Use of GPS to reduce GHG Emissions of the Municipal Fleet

The Regional Municipality of Tracadie is a community with 16,000 people in northeast New Brunswick. Since the Regional Municipality of Tracadie is one of the municipalities at risk of being affected by climate change due to its geographic and coastal location, it wants to help reduce the GHG it produces. The environmental objectives, directly resulting from a detailed analysis of the data collected per vehicle and per driver, are to achieve a 20% reduction in GHG emissions from municipal transportation as well as a 20% reduction in fossil fuel use by the entire municipal fleet. The Regional Municipality of Tracadie will install GPS modules, then use Esri’s ArcMap program, which will be installed for vehicle maintenance and asset management, both of which are part of the initiative. An initial training will be dispensed to all employees concerned and their supervisors to optimize their driving habits and an idling policy will be implemented for all fleet vehicles. A month after the start of data collection, an in-house team of employees will conduct the first analysis of the basic data to determine which drivers and which vehicles are achieving the objectives. The person coordinating environmental matters will be responsible for checking with the in-house team and the company’s module management team on how the initiative would be integrated into each sector of municipal services. An adjustment will be suggested in consideration of the concerns and priorities of each service sector. A detailed analysis will be carried out every month and a full analysis will be done after having used the GPS modules for six months. With the collected data, the Regional Municipality of Tracadie will be able to determine its progress and recommend actions to achieve the minimum objective of reducing GHG and fossil fuel by 20%. The reports and needs analysis will be integrated into all the municipality’s departments, as well as the recommendations by the work team. The Regional Municipality of Tracadie would start analyzing the routes used for certain daily operational tasks and the work team, with help from drivers and managers, will determine the best method to achieve the objectives based on the collected data. Based on the data analysis, if the improvement does not reach the targeted 20% reduction, the team will take the recommended actions to achieve the goal. For example, one-on-one training for the drivers based on their driving habits and increased follow-up by the supervisors so that each driver hits the goal. Moreover, if there is an unexpected result from the analyses, the work team will correct it either by implementing new in-house policies, adopting new operational practices, targeting efforts to improve the result or seeking help from a specialized external consultant, as the case may be. From the applicant’s standpoint, other municipalities could no doubt use its results to evaluate the effectiveness of such a system in their own municipality. They will be able to determine whether the investment would be worthwhile financially. Other municipalities could use their results to put their actions into practice and thereby achieve the objective of reducing GHG and fuel use by 20%. (Project description from original funding application)