite-based tracking system, and combining it with the speed limits that are now available in Navteq’s map data, it can sound an alert in the office whenever a vehicle exceeds the limit.

Clearly you’d have to use such a system judiciously, otherwise you’d find you were being alerted to transgressions all day long. You’d also have to have some respect for drivers’ sensitivities. If they were your office, you wouldn’t constantly breathe down their necks, and arguably you wouldn’t want to do the metaphorical equivalent with your tracking system.

What’s remarkable is that such as system could even be contemplated. It reflects just how far people have moved forward in terms of accepting controls over the way they behave and the degree to which they need to respect the law.

Jump for a moment to another topical subject: average-speed enforcement cameras. Aren’t they clever? Anyone can jam their brakes on when they see a traditional yellow camera looming, but you can’t do that with an average-speed camera. If you’ve already passed the first one and this is the second, it’s already too late. And if you don’t know when the next one will pop up, you don’t know how slowly you have to go to compensate for your excess speed three miles back.

Hang on a minute, though: why are you doing jamming your brakes on when passing speed cameras in the first place? We’ve all either seen it or done it, but arguably this is “professional” law-breaking, committed in full knowledge by people intentionally exceeding the limit.

The irony is that traditional cameras tend to fail to catch these people, and in fact are more likely to catch out basically law-abiding drivers who inadvertently creep over the limit.

Average-speed cameras promise to give them a fairer deal, while at the same time properly curbing the wilder speeding excesses of the habitual transgressors. If you use telematics to monitor speeding in your fleet, you will need to take the same approach.

– Tabula*

*Tabula is the Latin for keyboard.