GPS Tracking ROI

I always try to provide some (useful?) “Eye Candy for the weekend and here’s a most interesting site:

Travel time maps (no, not time travel maps ;-)) are often used in the US for sophisticated business purposes such as trying to decide where to position the 17^th Wal*Mart (why do all their signs say “Wal*Mart” but all their written communications spell it “Wal-Mart”???) eyesore (oops, I mean “store”, they have very high-priced attorneys) in your town.  These efforts normally fall under the heading of GIS – (Geographic Information Systems)

I have worked in and on the fringes of the GIS industry for a number of years and I haven’t yet seen any commercial efforts that approach the detail and usefulness of these research efforts.  In particular I think a lot of cities who spend every dollar they can find on highway widening or light rail efforts ought to look more closely at this technology.  In many cases the money might be better spent in different locations.  And no matter where the money gets spent, maps like this could be very useful to commuters, real estate investors and business owners.  Recommended

Students use GPS to identify noxious weeds

By ALANA LISTOE - IR Staff Writer - 05/26/06

Students from Helena Middle School spent Thursday using technology to locate noxious weeds at the Lewis and Clark Fairgrounds.

“They constrict other plant’s growth,” said Anna Metropoulos, an HMS seventh-grader. “They take over and don’t let the other plants get nutrients.”

The 57 seventh-graders broke into seven groups, each equipped with a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) device. In a line formation the students walked along the grounds, marking the points to identify where noxious weeds are located. They input longitude and latitude specifications and also noted density information of each weed.

Students have spent the entire year working in the school lab identifying weeds and becoming acquainted with the GPS technology…. Full Article Here:

Here’s a cute little “good news” article with more behind it than meets the eye. I know, going in, that about 98% of Americans who glance at the headline will think, “How boring, who cares about weeds”? Well I can’t make anyone care, nor should I be able to, but perhaps you might just wish to read on a little further and see why I think it has some importance.

Despite America’s current penchant for ‘something from nothing’ … are you listening, Mr. Lay? , true wealth only comes from manufacturing something. At the basis of everything is food … absent food we can’t exist. When the US was young, we became rich because any poor man could come here, get free land and manufacture food. A hundred years ago a majority of the US population were farmers or in other trades directly connected with the production of food.

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No trace yet of missing Ingles truck driver

From air and by road, the search hits 3-day mark

by Jordan Schrader, jschrade@CITIZEN-TIMES.com

published May 25, 2006 12:15 am

BLACK MOUNTAIN – They flew helicopters over highways, watched footage from truck stop video cameras, checked cell phone and credit card records and asked questions at hospitals and a flea market.

But authorities and Ingles Markets employees found no sign of Richard Fox or Truck 906 as a third day passed since the truck driver’s disappearance.

“We’re very concerned,” said Ronnie Burns, director of distribution at the grocery chain’s warehouse in Black Mountain. “We’re running out of options that we can come up with.” … Rest of Lame Excuse Here:

Yesterday was a slow news day for my blogging. Didn’t take long for things to open up today, though. Now I much prefer to write about success stories and companies saving money with GPS, but every so often I just have to keep alive the thought that GPS provides safety along with its savings.

Here we have a 67yo man with a stable lifestyle and stable family situation gone missing along with his truck and $30,000 worth of cargo. The cargo was mundane grocery items, not DVD players or cigarettes, so the thought that he was hijacked for his cargo doesn’t pop out at first.

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Road pricing: Your bill is on its way

By James Ruppert

23 May 2006

Pay as you drive has become the Department of Transport’s new big idea. The new Transport Secretary, Douglas Alexander, has promised more cash will be available for congestion charging schemes as he pledged to get road pricing to work. He promised to make £200m available from 2008 to help councils with a view to setting up a pilot charging scheme within five years. This would be followed by a national scheme.

The anticipated scheme would use the Global Positioning System to fix the precise location of all vehicles, with cost anticipated to range from 2p a mile for rural stretches of road up to £1.30 for the busiest. Such a scheme could replace fuel and road tax. In 2004 the Department for Transport published a feasibility study on road pricing, claiming it would be “revenue-neutral”, which means that the overall level of motor taxation will remain the same. Now that’s good news isn’t it?.. Read James’ Full report, it’s interesting:

Now I slugged this post as the “Dirty Little Secret” and James has come across it right away in his report. The car’s odometer says he drove 111 km and the commercial GPS tracking system claims he drove only 98.5 km. There’s about a 12% variance … in just two partial days of driving. I don’t know about you, but if the government put ammeter on my vehicle and wanted to charge me more than a pound per kilometer … dollars per mile … someone better know which device is accurate … the odometer or the GPS tracker. Even though I am many miles away from Belfast and haven’t had the opportunity to test either the odometer or the GPS unit I can give you an expert opinion as to which one is reporting the accurate mileage. Neither one. This is a significant problem that no one seems to be working on a solution for, in spite of scheme after scheme being introduced to put PAYD — Pay As You Drive – in place. (more…)

Industry-leading traffic information company Inrix Inc. today unveiled the Inrix Dust Network, the first nationwide traffic service to go beyond the limitations of road sensors and provide accurate real-time and predictive traffic speed and flow information for major freeways, highways, arterials and side streets in every major metropolitan area in the U.S.

The Inrix Dust Network represents a traffic technology breakthrough that dramatically improves the accuracy, quality and coverage of traffic information and provides businesses, government agencies and consumers with the information they need to avoid gridlock, and save time and money. It works by combining anonymous, real-time GPS probe data from more than 500,000 commercial fleet, delivery and taxi vehicles across the U.S. with other real-time traffic flow information and hundreds of market-specific criteria that affect traffic — such as construction and road closures, real-time incidents, sporting events, weather forecasts and school schedules, greatly expanding traffic coverage and improving accuracy well beyond any other traffic service on the market today… Rest of Article Here:

OK, so these guys must be reading my blog, don’t you think? I’ve mentioned this before, as recently as here, instead of judging the flow of traffic by means of expensive, hard to maintain sensors that have to be pre-installed along roads, why not capture the information from the thousands and thousands of GPS tracking systems which are already out there on the nations busiest roads.

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SPRINGFIELD, ILL.

State officials say Illinois can’t afford a new high-tech system that legislators approved this year to track paroled sex offenders. But a Republican sponsor of the legislation says the real problem is that the state’s purse strings are controlled by Democrats, who don’t want to give credit for the idea to the opposing party in an election year.

“The rationale I was given was that the state couldn’t afford it, even though we found $1.4 billion in new spending this year,” said Rep. Jim Watson, R-Jacksonville, the sponsor. “What it comes down to is that it just wasn’t a priority.”

Under Watson’s bill, Illinois’ most dangerous paroled sexual predators would have been tracked 24 hours a day with ankle bracelets that use Global Positioning System, or GPS. The bill passed the Legislature earlier this year, and had the support of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a spokeswoman said in February…. Full Article Here:

Time and time again now we’ve gone over the benefits of GPS Tracking of many types of criminal offenders. The “buzz” these days is all about sexual offenders but it doesn’t matter if someone is convicted of molesting a child or robbing a TV out of a third-story window, the advantages to both the state, the public at large and the offender are large indeed. There’s approximately a 10 to 1 savings for the state for every offender who is “imprisoned” by GPS monitoring in lieu of being actually imprisoned in a state penal facility. This alone ought to wake up sleepy lawmakers who want to have dollars available for boondoggles other than the prisons.

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BOSTON — A local company is giving away free software that will turn your laptop into a GPS device. Based on your computer’s location, it will instantly locate where you are on a map and show what is in the area.

Just go to Loki.com to download the service. It’s free, but you’ll need Internet access and a laptop that is Wi-Fi equipped. The software uses wireless signals from millions of locations to tell you were you are. It will show you what restaurants, gas stations and other services that are in the area.

So, if you are out of town, but have a craving for sushi, Loki will pinpoint your location and find the closest restaurant. It will even plot the address on a map and give you driving directions.

The company plans to launch the service for cell phones and PDAs. Link Here:

Here we go again with America’s penchant for media outlets that serve up disinformation and nonsense. WCVB and Senior News Editor Jamy Pombo ought to know better that make stories out of nonsense. Especially in a Boston-based major news outlet … located inside the Route 128 Corridor in one of America’s prime technological centers. Perhaps WCVB doesn’t know how much past and current work of building and improv9ng the GPS comes out of the Air Force Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Field, practically in visual range of WCVB’s transmitters. Boston has played a key role n developing and fielding the GPS … Loki ahs had no connection with it at all. The acronym GPS does not even appear on Loki’s web site.

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