Many professional truck drivers rely on navigation systems to arrive safely and on time, but the technology doesn’t completely eliminate guesswork. Without truck route restrictions built into the system, some important routing details stay known only to more experienced drivers and fleet managers.
Without information or route controls, drivers will inevitably make split-second decisions at toll roads, dangerous intersections, high-crime areas, illegal parking zones, construction projects, and other locations that add cost, risk, and delivery delays.
Fortunately, you don’t need to communicate important routing details and hope drivers will comply. Fleets can include company-specific route restrictions in a navigation system to automatically ensure compliance.
With the Eleos custom driver platform, many of the nation’s top fleets use the Avoids feature to create and update areas in the embedded navigation system powered by HERE Technologies. The navigation system steers drivers around the selected areas.
With Avoids, fleets can ensure drivers follow the safest, most efficient routes, reducing operating costs and risks while improving the driver experience. This article outlines six clear benefits for fleets that use this feature to control routing end-to-end.
How fleets create truck route restrictions
Every fleet and driver knows route details that no navigation system can learn on its own. This is valuable institutional knowledge.
Drivers encounter difficult intersections. Dispatchers discover efficient routes to avoid congestion and delays. Safety managers find locations with elevated crash or theft risk. The challenge is ensuring that all drivers benefit from this knowledge.
With Avoids, fleet managers define an avoidance zone, a mapped area the in-app navigation automatically routes drivers around. Creating a an avoid area involves using Eleos’s web-based App Manager to point, click, and draw the area on a digital map. Fleets can also upload locations they want to avoid in bulk via an API.
Once activated, every newly generated route automatically incorporates those restrictions.
What is an avoidance zone in truck navigation?
An avoidance zone is a fleet-defined area that truck navigation software automatically routes drivers around. Fleets use tools like Eleos Avoids to mark tolls, hazardous intersections, theft hot spots, or restricted parking as avoidance zones, so every new route steers drivers clear of them without manual instructions.
Control trucking costs with custom toll avoidance
Routing decisions affect far more than arrival times. They also influence operating costs.
Commercial trucks pay billions of dollars in tolls every year, but these costs aren’t always recoverable from customers, especially when drivers decide on their own. Avoids gives fleet management direct control over these decisions.
Fleets can establish permanent or temporary avoidance zones around toll roads to automatically steer drivers toward practical alternatives. If toll routing policies change, administrators simply update the system rather than communicating new instructions across the fleet.
The result is a consistent routing strategy that controls costs and eliminates guesswork.
Build safety into every truck route
Some roads are too risky for semis, no matter how experienced the driver is.
Steep grades, difficult intersections, residential neighborhoods, and roads with a history of incidents can all increase exposure. Even if fleets know about these trouble spots, ensuring every driver complies with routing policies is another matter.
Avoids removes this uncertainty by automatically routing drivers around company-defined hazards.
The custom restrictions work alongside HERE’s truck-specific navigation, which already accounts for vehicle dimensions, weight limits, low bridges, hazardous materials, and legal truck restrictions.
Separately, when using the Trip Planner feature in their fleets’ custom apps, drivers receive advance notice of challenging maneuvers before starting navigation. These areas are marked along their route, and drivers can select an alternate route when appropriate.
Protect drivers, freight, and equipment with no-stop zones
Cargo theft hot spots, predatory towing locations, customer-specific restrictions, and areas with limited safe parking can all influence where fleets want drivers to travel or stop.
Avoids allows fleets to define these no-stop locations with precision, whether it’s an entire neighborhood or a single parking lot. As drivers plan fuel stops, rest breaks, or overnight parking, the routing engine automatically steers them away from prohibited areas.
Respond to changing road conditions in real time
Eleos Navigation automatically creates routes that account for current conditions such as weather events and road closures. In some instances, fleets want to take additional measures to shut trucks down due to adverse conditions.
In such instances, fleets can make temporary routing changes by scheduling avoidance zones for construction projects, severe weather, road closures, public events, and other short-term events.
Managers can choose specific start and end dates and times for these zones. Eleos Navigation automatically activates and expires the restrictions as specified.
Make truck navigation work for your fleet’s routing policy
Some fleets prefer navigation to vary when calculating truck routes based on vehicle specifications, traffic, and company policies.
Others want to use predefined routes and mileages to ensure compliance with customer requirements and maintain predictable costs and consistent billing.
Eleos supports both approaches. For the latter, fleets use Eleos’ Pluggable Routing feature, which pulls routes and Avoids from a fleet’s back-end routing system.
In either case, fleet administrators can test new Avoids before activating them, ensuring the routing changes perform exactly as intended before they reach drivers.
Whichever approach fleets choose, drivers use the embedded navigation in their daily driver workflow. After receiving a load, they plan their trips and start navigation, completing other tasks such as messaging and document uploads along the way.
Better routes lead to better operations
Truck navigation is far more than a modern convenience for drivers. It is an essential tool for safety, cost control, and overall route compliance.
The Avoids feature takes navigation to the next level, giving fleets a practical way to turn institutional knowledge into routing policies that drivers follow.
Whatever the reason for adding or editing an avoidance zone, fleets benefit from navigation that adheres to company standards instead of relying on reminders and individual judgment.
Ready to see what’s possible? Fill out the form below to schedule a personalized Eleos demo and see how a custom driver app can improve your fleet’s route compliance, safety, and cost control.
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Frequently asked questions
- What is an avoidance zone in truck navigation?
An avoidance zone is a fleet-defined area that truck navigation automatically routes drivers around. With Eleos Avoids, fleet managers mark tolls, hazardous intersections, or restricted parking as avoidance zones so every new route steers clear of them automatically. - Can fleets set temporary truck route restrictions for construction or weather?
Yes, fleets can schedule temporary avoidance zones with Eleos Avoids. Managers set a start and end date and time, and Eleos Navigation automatically activates and expires the restriction, so drivers avoid construction zones, severe weather, or road closures only while they’re active. - Does avoiding tolls with truck navigation software save fleets money?
Yes, fleets can use avoidance zones to route trucks around toll roads automatically. Eleos Avoids lets fleet managers set permanent or temporary toll avoidance zones, giving administrators direct control over routing costs instead of leaving toll decisions to individual drivers. - How do fleet managers create a truck route restriction?
Fleet managers create a truck route restriction, or avoidance zone, in the Eleos App Manager by drawing a bounding box on a map, or by uploading restricted locations in bulk through an API. Once activated, every new route in the fleet’s app automatically avoids those areas.