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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Left-hand Turns Can Cost You

As reported through Yahoo! News: With a delivery fleet of 96,173 package cars, vans, tractors, and motorcycles, the United Parcel Service or UPS knows a great deal about efficient driving.

WAGA Fox 5 News interviewed UPS dispatch supervisor Matthew Frost to learn about some of the Fortune 500 company’s driving tips. Matthew said, “A lot of the managers here and supervisors here, they train their kids when they get of driving age and they train them the same way that we train our drivers here to keep ‘em safe.

Because these are proven methods that work.” After 6 years behind the wheel of a brown truck, Matthew now helps plan out the drivers’ routes. “When we design routes, as we put them together, we want to try to design it where the drivers are taking a right-hand turn as many as possible.” The company has found that right-hand turns are not only safer, but they’re also more efficient. It’s a tip that AAA agrees with. By using routing technology and avoiding idling at lights for left-hand turns, UPS was able to avoid 98 million minutes of idle time in a year; an estimated fuel savings of about $980,000 per year.

Other tips by the delivery giant include leaving at least one car length between you and the car stopped ahead of you to allow for reaction time. They advise using your eyes to scan the road and your mirrors. The dispatch supervisor said, “We train our drivers to check a mirror every five to eight seconds. Then check back to the front, then check another mirror, back to the front.” In addition to all of that, the drivers are given training drills to keep their minds sharp.

Matthew told WAGA that UPS has, "110,000 drivers. We log 3 billion miles a year and we average less than one accident per 1 million miles." That safe driving record is enforced with drivers undergoing 1 week of the company’s training after which they are allowed to get behind the wheel of a truck.

UPS is proud of their Circle of Honor club with 6,400 drivers who all have 25 years or more of safe driving.

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