Happy Veterans Day! THANK YOU to all veterans for your time, bravery and sacrifice for this country. We honor you today and are so grateful to you for protecting our freedoms.

Your safety is our top priority. Autumn means less favorable road conditions like wind, rain and fog. Please check out the National Safety Council’s fall driving tips as well as these pointers:

Buckle up when driving the vanpool vehicle and instruct your riders to use their seatbelts as well. Washington State law and Intercity Transit require that you use your seatbelt.

Evaluate your vanpool schedule. If you often find yourself rushing to get to work, talk with your group about adjusting your start time to leave a bit earlier. Be sure you are leaving early enough to allow time for traffic or other delays.

Maintain a safe following distance. Leaving room between you and the vehicle ahead allows for more time to react if they stop suddenly. This is especially important in weather where visibility is diminished. Use a four-second following distance during optimal driving conditions and increase this distance in rain, snow, fog, or other inclement weather.

Be a predictable driver. Follow posted speed limits, use turn signals, do not change lanes at the last second, and avoid sudden braking or acceleration.

Be aware of your surroundings. Maintain situational awareness by scanning the area around your vehicle every few seconds. It is important to be aware of your vehicle’s position in relation to other vehicles from all angles. Check your mirrors often.

Beware of drowsy driving. Have you ever driven from one place to another with no recollection of the drive? This could mean you need to catch a few extra Z’s! Ensure you get enough quality sleep each night so you can be confident in your ability to transport you and your riders safely. If you feel sleepy at commute time, ask another approved driver to take the wheel.

We thank you for carrying precious cargo to and from work safely.

We’re excited to announce that we are adding Geotab vehicle tracking devices to our vanpool fleet. These devices use advanced real-time GPS technology to capture precise data on vehicle health, and will notify us in case of engine fault, collision or possible collision. The devices will also record vehicle mileage and location, which will assist us in verifying group routes. If you forget to record your mileage at end of month, we can help by running a Geotab report to ensure that the mileage we report in our monthly and annual federal reports is accurate.

The Geotab devices will also notify us of high-risk driving behaviors such as driver seatbelt non-use and speeding. We chose to be notified of these safety markers as they are important to help ensure the safety of you and your riders. In 2022, half of passenger vehicle occupants killed were not wearing a seatbelt and speeding killed more than 12,000 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Over the past few months, we have installed and tested the tracking devices in about 25% of our vanpool vehicles. This phase of the demonstration project is now complete and we will continue installing the devices on the rest of the fleet. We will mostly do this as a scheduled waiter service, which should take about a half hour. Please watch for a communication from us inviting you to choose a date and time for the install.

If you have any questions, please contact us at vanpool@intercitytransit.com or 360.786.8800.

Did you know…you can schedule a waiter service with us to complete minor service items on your vanpool vehicle? We can take care of any of the following while you wait:

• Replace inoperative headlights, brake lights, turn lights or running lights
• Replace bulbs or wipers
• Replace a lost fuel card
• Refill wiper fluid
• Add air to tires
• Check tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) light

Just contact us at 360.786.8800 or vanpool@intercitytransit.com and give us a half-hour window of when you’d like to stop by.

If you have any questions, let us know.

Just a heads up that our maintenance building will be under construction soon and our maintenance team will move to a temporary building on the east side of our property. This will result in some changes to the way you drop off your van for service. Instead of dropping off your van at maintenance, you’ll park in our administrative building visitor lot, pick up your spare van key from the self-service lockbox, and drive away in the spare van. We expect the new process to start sometime in December. We’ll provide more detailed information and instructions when your van is due service.