GPS Tracking ROI

Some of my faithful readers already know I’ve written a few times about Ron and the Taxi Worker’s Alliance of Philadelphia and the city’s ill-advised plan to GPS Philadelphia cabs.  But for those who came here looking for Katie Couric’s legs (by far my highest visitor count ever that day, never underestimate the prurience of the average Internet surfer, I guess) I’m using Ron to help point out what not to do if you’re considering using GPS tracking.

Many of the better business schools teach classes in how not to implement a business or new business idea.  For someone now I’ve been following a long, sad saga perpetrated by the Philadelphia Parking Authority.  Right about now, were I putting together a business course, I’d rank them right up there at the top for examples in how to take a good idea and turn it into a real turd in the punchbowl.

For reason which are mysterious to me this organization has acquired the near fief-like control of the taxis in Philadelphia.  Why?  Only someone on the inside of Philadelphia politics can answer that for me.  The two concepts are almost foreign to me to begin with.  taxis are public transportation which obviate the need for parking lots and garages.  Parking garages are a pollution-enhancing (necessary?) evil of modern cites which conspicuously hurt  the adoption of more low-pollution public transportation.  I dunno.

What I do know is, the Parking Authority came across the idea of using a special-purpose GPS solution to enhance the service level of taxicabs in Philadelphia.  On the surface this certainly sounds like a good idea.  I’ve been a GPS tracking practitioner for many years now and I certainly know that, properly implemented, GPS for taxis can:

• Enhance both driver and rider safety
• Provide better profits to cab operators
• Reduce customer wait time
• Eliminate the constant mystery that surrounds complaints of bad service or cheating … bad drivers are immediately detected and weeded out, good drivers, wrongly accused are protected and rewarded for their dedication to decent service.

There are other benefits that can accrue to management, drivers and customers but those four are certainly in the lead and they are easily proven with a number of successful GPS implementations around the world.

the Parking Authority, though, in an apparent display of lack of interest in either driver or passenger viewpoints just proceeded like a bull in a china shop.  They:

• Failed to involve the independent businessmen (drivers) who are the true “make or break” of system changes.  Who knows more about what is needed than the men and women who are performing the work, day and night?
• They (in my view) violated laws from the US Constitution on down by ruling that independent business would fund and maintain a city-dictated system without even having any input in the matter.
• They appear to have “gotten in bed” with a particular vendor, selected that vendor and then hired the vendor’s marketing lead to become a city employee who specified and source selected the system to “feather his nest” by moving over to the contractor side and getting a fat salary to run the very system he bought as a government official. Sounds crooked and impossible in this day and age, doesn’t it?  But it happened and the city attorney even opined publicly that it was wrong … but failed to take any action.
• And last but not least they took an ancillary aspect of the system … the ability to accept credit cards as a convenience, and decided to extract funds out of the driver’s pockets by charging grossly unfair fees for credit card use and further discriminating against the poor and the differentially abled who are the people most likely to have no transportation choice except taxis and the least likely to have credit cards.

Wow, Phil Park, is there anything else you could have done to make this system any worse?  I don’t know, but Ron does.  He’s the president of the Philadelphia Taxi Worker’s Alliance a group who has now become pretty polarized against the city’s high-handed methods.  Read their latest newsletter here.  You can also see the kind of publicity and “friends” that the City of Brotherly Love is building for itself here.

Now I am sure I have lots of old school conservative readers here.  In fact I am pretty old school and conservative myself.  So why should you care about Ron and his TWA and the mess that the Philadelphia Parking Authority has made?

To my mind the reason we should all care is easy.  Disputes between people are a fact of life.  But they hardly ever benefit either side.  Life in general and business in particular is better when things are more unified than polarized.  This mess I have been chronicling here has put Philadelphia back into my mind as the former city of Mayor Rizzo … an dif you don’t know who he was, just Google Boss tweed and add some physical force.  What a setback.