Winnipeg councillor wants audit of vehicle-tracking data to find inefficiencies

A Winnipeg city councillor wants the city to take stock of its vehicle-tracking technology to ensure the fleet is being used as efficiently and safely as possible.

Transcona Ward councillor Shawn Nason is putting forward a motion that would direct the public service to audit the city’s use of Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) technology, and identify any gaps in the system.

It would also examine the possibility of making the data publicly available.

“We all know that the City of Winnipeg has a lot of vehicles, and that we want to make sure that they’re being used for work purposes, that they’re at locations that they need to be at, (and) that they’re not sitting idling for extended periods of time,” Nason says.

“There’s also safety components that could be looked at with vehicle location for staff that are working alone to make sure that they’re where they’re supposed to be, and if something were to happen, we know how to locate them.”

In 2013, the city set in motion a wider-scale rollout of AVL technology, although a report at the time says some vehicles were already outfitted with the systems.

Some of the capabilities included near real-time vehicle data – such as location, speed, direction, etc – driver information, and reports on excessive speeds and hard stops.

Other benefits include reducing emissions and fuel consumption, improved efficiency, and enhanced worker safety.

“I know one of the goats I see a lot of concerns about is on our photo enforcement vehicles; they sit and they idle and they idle, and from an environmental perspective, it’s not a good thing,” Nason says.

“Again, to look at what we’re doing and how we’re doing operations to make sure it’s optimized.”

Nason says the impetus for the motion is a recent report by Manitoba’s Auditor General, which shows AVL information on provincial vehicles isn’t being used to “maximize operational and financial efficiencies.”

The auditor general found expected driver behaviour isn’t consistently defined, and although nearly 1,800 light-duty vehicles are equipped with the technology, there doesn’t appear to be clear consequences for non-compliance.

“While there will always be exceptional circumstances, there should be clear and consistent expectations for drivers regarding speed and how long a vehicle should be left running,” Auditor General Tyson Shtykalo wrote in the report.

“We found a range of approaches to monitoring, reporting, and correcting unacceptable driver behaviour.”

Shtykalo’s report makes eight recommendations; including that the province follow-up on incidents of driver non-compliance, and establish a central authority to oversee the AVL data.

The audit found speeding and idling incidents peaked and then declined in the months following September 2018, when AVL systems were installed in government vehicles.

Between then and September 2020, the report says there was a median of 2.03 speeding incidents per week, however, one vehicle with the highest number of speeding incidents still recorded an average of 8.7 incidents per day.

Nason’s motion will appear before a city committee Monday.