How One City is Cutting Down Speeding in Its Municipal Fleet
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Newly adopted technology has kept drivers within speed limits and reduced hard braking by more than a third, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said.
A pilot program that uses technology to reduce the speeds of fleet vehicles in New York City has so far been successful, according to a Jan. 11 announcement from Mayor Eric Adams.
The 50 city fleet vehicles equipped with intelligent speed assistance technology have kept within speed limit parameters 99% of the time, racking up over 133,400 miles since the pilot began in August, Adams said. The outlying 1% represents the vehicle operator’s initial acceleration before the ISA technology reduced their speed, city leaders said.
Hard braking events, which city officials said often are an indicator of unsafe driving, were also reduced by 36% in the fleet vehicles outfitted with ISA technology. New York officials said that decrease could indicate that ISA is helping keep drivers focused.
The ISA technology sets a maximum vehicle speed based on local limits and can either slow vehicles that attempt to exceed limits or alert drivers who are going too fast.
All the fleet vehicles with ISA include an override button to temporarily disable the technology for 15 seconds, which could be helpful in certain situations. The override button has been used around 600 times, city leaders said, and seemed to be most frequently used in the pilot’s early weeks as drivers got used to ISA.
Of the 50 fleet vehicles outfitted with the technology, light duty vehicles have accounted for 62% of the miles driven, followed by medium duty vehicles at 25% and heavy duty at 13%. The pilot is expected to continue through the early part of 2024, with the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services then set to co-author a report with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center to share the full results.
DCSA has already applied for federal grant funding to roll out ISA technology to 7,500 city fleet vehicles over three to four years, which if approved would represent the largest coordinated implementation of ISA anywhere in the world.
City leaders said the pilot and further implementation of ISA technology shows their commitment to road safety and reducing excessive speed. DCAS Deputy Commissioner and NYC Chief Fleet Officer Keith Kerman said in a statement the agency is “leading the effort to design a vehicle that can’t and won’t speed in the first place.”
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