GPS Tracking ROI

A good article in the Boston Globe today that attempts to address a problem that we, as a nation, are just doing abysmally at solving. Full text:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/10/21/gps_urged_vs_domestic_violence/

About 1500 women are killed each year by violent partners (almost always males)(Source: FBI Uniform Crime Statistics). There is no reliable statistic for the number of women beaten, but one empirically knows it’s much higher than those killed … this alone is a comment on our society in that the predominantly male FBI doesn’t even bother with beatings … must be many men out there who believe a wife is always someone who can benefit from a good thumping when she’s ‘wrong’. There’s some dynamic in the human male that seems to bring out the worst whenever marriage/partnership relationships ‘go south’.

The legal ‘cure’ is for a woman who feels threatened to obtain a TRO … Temporary Restraining Order from a court to instruct the potentially abusive partner to leave her (and her children) alone. Frequently these TROs contain provisions that restrict the subject of the order from approaching the protected person closer than a certain distance.

I don’t have a firm statistic but it appears that a huge percentage of physically abused or murdered persons were already under the “protection” of a TRO. If a man takes the notion to go wild and commit violence the existence of a piece of paper from a civil court instructing him not to do so has little or no effect. A person with murder in their heart knows that if apprehended they face severe criminal charges .. the addition of some civil penalty on top of that has little more weight than a fly.

The Massachusetts initiative has two very important features. Number one, unless violation of a TRO is made a felony there is little police can do … as it exists today in many states violating a civil TRO has about the same legal consequences as failing to license your dog. This places law enforcement in a no-win situation. If the suspected offender brandishes a weapon or makes other obvious threats then he/she can be arrested on some criminal charge … but absent any evidence of criminal activity, violating the TRO is not really something the police can do much about.

The second important point is the proposal to use GPS devices to monitor the compliance with the order. At such a nominal cost, $10 a day, it sounds like a real bargain to the state. if it were my program, I’d impose the daily monitoring fee upon the subject … and perhaps refund him at a later date for good behavior if the order was never violated. I don’t know how good the chances are for this initiative but I applaud it and hope the idea spreads to other states.

There’s an old fable about a dangerous cliff and the debate by authorities if it would be more practical to put a safety railing at the top of the cliff or station and ambulance down at the bottom. As of today, the USA’s main response to domestic violence has been to place the ambulance at the bottom. Guardrails (or GPS) could save more lives and cost a lot less both in dollars and in pain.

Thrifty Car Rental Introduces GPS Navigation

TULSA, Okla., Oct. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Thrifty Car Rental, a subsidiary of Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. (NYSE: DTG - News), today announced it would begin offering GPS-enabled (Global Positioning System) navigation via an optimized Garmin StreetPilot c330 at 138 popular locations in the U.S. and Canada effective October 18, 2005.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051018/datu057.html?.v=19

Here’s another blessing/curse, depending upon the feelings of the rental company. Those who see every GPS offering as an intrusive snoop into their private lives are going to feel it’s just more ‘big brother’ in action. In fairness, Thrifty is doing this right, because it’s a service the customer has to ask for _and pay for_ … more on that below.

For those of us who use rental cars frequently in unfamiliar areas it’s definitely a blessing. Wish I had a dollar for every time I blasted past my hotel and had to back track, tired, distracted and short on sleep before an early morning meeting. Worse yet is the mad dash to the airport wondering where the closest gas station is so I can fuel my rented chariot and zip on into the vehicle turn-in lane without going miles out of the way or making a U-turn across lanes of busy traffic.

I can see a business reason behind Thrifty’s daily charge … $9.95… what goes on a vehicle has to be paid for or there’s no reason to be in the rental business, but I must say the amount seems a little ridiculous in today’s world of falling electronic prices. The average rental car is kept in service for 2 years or 20,000 miles. I’m pretty sure that means each car will be rented out several hundred times. Don’t know exactly how much Thrifty is paying for these units but the current street price is well under $1,000 in single quantities so one can be pretty sure Thrifty paid a lot less in quantity. There is essentially no operating cost … perhaps $50 each to install in each vehicle … so Thrifty stands to make at least 200% profit on the deal. Even though I’m a dyed in the wool GPS enthusiast I would have to think twice before I added $10 bucks a day plus tax to my own bill.

That brings up what I feel is the most important thing to glean from this announcement. Even though GPS devices are making their way into the consumer world in ever increasing areas, they are still being treated as a luxury or ‘gizmo’ rather than the utility that they truly are. If I were setting up “Dave’s Auto Rent” you can be sure that GPS would form one of the backbones of my business … as would on-site refueling … one of the biggest detriments to rental convenience.

If I invest money in #20,000 plus automobile and rent them out to ever Tom, Dick and Mary I want to be able to know where they are and how badly they are being abused. Instead of a thousand-dollar receive only unit that gives drivers directions, I’d use a system that duplicated the Street Pilot’s feature plus enabled me to locate the vehicle at any time. The loss prevention and risk management factors alone can pay for the system in a year, easily.

The second biggest profit disincentive I see is the abysmal state of fuel handling. Rental car companies either try to sell you a full tank of gas and let you give up the amount that’s in the car when you return it .. what if you buy a full tank and only drive 40 or 50 miles? Or else let you wander around trying to find a place to fill up before turn-in. Not only are both of these options customer-unfriendly, but they cost money … because they take time and when a customer has a car for a day and is wandering around looking for gas the car can’t be rented out to another customer, the same day, exactly as it can be as soon as the first client returns it. It’s absolutely dumb not to have fuel available and just charge the customer market rate for the fuel used … the cars that go out with the ‘return empty’ option get filled up before re-rent anyway … they companies are already providing the service to a significant fraction of their users, so why not just save the wasted time … and make a lot of satisfied customers.

When I rent a car for business I go completely on price … all the “Hertz Number One” services in the world are not worth any extra costs to me … but if a company saw the way to maximize their rate of return on the rental by giving me guidance and a sensible deal on the fuel I’d become a ‘one brand’ guy overnight.

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 10/16/05BY BOB CULLINANESTAFF WRITER
A new inventory of Monmouth County vehicles reveals the county has 1,049 cars, trucks and buses, which makes it the largest county vehicle fleet in the state.It is an increase of 188 vehicles over the inventory the county reported five months ago…. (full article here:
http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051016/NEWS/510160427

There have been times I am discounted or shunted aside as just a grouchy old curmudgeon. Well, I am older than some (60 this year, the start of middle age, yes?) and I probably am a curmudgeon, but that doesn’t make my ideas any less valuable.

There are about 3200 counties in the United States (Parishes in Louisiana and Boroughs in Alaska) (and 10 or so equivalent subdivisions in each Canadian Province) and a great many of them are operating no better than Monmouth County, New Jersey. Imagine personally not knowing where 118 vehicles are .. not being able to count your personal or business assets within a hundred or so when asked for an official inventory? If it were your personal bank funds you’d probably be filing bankruptcy, or your business would be in tax court.

On average the managers of these entities earn on average over $68,000 a year to take care of your tax dollar.

It’s time now that you, as an individual tax payer to take a stand and demand better. It’s no secret that I sell GPS services to counties, other political sub-divisions and individual businesses. This is not, however, a sales pitch for my services.

If your county (city, state, etc.) doesn’t know within a hundred or so vehicles how many they spent your money on, if they are furnishing take home vehicles to hundreds of government employees, then they don’t need GPS … at least not at first … they need a good swift kick in the you-know-where to get them earning their $68K per year.

It’s up to you, as individual citizens .. no one curmudgeon can handle 3000 plus counties. (If you want to know my reputation with the manager of my home county fleet … just call him … he doesn’t want to manage or be manged… what about yours?

Terrence Nguyen has a neat article in Fleetowner about (old) new technology helping trucking companies help others: HURRICANE IMPACT: How one carrier rode to the rescue by Terrence Nguyen, web editor.

After Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, fleets turned to satellite communication systems as the only reliable means of communication when cellular links and landlines failed. Pelzer, SC-based Owen-Kennedy Specialized Transport sent a 4×4 pickup — normally used to tow horses to horse shows — equipped with a Qualcomm OmniTRACS mobile communications system to Bay St. Louis, MS. The pickup was used to find a route for a larger truck, also equipped with the system and hauling a trailer full of supplies, to reach the Bay St. Louis area….

The Owen-Kennedy folks use the venerable OmniTracs product from my friends at Qualcomm. Although the design is dated and the system is expensive the OmniTRACS is what old time bush pilots called “hell for stout” … they just keep working and producing profit for their users and enhancing safety for their equipped drivers … and everyone that driver can see and assist.

Friends of mine from a small company here in the Springs, Insite Technologies have been working a pilot program for the American Red Cross using a system similar to OmniTRACS but updated and streamlined for today’s market. When the storm hit they packed up some spare truck units, demonstration equipment and some loaners from the manufacturer, EMS Technologies . More than 20 units were installed under field conditions and the Red Cross immediately put the, to work tracking vital post-Katrina relief supplies and personnel.

Then came Rita. Several times Red Cross vehicles were the only source of communicating for a number of towns in the storm’s path. Many folks just don’t know how devastating the loss of communication in a major storm can be. Naturally, you can forget about wired terrestrial phones … they stop working for days or weeks until cables and microwave kinks are repaired. The cellular phone system, voice and data actually is just an overlay to the wired phone system and is built even less robustly, so it’s either out of service, or in the rare case that a cell site is working, it’s overloaded immediately. Even voice satellite phones suffer from extreme weather conditions and often fail to connect in the worst weather. The only reliably means of getting through is a system that uses satellites to send and receive the data and that operates at a frequency which is not severely affected by weather … here’s one example, the MSAT system which orbits continuously in the southern sky over the US. No weather or terrorists events on earth can affect these birds.

If you need to talk about these kind of systems or want to learn more about communications that just won’t stop, just give me a shout.

Now here’s a pretty thoughtful and intelligent use for vehicle GPS tracking. One of those, “Wow, why didn’t I think of that” ideas:
http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/shownews.cfm?num=375

Basically, an insurance company is going to charge for auto insurance by use. Makes sense when you stop to think about it. If a driver happens to use his vehicle very little, he or she pays an extraordinarily high cost per mile driven for insurance. If our example is is very high mileage driver, he or she is getting a bargain per mile and the insurance company is far more exposed.

Stick an unobtrusive tracker on the vehicle and the insurer can charge exactly the amount that is fair to both customer and client. They don’t mention it in the press release, but th opportunity for performance monitoring is certainly there … detecting excessive speed and other high risk behaviors.

Too much like big brother? For some, perhaps, but the alternative is everyone paying too much (to cover unknown eventualities) for a service which ought to be easily measurable and billable.

Oh, an yes, perhaps save a few lives too.

Well, here we go again with more drivers who are used to running amok and acting like they have a license to steal from management whining, complaining and protesting about a system that actually could help them stay safer and earn more money. read the Newsday article here:
http://tinyurl.com/comb9

Basically the New York Taxi Commission, sick of the complaints from drivers “taking the long way ’round”, congregating in parts of the city so there are no cabs in others and in general being the but of jokes and war stories world-wide has decided to discuss having new cabs equipped with GPS.

The drivers, somewhat understandably, don’t want to hear about it, because they have been left to run their cabs any which way they want to since the days the cabs were horse drawn.

Not only would modern technology eliminate arguments of abuse … thereby protecting the driver for false accusations just as much as protecting the traveling public from rip offs, but it’s a proven fact that GPS-dispatched cabs have a higher load factor .. and drivers only make money when the flag is down and they are carrying fares.

The costs quoted in the article are absolutely bogus .. it’s disappointing to me that every reporter in the 20 or 30 repetitions of this article has just repeated them as if they were fact … a decent system, per cab could be had for $5 or $600 with costs for dispatch, control and safety messages on the order of a dollar per shift. Sometimes I wonder if the 21st century will ever get here.