Guidance for people running transport operations.
Practical writing on Operator Licences, Driver CPC and drivers’ hours, from the team building FleetOptix.
The Christmas peak meets the worst driving weather of the year
More drops, shorter days, standing water and crosswinds — and a traffic office under pressure to make the schedule work. Where that pressure actually shows up in your records.
Read the article →What does fuel-efficient driving achieve? The answer is not about fuel
The theory test answer is improved road safety, which sounds like a trick until you look at the mechanism. It is the same one the Driver CPC syllabus names, and the same one that shows up in a fleet's fuel figures.
Geofencing for vehicles: what it produces, and where it goes wrong
A geofence does not show you where a vehicle is — the tracker already does that. It turns a stream of positions into three timestamps. Most of the trouble comes from the fence being smaller than the error on a satellite fix, and most of the risk comes from forgetting it is personal data.
DVSA operator assessments: why 92% come back unsatisfactory
More than nine in ten DVSA maintenance assessments now end unsatisfactory, up from seven in ten a decade ago. The rate is real, published by DVSA, and almost always quoted without the one fact that explains it.
VOSA: what happened to it, and who does its job now
VOSA was abolished on 31 March 2014 and its work passed to DVSA the next day. The name survives in the trade and in a great many operator handbooks — and the enforcement it ran then looks nothing like the enforcement you meet now.
DVSA enforcement actions: what each one is, and what follows it
Prohibition, fixed penalty, offence rectification, referral to the Traffic Commissioner. Each is a different thing with a different consequence, and the published data shows which vehicles actually attract them.
The photocard driving licence, explained
The card expires every ten years; the entitlement usually does not. Knowing which of the two you are looking at is most of what separates a licence check from a glance at a piece of plastic.
What is FORS? The scheme, the levels, and when a contract requires it
FORS is voluntary in law and mandatory on a growing number of contracts. Which level you need is usually decided by the contract's value and date, not by the size of your fleet.
Trailer compliance: the half of the fleet that gets forgotten
Trailers have their own test, their own inspection schedule and their own record trail — and because nobody drives one home at night, they are the part of the fleet most likely to drift out of compliance unnoticed.