Grand Island Express, a 140-vehicle for-hire trucking firm soon to enter its 50th year, takes pride in its family approach to business. Every new driver gets a one-on-one meeting with the company’s president, Tom Pirnie, son of the company’s founder, to establish a personal connection, and thereafter, they remain on a first-name basis. A core value within the Grand Island Express family is safety, and that’s why they chose Lytx DriveCam video telematics as its safety partner.
The DriveCam exception-based video safety program combines video capture of road incidents such as hard braking or sudden swerving, data analysis of those incidents, and personalized coaching insights to improve driving behavior. Today, Lytx helps protect more than 650,000 commercial and government fleet drivers under its DriveCam program.
A combination of DriveCam video and coaching insights has helped Grand Island keep its CSA scores so low that they’re broadcast front and center on the company website. The Grand Island fleet achieves those scores without sacrificing its 98% on-time delivery record.
Grand Island Express Safety Director Lucas Mowrey, a former driver himself, said the DriveCam program has helped them live up to the Grand Island motto: “There is no load so important that we can’t take the time to deliver it safely.”
“It’s hard to get hired here. You have to have a clean record to start with, but nobody’s perfect,” he said. “I’m not asking for perfection, but I am striving for it. I believe we can be the safest fleet.”
One of the first lessons Mowrey and his team learned following the DriveCam deployment was that just about 10% to 20% of the drivers needed extra attention to improve safety, and that coaching has to be personalized. Even the small things, he learned, were important, like coaching on following distance to minimize the likelihood of rear-end collisions.
“It’s tough to coach over the phone,” he said. “The coaching experience completely changes when it’s in person; you’re able to see who takes it to heart.”
Mowrey added that he was pleasantly surprised by how positively the coaching with DriveCam video clips has been received.
“We have one driver who wants to go back and review his video clips every night—it’s not what I expected,” he said. “We have a truly great group of drivers, and all I’m asking is that they understand what they can do differently to improve safety.”
Grand Island first tried self-service dash cams in every truck but found them to be unreliable, and when they did work, it could take days to get the video from the SD card. Mowrey knew they had to find another solution, and he heard about DriveCam from a peer.
Grand Island skipped a trial and went straight to deployment, Mowrey said, because “we believed in the technology and the success rate has been high.”
Grand Island’s safety record is so good that its fleet was recently named the Nebraska Trucking Association’s Safest Fleet Grand Champion, a designation Mowrey said the DriveCam program helped them earn.
For more information, go to www.lytx.com.
