Driving the green truck agenda
September 1st 2010 Eco-driving training – just more red tape or help in cutting costs? Geoff Dossetter considers
One of the last actions of New Labour was to commission the Department for Transport to carry out a consultation on Increasing the Uptake of Eco-driving for Drivers of Large Goods Vehicles and Passenger Carrying Vehicles. The consultation defined eco-driving as including skills relating to aerodynamics, speeds, fuel efficiency and choice of gears, acceleration and braking, and anticipation of traffic and driving conditions.
It suggested three possible options for consideration in order to achieve increased mpg – no change to the present, thus allowing operators to please themselves; increased promotion of the benefits of training with some targeted at those operators most likely to profit; and, finally, compulsory inclusion of eco-driving techniques in the Driver CPC mandatory training regulations.
With the remorseless increase in the price of oil unlikely to ever subside, and the fact that, for some vehicles, fuel constitutes up to 40 per cent of operating costs, common sense suggests that every possible effort must be made to improve fuel efficiency. That means making every journey count - reducing empty running, improving scheduling and route planning, consolidating loads, avoiding wasteful congestion, inter-company collaboration and all of the other smart management steps to squeeze out more from less. Crucially, it also includes improved driver behaviour.
The fuel efficiency differences between the performance of a good driver and a bad driver can no longer be questioned. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that driver training can result in fuel savings of up to ten per cent.Multiply that by the size of the fleet, higher diesel prices and the prospect of the Coalition’s ambition to balance the books and reduce the deficit by tax and duty increases, then the potential cost savings available are enormous.
And we haven’t yet mentioned the national and international targets to reduce carbon emissions which would also undoubtedly follow. After all, it’s not called ‘eco-driving’ for nothing!
None of this is new. Advanced driver training, in order to save money and reduce waste, has, to my certain knowledge, been around for at least thirty years. And yet so many operators, and drivers themselves, seem to remain unconvinced of what can be achieved, or are oblivious to the whole point of the training – to reduce costs and improve performance. So, as suggested by the last of the options in the consultation, should operators be legally compelled to introduce such training?
I’m reminded of the Jimmy Savile seat-belt ‘clunk-click every trip’ campaign of the 1980s. After years of trying to convince motorists of the wisdom of voluntarily using seat belts that were already fitted to vehicles, the then Government finally ran out of patience and made wearing them a statutory obligation. The result was a continuous reduction in deaths and serious injuries on the road. Few could complain about that.
Is eco-driving training the same thing? Should vehicle operators have a statutory obligation for their drivers to be given training which will result in lower fuel costs and less emissions? After all, unlike seatbelts, this is not a matter of life or death.
Superfluous regulation has been the bane of industry for many years, and transport and logistics has had more than its fair share.
Pointless bureaucracy designed to satisfy trivial and worthless regimentation of procedure, or statistics gathering or some other ’jobsworth’ type process, has resulted in a waste of time and money and brought genuine, necessary and worthwhile regulation into disrepute. One of the legacies of New Labour.
Opponents of mandatory eco-driving training suggest that it would remove the operators’ flexibility to apply training on a targeted basis and would lead them to treat the process as a ‘tickbox’ exercise. They have a point. And nobody wants more regulation anyway.
On the other hand it is quite clear that there are massive financial gains to be made for the very large number of individual operators who presently have no such training programme for the benefit of themselves, of the overall industry, or for a contribution to carbon saving.
I have previously mentioned in this column the words of the chief executive of one of our largest 3PL companies who said in effect that ‘we have yet to find a green project that does not have a beneficial impact on the bottom line.’ Eco-driving training is clearly such a project.
Nobody relishes an increase in constricting legislation. But maybe sometimes we need to regulate to help those people or companies who refuse to help themselves. More articles from Handling & Storage Solutions: | 
