3 Ways Municipal Fleets Can Save Money with Safety Training

Accidents are costing your municipal fleet time and money. Worse yet, they’re common.

As Verizon Connect points out, more worker deaths are caused by vehicular accidents than anything else. Driving is the most dangerous thing your employees do without exception. It’s more dangerous than climbing telephone poles, dealing with solid waste, or clearing debris on roadways.

Your municipal employee accidents add up to what we call cost of loss. Several years ago, the average cost of a vehicular accident was $21,000. That number is rising.

If you want to protect your people, reduce liability, and improve fleet safety, you must invest in safety training. Best of all, the investment will actually save you money.

How Can Paying For Safety Training Save Money?

As we said above, accidents add up to what we call “cost of loss.” Accidents cost you money because they result in:

• Property damage
• Vehicle repairs
• Traffic violation fines
• Legal representation
• Court fines
• OSHA fines
• Insurance deductible and premiums
• Workers comp injuries
• Reduced productivity
• Third-party liability claims

Even a small accident without any injuries will cost you anywhere from $8,000 to $12,000. And an accident with a fatality can cost a city or municipality millions of dollars.

Currently, these accidents are just “part of doing business.” You likely do the bare minimum that’s asked of you. This isn’t to point fingers - most municipalities we’ve worked with thought they were doing the best they could.

They were wrong. There are proven solutions out there that can reduce accidents by 20% or more per year. Now, time for some quick math to show you how this pays off.

If the average cost of an accident is around $20,000, and your municipality has 10 accidents per year, a 20% reduction means two fewer accidents. That saves you $40,000. As long as you spend less than $40,000 on training per year, you’re coming out in the black.

These are extremely conservative estimates. Most municipalities have two or three times as many accidents as these. They just don’t consider backing into the garage door or hitting the curb and damaging a tire to be an accident.

Moreover, a 20% reduction is the minimum you should expect. Many companies who invest in proven solutions see even better results.

3 Proven Fleet Safety Training Solutions

We’ve worked with many municipalities and seen their cost of loss go down by tens of thousands of dollars per year or more. Better yet, we help their employees get home safely every night. In our 30+ years of transportation safety, we’ve seen these three things work time and time again.

1. New-Hire Online Training

The municipalities that get the best results invest in professionally-produced, world-class safety training. These programs are much cheaper than you think.

An effective online training program includes:

• Important information on defensive driving
• Strategies to reduce and avoid personal injury
• The ability to access safety training from any mobile device
• The ability for supervisors to track training progress and store reports

The Fleet Safety Course provides all of these features. Some of the biggest municipal counties in the country use The Fleet Safety Course to reduce accidents, save time, and protect their people.

It takes only a few minutes to get started.

2. Monthly Safety Meetings

Self-directed online safety training is the cornerstone of an effective safety training program, but you should build off of it to achieve even better results.

Think of it this way: how much do you remember from freshman year math class? Do you remember how to solve a two-variable equation?

Of course not. But you would if every month you practiced it.

It works the same with safety training. If you teach your employees on day one how to do a proper vehicle inspection and never follow up, chances are slim that they will do the correct way down the line.

Monthly safety meetings solve this issue.

You should host a monthly safety meeting focused on a specific safety issue such as, following distance, performing safe turns, and avoiding workplace falls. By focusing on these specific issues one at a time, your safety numbers will quickly improve.

If you think that sounds like a lot of work, you’re correct. It takes several hours a week to put together a monthly safety program worth its salt. That’s why we made one for you.

Many of our clients use The Monthly Safety Initiative. This “safety meeting in a box” provides you with everything you need for a safety meeting, every month.

You’ll have professionally-made posters, pledges, and facilitator guides without having to spend any of your own time making them.

Download Free eBook: How Often Should You Do Safety Training?

3. Behind The Wheel Training

Most of your employees’ risk comes from driving. You need to train them to be defensive drivers in order to prevent accidents. And, just like hitting a baseball or baking a cake, defensive driving is a skill.

You can’t learn a skill without practicing it.

We recommend you conduct behind-the-wheel training with all new drivers and every driver annually. You should examine your drivers on their ability to put the concepts and principles they learned from their online training and safety meetings into practice.

If you don’t want to make your own process, our clients use LLLC Instructor and Driver Certification. We teach your instructors how to effectively conduct behind-the-wheel training. They, in turn, train your drivers. This virtuous cycle helps you further reduce accidents and limit liability.

Save Money & Improve Fleet Safety

Accidents are common and costly in municipal fleets, but they are preventable.

If you take action and implement the three strategies we discussed here, you can protect your people, improve fleet safety, and save money.

Your positive return on investment will allow you to become more efficient and provide a better working environment for everyone involved.

Without proper fleet safety training, you can’t succeed.