SPONSORED CONTENT: Despite efforts to prevent the all-too-often headlines of yet another truck stuck under a bridge, our cities and truck drivers' schedules are still being brought to gridlock in what feels like a daily occurrence.
It is so frequent that some bridges including South Melbourne’s infamous Montague Street Bridge (with a claimed 226 hits), Footscray’s Napier Street Bridge or Perth’s Bayswater Bridge even have their own Facebook pages and leaderboard scores.
READ HERE: NAPIER BRIDGE CONTNUES TO BE HIT BY TRUCKS
These kinds of incidents and accidents cause traffic chaos, not to mention the financial cost to the truck owners, courier companies, fines and license suspensions for drivers, but most significantly risk lives of drivers and passengers alike.
Despite many physical barriers, strike bars and warning signs, such accidents and incidents could have been easily avoided if drivers and fleet managers used affordable and readily available Truck Navigation. Truck navigation not only provides the most appropriate and efficient routes for heavy vehicles, but it importantly factors in the dimensions and weights of vehicles so that low bridges, narrow roads and restricted areas are avoided.
After talking with Brent Stafford, Executive Director at Directed Technologies, a leading Australian owned Audio Visual Navigation systems and telematics supplier it became apparent that the solution may already be installed in your vehicles. Directed have supplied Mercedes Benz, HINO, UD, Fuso, Isuzu and other truck brands with navigation for many years and those systems often only require a small SD card to turn on or update their truck navigation with the latest truck routes to avoid dead ends, length width and height restrictions, and direct you to truck preferred and even BDouble routes.
Navigation made specifically for heavy vehicles also provides very handy information including weigh bridges, high flow diesel providers, rest stops and other convenient data.
Brent Stafford commented “For Fleet Managers and Owner Drivers, ensuring their vehicle has truck navigation installed with the latest maps is a low cost investment in safety and operational efficiency. Updating truck navigation maps makes your business more efficient, saves you money, potentially saves your license, and could even saves lives.”
Directed are taking it upon themselves to ensure Australian road users and truck drivers are safer and more efficient by encouraging them to update their truck navigation maps. Directed is currently running a promotion for companies and drivers to update their Truck Navigation maps at only $169.00 including replacement SD card and delivery. https://www.directed.com.au/navigation
If you think your truck navigation maps that are just a couple of years out of date are fine, think again. Your maps have missed millions of updates and could be placing you, road users, your truck or your business in significant peril.
The mapping powering the Directed Audio Visual Navigation is by HERE Maps, and recently released HERE data shows the staggering number of changes that have been made to their map data in the past two years to keep up with changes occurring on our roads. The Australian Truck Maps have had over 2.7 million updates.
While many drivers, couriers and operators rely on devices including mobile phones, iPads and laptops to run their navigation dispatch and communications apps and software, interacting with these devices while driving is not only extremely dangerous, the penalties for using a mobile phone or device while driving or stationary but not parked are extremely high, with Queensland just upping their fines to $1,000 and other states to follow suit. There is also the new risk of tablets turning into projectiles now that many new trucks are fitted with airbags. The only true safe and legal solution for drivers is for their maps and dispatching systems to be integrated to their AVN (Audio Visual Navigation System).
Australian State & Territory fines for illegal use of devices while driving or stationary but not parked:
- QLD: 4 demerit points / $1,000 fine
- VIC: 4 demerit points / $484 fine
- ACT: 4 demerit points / $447 fine
- WA: 3 demerit points / $400 fine
- NSW: 5 demerit points / $337 fine
- TAS: 3 demerit points / $300 fine
- NT: 3 demerit points / $250 fine