GPS Tracking ROI

Stolen GPS leads authorities to its thieves

BY BRANDON BAIN
Newsday Staff Writer

Three Lindenhurst residents found out the hard way that it’s not a good idea to steal global positioning system devices from the Town of Babylon.
Within hours of the theft, police used the devices’ technology to track the thieves back to their homes and arrest them.

Babylon officials said they noticed Tuesday morning that 14 GPS devices had been stolen the night before from vehicles in the Department of Public Works storage yard on Sunrise Highway in Lindenhurst.
The town tapped its GPS system, which uses satellite technology to pinpoint a vehicle’s location. The system showed one of the devices was inside a house at 234 Heathcote Rd. When police arrived Tuesday evening at the residence, they said Kurt Husfeldt, 46, was holding the device…. Referenced Article Here:

One of the many witticisms Yogi Berra never said is, “It’s deja vu all over again.” I featured the town of Babylon, Long Island back in March of last year. They were taking proactive action to improve their worker’s safety and efficiency and provide better service to their customers .. the citizens of Babylon. Never figured on this re-visit, though.

OK a 13-year old kid maybe wasn’t savvy enough to realize these things were in the city trucks for a reason. At 13 one is already well old enough to know that stealing’s wrong, but kids make mistakes. He brings the loot home to his dad … Ota figure something really weird is going on there.

Daddy, pillar of virtue and good citizen that he is doesn’t call the cops, make a deal to keep his son out of jail or do anything that could be considered the ‘right thing’. He takes the stolen phone and makes calls on it. Bill Engvall (Google is your friend, people) could say it better than me … “If he’d been wearing his sign, I could have stopped him”

I think, like Bill, that stupid people ought to wear a sign … but as we’ve seen in the past couple days, GPS can even help whittle down that population.

Government admits struggle to sell road pricing scheme

Hélène Mulholland and agencies
Wednesday January 10, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Traffic in London. Photograph: the Guardian.

Downing Street today acknowledged that ministers faced a struggle to win public support for road pricing.

A petition posted on the No 10 website protesting against the proposals has already notched up over 160,000 signatures.

The prime minister’s official spokesman accepted that the idea of charging motorists for every mile they drive has aroused strong feelings.

However, he stressed that action was essential to prevent congestion getting out of control.

The scheme, currently being piloted in a number of areas, uses satellite-tracking technology to charge motorists for using certain roads. Prices vary depending on the location and the time of day…. Full Guardian article here:

A lot of stories are landing in the in-box lately about PAYD (Pay As You Drive) schemes.  I’ve been covering the subject often,here, here, here and here for just a few reports.  What we need to do here is separate the idea of PAYD from the somewhat ill-thought out technical solutions being proposed by officials ignorant of technology and some vendors who seem eager to sell a solution, even if it’s wrong.

In the world of formal, government communications and information technology programs usually follow the requirement/tech solution/implementation road map.  One doesn’t (if they are smart) implement  a tech solution before they have the requirement defined.  Many ill-fated programs have the root cause of their failure laid at the step of the customer who started out by telling IT the solution he wanted … instead of letting the right folks devise the proper solution.

The Requirement:

Reduce traffic on key roads so that overall traffic flow avoids gridlock whenever possible.  To me, that’s all that should be stated.  To decide to charge people more for certain roads is a potential solution, it’s not at all the requirement.  Aside from improving traffic slow I see no reason at all for the government denying the free and convenient use of the roads the citizens paid for, do you?

Some Possible Tech Solutions:

• Raise fuel taxes.  Simple, isn’t it?  But here’s the advantages:  First of all it’s a taxation already imposed and the infrastructure to collect it is already in place.  It’s totally democratic … the more you drive the more you pay, the bigger your car the more you pay, etc.  Will it induce anyone to take alternate routes?  Not likely but if you reduce the overall flow of traffic both desirable and less desirable roads will be able to continue serving the public.  As fortuitous fallout from this solution you’ll cut overall driving, oil consumption, road injuries and the emission of green house gasses.  Pretty much an all positive idea.
• Charge By Specific Roads: There is already a well established way to both finance highways and control access.  It’s called a toll road.  Either by means of conventional toll barrier schemes or the much easier and cheaper idea of billing cars upon entry and exit with simple ALPR Automatic License Plate recognition devices.  See here, for example. This idea requires more infrastructure but has the advantage of being easily applied to specific areas and those areas can be expanded, moved or done away with a population density and traffic issues change.
• GPS Track All Cars:  friends, I’m Mr. GPS. (Tim Says So) I love the technology, have made my living with it for years and am a firm believer that the uses of GPS have only begun to be tapped.  But just like I wouldn’t advise a 16 pound sledge hammer to swat a fly, I would not advise using GPS tracking for this project.  There is no ROI.  The infrastructure costs would be significant.  keeping all the units in hundreds of thousands of cars working would be a maintenance nightmare, and there are huge, real privacy concerns.  How has the data, who can view the data, how long is the data kept … the list goes on and on.  But by far the worst aspect of trying to select the GPS tracking tool for the wrong application is this … the data itself.  You can buy ten or a hundred or even a thousand GPS trackers to keep tabs on specific vehicles and see tremendous advantages.  But the sheer volume of information a scheme like this would collect is gigantic.  The data processing of reviewing all the tracking information, correlating it with location, time of day, etc. is an immense task and it grows exponentially as the number of cars and the number of miles increases.  Very ill advised.

There’s a lot of old sayings that could apply, the one most appropriate might be, “when your only tool is a hammer, it’s hard not to see the world as a nail.”  GPS is the wrong tool for this idea and pursuing this course is a huge, huge mistake.

….. Empire’s Atlanta-based warehouse is its largest, with as many as 40 trucks making up to 700 stops per day to support the needs of 6,000 customers. In monitoring delivery operations at this location, Empire very quickly realized that it required real-time visibility into activities on the road to continue providing optimum levels of service. “If a driver was held up in the morning at the first stop for an hour, we had no way of knowing if we were going to miss time windows ahead,” says Dyrc McLeod, director of operations for Empire Distributors. “We couldn’t collect information on exceptions as they happened. Instead, drivers would provide us with an update either later in the day or at the end of their shift. If our drivers decided to park for a couple of hours, we also had no way of knowing it.” …  Another benefit is improved accountability. “Now that we have access to more information on the road, I can set delivery standards in terms of per-hour service time and enforce driver accountability,” he explains. “If a driver falls below the standard we can work on the problem, determine the issue and provide training if necessary.”… “With Cube Route, I can now compare the profitability of each route,” he continues. “I can find more profitable ways to manage smaller orders. The best part is that everything we are doing is invisible to the customer. All they’re seeing is better service.” Full Article Here:

Let’s see now … improved route scheduling, better driver performance, decreased fuel cost, decreased labor cost and … oh yes, perhaps a little bit important in today’s world … increased customer satisfaction.

Now tell me again what it is you can’t afford?  I haven’t sold or serviced this Cube Route solution (see:www.cuberoute.com ) but I really like what I see there.  Unlike so many GPS sellers who seem to be fascinated with the technology, Cube Route basically uses any tracking technology, including GPS cell phones and focused on the business aspects.

If you don’t know where your trucks are, you can’t tell if your business is booming, turning in mediocre performance or crashing and burning.

If you don’t know when your drivers start work, how long their breaks are or when they quit, how can you possibly sign the payroll checks with confidence that you are discharging your managerial responsibilities properly.

If you think two-way radio or the silly little “push to talk” features that make cell phones imitate a radio then boy do I have some stories to tell you about how unreliable a way that is to tell who is where and when.

If you think customers will be happy with an answer like,” I’ll call the driver and tell him to hurry, I think he’s nearly at your place now.” then you don’t know much about customer service and how easy it is for customers to go find another vendor

If you think that a call center to keep customer sup to date is a good (or cheap) solution, think again, even if your CSR’s do speak English.

In short, if you are in logistics you need a logistics management system and if you think you can’t afford it, you better think again … in today’s world you can’t afford not to.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

GPS bracelet puts teen at the scene of the crime

Tampa, Florida - A Hillsborough County teen may have a hard time denying he was one of three people who broke into a house in Valrico. Deputies say his GPS tracking bracelet puts him at the scene of the crime.

Anthony Hunter, 17, David Harrell, 19, and Curtis Walsh, 22, all face numerous charges related to a break-in last week.

Deputies say a neighbor saw the men breaking into the Springville Drive home and called deputies.

Investigators say the suspects first crashed their getaway car and then took off running.

Deputies finally rounded up  the suspects and noticed Hunter was wearing a GPS tracking monitor.

They say a check of the system proved Hunter was one of the burglars. Source:

Featured today is one Anthony Hunter.  A nice young lad of 17, although apparently not all that nice because he was required by authorities to wear a GPS tracking bracelet.  Well, lot’s of teens get in trouble at that age point, and a brush with the law often gives the opportunity to get their head on straight and clean up their act.

Anthony, however, has a head a little harder than most.  Knowing he had the bracelet on and was already a subject of law enforcement interest, Anthony decides to “hang out” with a couple other clever young men, where, perhaps because Hillsborough County didn’t provide him enough recreation activities, or a teacher looked at him crosswise in the 6th grade or his mom didn’t love him enough … got to be someone else’s fault, not Anthony’s … he heads off with his role-model buddies to burglarize a house.

Notice it didn’t mealy-mouth that statement and say “allegedly” burglarized the house?  Why?  Because the dumb-ass was still wearing his GPS bracelet which clearly showed he was at the scene on the date and time of the burglary.

Way to go, Anthony.  And way to go Hillsborough County, when you invested in the GPS program I bet you didn’t know it would catch criminals quite that effectively.  GPS tracking doesn’t cost, it pays.

ABC 7 Medical: GPS Heart Surgery

- Monday January 15, 2007 4:43 pm

-WJLA Script-
Anchor:
TONIGHT, THE SAME GPS TECHNOLOGY USED AS A NAVIGATIONAL SYSTEM IN YOUR CAR IS NOW HELPING DOCTORS REPAIR THE HEART.
MEDICAL REPORTER KATHY FOWLER JOINS US WITH THIS STORY.
Kathy Fowler on-set:
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE LIVING WITH HEART ARRYHYTHMIAS, AN IRREGULAR HEART BEAT.
NOW DOCTORS HAVE COME UP WITH A NOVEL NEW TREATMENT.
THEY USE GPS AND ROBOTIC TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THE TREATMENT BOTH FASTER AND MORE ACCURATE.
Story: you can watch the video of this news item here:

A better title for this post might be, “Things Aren’t Always What They Seem” but then that wouldn’t be near as sensational as WJLA’s sensationalism of heart repair surgery.  TV is a business and to succeed in business sometime you have to show a little leg.

At least WJLA doesn’t have to sink to the level of one of it’s big competitors to attract viewers, but although medical reporter Kathy Fowler reinforces the point that it’s completely possible to be an attractive, competent representative of the press while not visually showing any leg, her “softball” report is so rife with misstatements and phony conclusions that she might as well have emulated the famous Couric poses.

GPS as used in car navigation and vehicle tracking does not have anything near the precision of resolution required for robotic heart surgery.  There are high precision examples of GPS in dally use, such as systems used by surveyors that can measure down to the centimeter and scientific research programs that get into the millimeter ranges.  But they bear about as much similarity to your Garmin dash-mount as a hot dog does to a warm puppy.

What I do think WJLA is trying to say, in their typical US talk down to the viewer manner is that the robotic surgical device is guided by a multilateration process. 

Multilateration, also known as hyperbolic positioning, is the process of locating an object by accurately computing the time difference of arrival (TDOA) of a signal emitted from the object to three or more receivers. It also refers to the case of locating a receiver by measuring the TDOA of a signal transmitted from three or more synchronized transmitters… More multilateration from Wikipedia here:

The process does, in fairness have a similarity to the basic GPS algorithm, where a receiver is located by measuring the TDOA from a number of transmitting satellites … but then it also has a relationship to police Doppler speed guns, cell phone receiver tracking and bats emitting hypersonic sounds to judge their distance in the dark.

The perfecting of the technique to the point it can be used on a live patient is indeed newsworthy and I’m happy to see it added to the treatment repertoire of medical professionals, but I really feel making the tenuous tie to GPS is a bit much.

But then again, since the site I glommed Couric’s image from … www.tunc.biz gets over 300,000 search hits per day on “Katie Couric’s Legs”, who am I to argue with “showing a little leg”.

CABBIE ISMAIL Ibrahim has no problem with the idea of using the global-positioning devices and credit-card swipers that will be required technology in all city taxis by the end of the year.

The reality, however, is costing him money.

He’d been using the GPS for about a week when I talked with him. And let’s just say he has some complaints.

“The meter went blank on my way to Conshohocken,” says Ibrahim, who owns his cab, rents the required medallion and takes ride requests over a radio system run by All City Taxi.

“I tried to round off the fare. But the people thought I was trying to rip them off.”

When the GPS goes off, he said, the meter goes off. This also happened to Ibrahim a few days ago, when he logged onto the system at the beginning of a shift and got a message saying the system was temporarily unavailable.

So he tried offering flat rates to the customers who flagged him down, but they accused him of trying to rig the ride.

Frustrated, he called it a day - and lost a day’s fares.

“Riders don’t trust you,” he says. “If the system is down, they think you did it.”

Ibrahim seems like a straight-up guy, but I confess: I’d figure he was lying, too.

Riding cabs in this city has been a crapshoot for so long, a fed-up public won’t give a decent cabbie the benefit of the doubt, even when he deserves it…. Read Full Article Here:

Recently I asked my friend Ron Blount from Philadelphia how the forced installation of GPS tracking on Philly cabs was progressing. Ron’s report wasn’t good. Instead of being a tool to help the drivers earn and a boon to the customer it seems that Philly’s GPS implementation is still fraught with many problems, most of which are the fault of inept management. Some, however, now that the system has had field evaluation, reflect a a basic incompetence with the proper design of a GPS tracking system … especially if one wants to use GPS to gain a rapid ROI … and if you don’t want an ROI, why on Earth would you use GPS? Previous posts are here, and here and here:

GPS Tracking Management Issues:

• First and foremost, when thinking of a GPS system (or anything else that directly affects your worker’s pocketbooks) you must involve the workers in the decision-making process from the beginning. In Philadelphia’s case, most of the taxi drivers are independent businessmen … it’s un-American to impose a city agency’s will in this manner, as well as downright dumb business.
• Secondly, the folks who specify and procure the system must be above reproach. To allow a city employee to select the contractor and then jump ship to work for that contractor on the system he selected … sad.
• Third, just because you are a city agency had you have power doesn’t mean that using that power to impose your will is the best way to get things done. Just as a vendors “sells” a system to a client, GPS tracking can easily be sold to drivers if one focuses on the true benefits.

GPS Technical Issues:

• Number one issue is, there must be a back-up plan. Any system devised by man can fail, what differentiates good managers from the ranks of the also-rans is how the system “rides through” outages. If a system computes fares … which are the living of the drivers, the business income of the cab owners and the discretionary expenditures of the passengers, to have no plan to charge agreed upon rates during a GPS outage is inexcusable.
• Number two: GPS tracking is many things but one of the things it is not is an accurate odometer. I’ve written about that issue before in some detail here. Fair trading practices are legislated in every state and if I were a Philadelphia I would take this issue and run with it to Harrisburg. The Parking Authority may have a strangle hold on Philadelphia the may mayor Rizzo used to, but he’s long dead and so is any excuse for cheating the public … or the drivers.
• My last point ties in with the second. GPS also does not do well in the heart of a city … read about the “Urban Canyon Effect“. A properly designed system will have a`secondary, short-term means of navigation, such as a digital odometer and a heading sensor that can navigate (and measure) the cab’s progress during periods of bad GPS reception, system outages and act as a check on overall mileage to make sure the customer or the driver is not being cheated.

Frankly, I’m appalled at the way Philadelphia has mismanaged this system and how poorly the city government is serving its citizens (both taxi drivers and taxi riders typically fall in that group). If you ride taxis in Philly, if you ever plan to, or if you just hate to see bad government in action, here’s the folks to have a word with:

Philadelphia Parking Authority: 3101 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, Linda J. Miller 215-683-9675

Philadelphia Mayor’s Action Center: City Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19107, (215) 686-3000, Renee.R.Grundy@phila.gov

… Whether the cuts will affect public services remains to be seen.  (my emphasis)

By the end of yesterday, the city had cut 500 vehicles from its fleet of about 2,700, or almost 19 percent. Ultimately, Mayor L. Douglas Wilder wants to reduce the fleet size by 25 percent, but further cuts won’t come easy, city officials acknowledged…. Read the full, sad story here:

A city cuts nearly 25% of its municipal vehicles and they don’t really know if public services will be affected?  Am I the only goofy guy on the face of the planet who is both mystified and pissed when he sees such blatant evidence of mismanagement?

Elected officials get elected to serve the citizens.  Appointed managers, auditors and other workers are in their roles to serve as well, and to effectively support the elected officials.  Its impossible to run a city the city of Richmond without a fleet of vehicles.  Given that the city is of significant size it’s a safe, empirical guess that the fleet of vehicles must be of an significant size also.  But to miss the mark by 25%?  or more accurately to not know by how much you missed the mark? Sad, folks, sad indeed.

You know “dunce” is a word that came from a great 14th century scholar and educator, John Duns Scotis.  After setting the pace in education for some 200 years or so the advocates of Scotis’ methods began to staunchly oppose reforms and advances in education.  The name became a term of abuse, a synonym for one incapable of scholarship.

Now I don’t mean to say that these leaders and management folks in Norfolk are really dunce’s, but I do think they are pretty darn ignorant in that they won’t use cheap, effective readily available tools to manage.

I’ve seen this time and time again in public service fleets … for years now.  The people in charge of managing the fleet are not really managing … because they are not measuring the actual performance and they do not know what the vehicles are being used for.  Writing justifications for purchasing/keeping a vehicle proves only the skill of the justification writer.  keeping track of vehicle mileage to show fleet use is no smarter … I can write a whole blog post on how drivers run up miles … maybe I well.

Numbers of vehicles alone and mileage alone to not tell the manager what she needs to know.  But cheap (pays for itself in the first year) GPS tracking would give the mangers the real data on where the vehicles were used, how much and by whom … all the data they need to make the decisions they are getting paid to.  You can’t manage what you can’t measure … it’s been proven time and time again … today in Richmond, tomorrow in your city?