GPS tracking of work cars...interesting.

[2011G6E]

Interesting...and a little worrying.

I was chatting to a supervisor tonight, and he had a map up on his computer screen, with several boxes on it with car regos I recognised. They were our work vehicles. I knew of course, as does everyone here, that our cars all have GPS trackers in them, but I didn't know the level of detail they go to.

The list of things they tracked was, of course, location, speed, average speed, "excessive acceleration" (of a kph/second figure), excessive braking (more than 21kph/second...one guy had 34kph/second...obviously a roo jumped out), "violent cornering" (measured as a change of direction of 70 degrees from original course at 50kph or greater), and (amazingly) whether you had not put the handbrake on when parking it..."not securing vehicle correctly", that one was marked as...odd seeing as how they are all automatics...

They keep a full...and I mean full...log of everyones car driving, as we have to fill out log books when we take a car anywhere, so they know who was in the drivers seat.

Now, the problem starts when you "speed"...some guys have been asked to please explain when they have showed up as spiking briefly at up to 120kph. This is, as happened to me tonight, when overtaking a slow moving semi trailer with a wide load on it. I got up to 118 or so getting past him. I was acutely aware of the tracking I had just seen, so I tried sitting on 100kph to overtake...but unless I had about ten kilometers of clear road, there was no way I was going to get past without "speeding". Stay behind him, you say? What, go the rest of the 215km journey to meet the train we were relieveing at 85kph instead of just flooring it and getting past as safely and quickly as possible?

Of course, this last bit is exactly what the poilce say you should do, as they claim you cannot speed by one kph, even when overtaking.

I wonder how many accidents would occur if safety idiots got thier way and 100kph speed limiters were fitted to cars? I wonder also how much traffic congestion would be caused when no one could overtake someone doing 93kph without waiting in vain for a long enough piece of road to dawdle past...


Most of all, I wonder how long before this sort of GPS tracking is seen as "a good thing" by safetycrats in Canberra...it's getting cheaper and cheaper...