• Type of Project: Vehicle Fleet Efficiency
• Campus Size: Four campuses serving 80,000+ students; four square miles between each campus
• Current Fleet Size: 850 vehicles. Currently 30 are in Phase One of the shared fleet; goal of overall reduction as stated next question. 200 and 300 respectively
• Goal Fleet Size: 500 (200 shared and 300 specialized vehicles)
• Average Length of Trip per Shared Vehicle: 4 miles
• Number of Shared Fleet Users: 1,300+
• Savings: Operations costs are down at least 50%; millions annual cost savings in fleet reduction
• Number of Departments Currently Involved in Shared Fleet Program: 20, anticipating growth to over 150

The Value Proposition: Fleet managers are constantly under pressure to do more with fewer resources, and in many cases, they must also meet sustainability goals. While electrification of transportation can help check the emissions and sustainability box, it may not do much to reduce costs — and can potentially even increase them. Sustainable approaches can address not just how vehicles are fueled, but how many there are and how efficiently they are used. Optimization of fleet management, especially in the municipalities, universities, schools, and hospitals (MUSH) sector, can go a long way to both cutting costs and cutting vehicle lifecycle emissions.

Arizona State University (ASU), an institution serving more than 80,000 across four campuses has successfully completed the first phase of its effort to increase the efficiency of its transportation assets and reduce the overall number of vehicles. It has already achieved some significant wins with the adoption of fleet management software and an As-A-Service approach that turns transportation into a no-hassle and efficient value proposition for participating departments.

Identifying the Problem and Quantifying the Opportunity: When newly arrived Fleet Program Manager John Mack came to ASU’s Tempe, Arizona campus in 2021, something caught his attention: Even though campus life had largely returned to normal after over a year of vacancy during the COVID pandemic, many of the 850 vehicles in the university’s transportation fleet were unused. They were literally depreciating — gathering dust in the heat and unnecessarily draining the school’s resources.

Armed with decades of experience in the trucking industry, with its focus on efficiencies and asset utilization factors, Mack quickly concluded there must be a better way to manage ASU’s fleet. In the past, each university department across its four campuses had procured, owned, fueled, and serviced its own vehicles, which ranged from electric carts and Chevy Bolts to several gasoline-powered SUVs and pick-ups.

His notion was to eliminate inefficiencies by sharing vehicles among multiple users across multiple departments that were close to one another. However, Mack needed to know how many vehicles would actually be required so nobody was left without a ride. To answer that question, he outfitted 435 vehicles on the larger Tempe campus with GPS devices. Three months of data proved that some vehicles were not being used at all, while others were being significantly under-utilized. In fact, the average fleet vehicle was in service about 20% of the time, with most of that use dedicated travel within the 4 square mile campus.

The next step was to analyze the data to determine when, where, and which types of vehicles were in use. Mack and his team loaded that information into Agile Fleet Commander software specifically built for fleet optimization. The software provides more than 60 reports, including utilization patterns of each vehicle in the pool and real-time trip data. This allowed Mack to demonstrate that vehicles could, in fact, be shared among multiple departments and determine just how many the campus was likely to need.

Easing the Adoption Process: Mack understood that developing a new fleet management program could create anxiety and concerns about vehicle availability, so he developed two strategies to overcome potential resistance to the program.

First, he introduced an “as-a-service” model that would guarantee every user access to a vehicle that had already been maintained, cleaned, and fueled with either gasoline or electricity. The goal was to make the user experience similar to dealing with a rental car company. All the user had to do was log on to the Agile software app and reserve one of 26 vehicles in the initial program, which included several gas-powered pick-ups and SUVs, electric Chevy Bolts, and dozens of GEM electric carts.

Users could access keys at a password-protected lockbox and pay different rates for different types of vehicles (not surprisingly gas pick-ups cost more per hour than electric carts). The reservation system was also programmed to randomly select vehicles from the preferred category to eliminate tendencies for hoarding or monopolization of certain vehicles. Each user’s department would be charged on an hourly basis, irrespective of distance traveled and energy used.

Second, Mack took pains to visit each department and explain how the program would work and its advantages, including how it would cut costs. “The key to those conversations had everything to do with taking the emotion out of it and representing it by GPS fact-based data,” Mack explained.

The shared program has now been in production for well over two years and currently involves 20 departments. Mack says users have come to relish the approach, commenting, “Once they got a taste of it, they’re spoiled to death. Number one, they don’t have to wash their own vehicle. Number two, they don’t have to worry about any of the maintenance on their own vehicles. Nobody’s got a dead battery or a flat tire. It doesn’t occur with our shared fleet.”

The only major problem he and his team haven’t yet solved is how to monitor the state of charge in the batteries of the electric GM Bolts when they are parked. That’s because the telematics that communicate with the vehicle when it’s running go dormant when the car is turned off. “If the vehicle is running,” Mack says, “it’s talking to the mother ship, but once it’s parked and turned off, I don’t know. Did it get plugged in? What is it doing as far as from a range capacity?” That can present a problem if somebody is reserving a vehicle that has to travel longer distances.

Results to Date, and Next Steps: While it’s difficult to develop specific metrics, Mack says the operational costs are down by at least 50%. Many gains will only fully be realized when the university doesn’t have to buy as many new vehicles. Rather than having lightly used vehicles reach the end of life as an inevitable result of heat and sun damage, Mack’s goal is to wear vehicles out because they simply drove so many miles. “You get something and you just literally wear it out,” he said “That’s more sustainable.”

Mack plans to expand the program to other departments within the campus with a goal of reaching a total of 150. His team will replicate the GPS tracking program with a new group of vehicles selected through a heat-mapping exercise that illustrates where and when campus commuting activity occurs. His team will also identify new secure kiosk locations in other areas of the campus.

Eventually, Mack plans to create a university-wide centralized and optimized fleet structure. This would provide transportation services to the four campuses – each of which is separated by roughly 25 miles – when and where it is needed at the lowest cost to the participating departments and university. Mack estimates that this might ultimately involve a shared fleet of 200 vehicles, with another 300 specialized and school vehicles dedicated to other purposes. This would reduce the entire fleet from about 850 to perhaps 500 vehicles, and yield millions of dollars in annual cost savings.

Mack notes that he has received multiple inquiries from other institutions and has shared information with interested counterparts in Texas and California. The biggest surprise since the program started, he says, is that, “Everybody likes it. With the shared fleet, you don’t need a private car … It’s not as expensive as you may think, and you just need leadership support to move forward. It’s so routine now for everybody using it, you would think it had been here 10 years.”