School Distict Selects GPS Tracking for Safety and Savings
Filed under: GPS Case Studies, GPS Successes, Uncategorized
Unaware the bus had an assignment that day, he called the dispatcher who claimed the vehicle was in the bus parking lot. As it turns out, a substitute driver mistakenly had taken the wrong bus on a field trip and AWARE was able to pinpoint its exact location….
Well it isn’t as if GPS tracking for school busses was new, but the acceptance has really been poor, considering the broad base of school districts and private contractors who carry students across the world. Of course, especially here in the US, the reason there are so many entities engaged in this service, often wastefully passing each other as they go about their routs is a story for another day.
As a private entrepreneur I have approached many school districts with the idea of GPS tracking their busses, always to little or no interest. In spite of offers to prove savings upon their own fleets there is no one literally interested enough is school bus safety to actually take a free trial evaluation offer. It’s much easier in a public service job to sit back in the swivel chair and whine about not having enough money. Of course the fact that the GPS could actually afford a net savings … meaning more money in the district’s coffers seems to fall on deaf ears. There’s an old business saying that you have to spend money to make money. I would submit that a paraphrase is also true; you have to expend a little effort to make money also.
Now that Cummins, one of the leading purveyors of engines and Bluebird, perhaps the biggest US school bus manufacturers are now including GPS systems as an option will help sway the market.
I included a paragraph above illustrating one of the most denied aspects of GPS tracking. There may or may not be wrong-doing involved with vehicles not being where they are supposed to be, but the truth of the matter is, vehicle managers in the pupil transportation industry (as well in every other industry and government industry I have performed demonstrations for) simply do not know where their vehicles are.
It does not matter if the unknown trips and locations are benign or malicious, it takes a manager to decide … you can’t yet program some kind of “expert system” to make these sorts of decisions, and the best manager in the world can not make correct decisions if the assets managed are not measured.
Investigate the optional systems from the big manufacturers, investigate third-party systems, but whatever you do, do something!
Our children’s safety is of prime importance and. as a side benefit, while protecting the children, you’ll definitely improve your bottom line.
We Ain’t Perfect — But We Try
One of my two regular readers (joke, naman) may have noticed a prolonged outage yesterday … we were down at lease 9 hours. As with many smaller web operations, this blog and many of my other business interests are hosted on a reseller account, sold to me by these guys:
http://www.qualityhostonline.com/
They, of course are just additional customers up the chain of hierarchy in a big data center in New Jersey. The big Data Center in the sky doesn’t want to offer any explanation of their difficulties … maybe they don’t know. But my “little guy” host with the big service attitude has already emailed me to assure me we are moving, seamlessly, to a new server to help insure this won’t happen again. This is service above and beyond the call, I feel. If there are any other outages in the next three days or so, please bear with us, we’re working to make things better.
If you need a host, you should take a look at these folks … they’re good and they actually care about their users.
http://www.qualityhostonline.com/
Mobile Office Technology, Including a Healthy Dose of GPS
If you’re using technology for your mobile work force, or thinking about implementing or upgrading, you should certainly look into these roadshows:
My prime supplier, GeoTab is one of the featured partners. 
Nobody likes paying the prices we do for gas, but you can turn the tables on your competition if you play your cards right. A year or two ago you could save a hundred or two per month per vehicle … now it’s easy to save more … you’ll be saving, they won’t … something like power play in hockey, isn’t it?
This Weekend’s GPS Tracking Eye Candy 1
Here’s the last day of a little road trip we took end of last week. Pretty country out there on the western slope.
When It’s dangerous Not To “Get” Footy and How GPS and Friends Can Help
A day or so ago, here, I published a post about an Australian footballer being forced to ware a GPS tracker by his team. In my American-weighted ignorance I got almost the whole story wrong (the only part I got right was that I’m exasperated by over-paid athletes who argue with the managers and teams who pay them to play).
Australian Rules Football, or just plain “footy” to most Australians is a game combining a lot of the aspects of the soccer kind of football with a few of the aspects of the Amaer4icna style of football … ever notice that the world has too darn many games called football?. We also have a plurality of AFL’s …The American Football League and the Australian Football League… but being separated by 9 or 10 thousand miles and half a year the games themselves seldom conflict;-), An aspect of the American game that is certainly _not_ shared by the Australian Rules game is having the athletes spend the majority of their time sitting on the bench. The playing field in Australian football is often four times the area of an American gridiron, there are more players, and they move around one heck of a lot more.
As an advantage in coaching and training, and as a measure of a player’s performance and effort level, many AFL teams have adopted the practice of putting GPS units on their players. The GPS tracks during the game can then be very accurately played back and studied. The players and coaches know who ran the fastest and the farthest and if a man is, for example, consistently going to the wrong area of the field, he and the coach can see the difficulty and make corrections in future play. There’s some real science already taking place using this technology, here’s one example: and some more info here:
My apologies for getting off track. As usual, if you own right up to a mistake and find out where you went wrong you typically learn a lot more. The credit for finding the mistake and getting me on the right track goes to my online friend and fellow blogger Brendon Sinclair. Brendon (literally) wrote the book on running a web design business and he runs a very active marketing and ecommerce firm on Australia’s Gold Coast. He’s also a marathon runner, registered nurse and, it turns out, knows a thing or three about GPS too. Thanks, Brendon.
Save 25% on Car Insurance With GPS? Canadians Can
Filed under: GPS Successes, GPS and PAYD, GPS for Business, Uncategorized
ICBC eyeing black boxes to track driving habits
By Jeff Nagel
Black Press
Jul 12 2006
ICBC is planning to install black box recorders to monitor the driving habits of 400 volunteer motorists.
But the auto insurance corporation says it’s doing so simply to keep pace with advancements in the insurance field – not as part of any plan to make widespread use of vehicle data recorders.
“That’s way down the road for us,” said ICBC spokesman Doug McClelland. “We figured we’d better get some experience working with this.”
Some private auto insurance firms in Canada are already using the devices, offering customers discounts on their insurance premiums in exchange for plugging in the black boxes to record how safely they drive.
Aviva Canada is offering Ontario drivers discounts of five to 25 per cent to participate… Rest of Article here:
For us south of the border folks the first thing that probably comes to mind if, who the heck is ICBC? The answer is, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. If you take the time to read the whole article you’ll see that a number of Canadian insurance companies are already using GPS tracking to voluntarily give savings to policy holders. Here in the US, I’m sorry to have to say this, but insurance companies just seem to revel in claims. The more accidents the more they can charge and the more they charge the more they make, so what’s for lunch.
This is far from the first time I’ve seen Canadian firms leading the way in the intelligent merger of technology and commerce. Why shouldn’t those who drive more cautiously and practice safe driving habits get a better insurance rate? For those of you who are worried about being spotted spending hours at the bar or visiting your girlfriend while you tell your wife you’re working late, well go ahead and voice your privacy moans. Myself? I’d prefer to save 25%.
GPS Tracking Your Wedding Engagement
Filed under: GPS Agriculture, GPS Successes, GPS Tutorials, Uncategorized
LUXEMBURG, Wisconsin (AP) — Stacy Martin needed a bird’s eye view to see her boyfriend’s marriage proposal.Brian Rueckl’s proposal came as a 40,000-square-foot message, “Stacy will you marry me?” tilled in a cornfield near the Manitowoc and Kewaunee county line.“At first I was in shock and forgot to say, ‘yes,”‘ Martin said.Rueckl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency, persuaded Martin to take an airplane ride with him Monday to take pictures of the land.The proposal came after a year of planning and 40 hours of work. Rueckl, 23, tilled the message, which included two intersecting hearts, on a farm owned by his boss. Full article here:
