WASHINGTON - The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) offers its Vehicle Allocation Methodology (VAM) to help agencies determine the optimal size and composition of their fleet. Taking into account each agency's specific mission requirements, this tool delivers on the directives in President Barack Obama's May memorandum to improve fleet management practices and improve fuel efficiency, and furthers the Administration's goal of moving the federal government to 100-percent alternative-fuel vehicle purchases by 2015, according to a release from the GSA. By optimizing their fleets, agencies are poised to meet their required 30-percent decrease in petroleum consumption by 2020 under President Obama's October 2009 Executive Order 13514 on Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance.

"This tool takes the savings we achieved through improving the fuel efficiency of the federal fleet and advancing the federal hybrid fleet to the next level by providing agencies with what the need to make the most cost- and fuel-efficient decisions for the size and composition of their fleet," GSA Chief of Staff Michael Robertson.

Agencies will then use this VAM to develop and submit to GSA a fleet management plan describing how the agency will achieve its optimal fleet inventory. Each management plan will include a schedule for the agency to follow in order to achieve its optimal fleet inventory, including plans for acquiring all AFVs by 2015.

In response to the President's directives in EO 13514 to reduce federal vehicle petroleum use by 30 percent by 2020, GSA, which is responsible for two-thirds of the federal fleet, increased the number of federal hybrid vehicles nine-fold over the past three years without increasing the number of vehicles in the fleet overall, and successfully integrated the first electric vehicles into the federal fleet. Eighty percent of the vehicles incorporated into the federal fleet this year by GSA have been alternative-fuel vehicles, the release stated.

On May 24, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum on federal fleet performance, directing agencies to implement government-wide fleet management practices. The President directed GSA to develop and distribute this VAM, a standard way to ensure that each vehicle in an agency's fleet is correctly sized and is appropriate for accomplishing the agency mission. The VAM will help agencies identify opportunities to incorporate alternative fuel vehicles and to identify and eliminate unnecessary vehicles from their fleets.

More information on VAM can be found here.