Taxi drivers told to turn on their GPS Tracking systems
Only 55 percent of taxis with the Bermuda Taxi Association are using GPS systems during peak Airport times.
The Transport Control Department reviewed taxi data, provided by BTA, in order to address recent concerns about service to the Airport.
The data revealed that of the 334 subscribers to the BTA GPS system only 183 taxis were using it. Rest of news article here:
This isn’t exactly earthshaking news to me. Months ago I wrote about the Bermuda Transport Control Department requiring all Bermuda taxis to install a standard GPS tracking and control system. Of course there was driver reluctance. Now, more than 330 systems are installed and in peak traffic times, nearly half of them aren’t in use.
n it on and off is a system not worth installing. You want a system to be able to record the exceptions to the rule as your drivers go about your business (or their business). If you give them the opportunity to turn the system “off”, do you really think the “bad apples” are going to let you see how far they are from the tree? Allowing systems to work only part time have another big disadvantage … you lose important historical and trend data. Do you perchance keep track of mileage for income tax purposes? Each mile not recorded is 40 plus cents off your deductions total. Not wise.
I had some real world experience on this with a large system I helped install for the USAF. For a number of reasons, some technical, some operational and some out and out sabotage, at one headquarters installation it turned out more than 50% of the systems were going a month or more without sending out a single byte of data. The customer was surely saving money on data transmission over the satellite, but he surely wasn’t getting much information to manage his vehicles and drivers. The only thing the system vendor seemed to be concerned with was the cost of the data transmissions, so he really seemed a bit perturbed when I showed him more than half the units weren’t working.
Lesson one is, don’t be so concerned about cost that you fail to gather data. Lesson two is, don’t be so concerned about privacy that you fail to track what’s needed. And lesson three is, educate the drivers … a comment made in the news article caught my eye … perhaps some of the taxis were engaged in charter trips rather than metered service. Well, a prime benefit of having a GPS tracking system in the first place is driver location when he or she get’s hijacked or forced off their normal route. Is there some reason to think that a private charter customer is any less likely to be a bad guy than a fare picked up off a cab rank? I don’t think so, and I think that properly trained, taxi drivers wouldn’t think so either.