00:07:44 · Brett Rogers
There's lot of data centers out there that we're competing with. But as far as getting power, what we have to do is make sure that we have chargers in the ground before the trucks show up. And so it sounds like a simple concept, but you basically need to know where trucks work two years before you need the trucks so you can kick off the utility conversations, the design, the construction of the chargers to make sure that we're able to charge the trucks. And that's been a fun challenge as well. And so far, we've had a 100% success rate as far as having charges in the ground and operational before trucks show up. That... That's kind of the EV side of the fence. When it comes to safety, I originally came over to here to really focus on EV, but saw a bunch of opportunities on how to leverage technology as far as telematics and adding advanced safety features, especially from the autonomous vehicle industry. You know, they're using all different types of sensors. They have cameras, LIDAR. They have radar systems on their vehicles. And then even probably in your personal vehicle, you're used to, like, a bird's eye view around the... Your vehicle so you can see 306 degree around you. I hopped in some of our refuse trucks, and all they had was a backup camera. And these trucks are huge. And so I'm getting in the truck, and I'm on private property. I don't have a CDL, so I can drive on public roads. But so I I get in a truck, and I'm like, it was hard to drive. It's hard to see around. And I'm thinking our our drivers are amazing. Our drivers are very good, but wouldn't it be nice if they had this common tools that we have in, you know, a a vehicle that can buy off the lot? And And so we started looking at technology, which started out with just a a three sixty bird's eye view. So now our drivers can see 360 degrees around the vehicle while they're driving in neighborhoods. So these are the same trucks that are driving through our residential neighborhoods, our commercial neighborhoods. And if you think about it, on the commercial side, those are our our dumpsters that are outside of, you know, like, your grocery stores or your fast food chain, and they're going in and out with a lot of people traffic around them. So we wanna make sure our drivers can see around them really well, but we also want our drivers focused on driving.
00:09:52 · Brett Rogers
And so that was the other challenge when it comes to safety is how do we give them the visibility and tools required to do their job but not create a distraction. And so what we were able to do is team up with various vendors and actually come up with basically machine learning and AI that can tell the difference between a person and an object. And then we can get different audible cues to our drivers, such as they may react differently to an object behind them because they might wanna back up close to that object in order to get out of a tight spot compared to a person. If they know a person's behind them, they're gonna stop and assess the situation and be able to react properly. So what we've done is not only given visual cues to our drivers, but we also give audible cues. And so our drivers know when to actually react without taking their eyes off the road or taking their eyes off the job. And then when we talk about verbal cues, we're not talking about beeps. Because even in maybe your personal car, you start getting, like, tone deaf to those beeps. And so we have had a large focus on giving audible cues such as pedestrian rear, pedestrian front to actually tell them what is happening around them and where that thing is happening at so then they can react properly. And so what we really consider that is giving them the tools to prevent incidents from happening real time. And so when you hear the terminology ADAS, this is kinda like our ADAS issue, our advanced driver alert systems. But then we've also taken safety technology to the next layer on top of that is how can we use technology to help coach our drivers? And so what we have is actually camera systems in our vehicles that can see, hey. How close are you following the vehicle in front of you? And so if our drivers are following a vehicle too close, we can say, increase following distance. We can tell them what they need to do in order to remedy the situation. Or for instance, you know, you really shouldn't be on your cell phone while driving a truck. And so we can sense if they're on their cell phone or if they're distracted from looking at the road, And then we actually tell them how to correct, which is, put the phone down or distracted driving.
00:11:55 · Brett Rogers
And so with that, what we've seen is just with those types of alerts in the cab, we monitor those behaviors, and we saw about 20 to 30% reduction in what we call unfocused behaviors. And so that's making our drivers safer, which is making our community safer. But when it comes to technology deployment, which I hit on a little bit before, the people, processes, technology, what we really needed is a bigger focus on our people and processes and when it comes to that in particular piece of technology because what we added in was a coaching program. So what we do is allow our drivers to self correct and to self correct, great. But if we see, like, hey. They're constantly having this following distance issue. Maybe we should sit down and actually coach them and say, like, hey. This is why following distance is important. You know, we don't wanna hit the person in front of us. We wanna have enough time to react. And so we'll sit down with them and actually have a conversation with them and teach them that, hey. What's the why behind this? And why are we asking you to increase the following distance? And then also saying, hey. This is how you follow correctly and giving them the proper coaching. And what we found is when we added in coaching to the technology, we went from a 20% decrease to a 95% decrease in unfocused behavior. So a huge step change in really the effectiveness of the technology by adding in really robust processes that are tailored towards our people.
00:13:16 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:13:16] S0: It's incredibly cool what you're doing here. I must admit, I do get a big kick out of sharing stories on this podcast because I think very often when people take out their trash, they're not thinking about technology. That is the furthest thing from their mind, and I must admit, I get a kick out of sharing stories like this and and really delivering that wow factor because I I was chatting with someone in Sweden recently, and they they had attached cameras to all of their waste management trucks. And they were scanning for potholes in the road, recording it and sending it to their authorities who would then go and fill those potholes before they got big. So technology is everywhere. So where else are you seeing AI improving both driver and community safety at all or just anything? And what evidence tells you it's working? Because it... It's not tech for tech's sake here. You're seeing real results. Right?
00:14:08 · Brett Rogers
[00:14:08] S1: Yeah. So... Absolutely. So on the safety side, we're seeing a huge reduction in our incidents overall, which is driving, you know, our safety aspect of the fence. But we also have advancements in... And I really like your story about the three sixty cameras. There's a bunch of different ways you can leverage that technology. Yeah. We haven't dove so far into that, but we are looking at ways that we can better serve our customers as far as how can we give them visibility into their communities in order to really help them improve. And I I think that pothole scenario is a really good example, but we're also using it with transparency in our routing. And so when you think about it, cities actually contract out their services. Some operate their own. Some some contract out. And if a customer calls them up about a particular question or a customer is asking, like, hey. I didn't get my trash picked up. And the city's really left on their heels, like, how do I react to this? And you're... They're trying to figure out what has already happened. And and you don't know. And so sometimes maybe they didn't get picked up because the truck hasn't driven by yet. Maybe they didn't get picked up because they set their can out too late, or maybe it was a mess, and it needs to get remedied and someone needs to come back. But the cities don't know. And so this technology is really giving us that transparency with the city to give them the tools to see what's happening real time. And so instead of them being reactive and trying to figure out in the past what's already been happening, they really can use these tools in order to see, hey, what's the status of this delivery? And they can talk to their customers like, hey, that truck hasn't driven by you. You can expect it at so and so time. And so now it eases the customer, makes our customers happier, makes our cities happier, and overall, just that increase in visibility and transparency, I think, is gonna go a long ways, and we've started rolling out that technology as well.
00:15:57 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:15:57] S0: And, of course, electric collection trucks operate under very different conditions from passenger vehicles. I'm curious. Are there any engineering or even charging problems that become apparent to a a fleet of the scale that we're talking about here?