GPS Tracking ROI

By Allison M. Heinrichs

TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Thursday, August 3, 2006

Kate Watson was pulling into her Dallas neighborhood three years ago when she looked in the rearview mirror and noticed she was being followed by an old, beat-up car that looked out of place in her upscale community.

Nervous, Watson called 911. A chip in her cell phone allowed a dispatcher to map Watson’s location and direct her to the nearest police station. When she pulled into the station’s parking lot, the suspicious car left.

“I was frightened,” said Watson, now of O’Hara. “It was very odd how they followed me — every turn I took, they turned. It was definitely a benefit having the police know where I was.”

Early next year, Allegheny County emergency officials expect to have a multimillion-dollar system similar to the one in Dallas, allowing them to accurately locate cell phone callers.

About 915, or 42 percent, of the 2,190 emergency calls fielded by Allegheny County emergency dispatchers every day come from cell phones. Several times a month, people calling from a cell phone aren’t able to give their location, forcing emergency officials to listen for sounds such as trains and blaring sirens to find the caller.

A $1 tax on wireless bills will pay for the county’s system….Rest of article here:

An interesting article about Allegheny County and overall issues of privacy regarding cell phone tracking. Well worth a read, although I feel some of the writer’s comments are a bit hyperbolic. It’s overall factual and well-written though.

The reason I say “It’s more than about time” is contained in one of the leading facts presented. More than 42%of the county’s 911 calls are already coming from cell phones. Anyone who thinks that figure is not going to climb rapidly hasn’t been watching the number of drivers looking like idiots while they lean on their cell phone hands, or the number of blue-haired grannies meandering down the middle of the shopping aisle at Wal*Mart with their Bluetooth headsets hanging on the rhi9nstone glasses frames.

Implementing GPS location into the 911 system is something every county in the US should have done, already. It’s not only life and death, but it saves big on emergency services time and resources. By and large the nation’s emergency services leaders have just been sitting on their backsides, whining they have no money. Although paid substantial salaries to be managers, they couldn’t manage their way out of a wet paper bag … and you can tell them Dave Starr says so … I don’t make anonymous slurs.

The true cost of any investment is the foregone alternative. Adding up wasted hours of emergency service quickly runs costs up through the roof. Factoring in lives saved adds an invaluable intangible. But Allegheny County avoided all the fine spreadsheet work. The dollar a month tax sounds fine to me. I already pay a fortune in taxes and fees to both wireless and wired phone providers, most of which have no benefit to me at all.

Here in Colorado, for example, we who pay our phone bills pay a state-wide ‘access fee”. Know what that ‘access fee” is for? It’s to reimburse the telco for people who don’t pay their phone bills and won’t get a job. You can’t cut off service to a welfare recipient without a job …they get their phone bill paid by those of us who work, or who are already retired and living on the proverbial “fixed income.”

So if we are going to tax the working citizen to pay for the non-workers, it’s only fair to tax cell phone users for their own safety. After all, unlike most of the fees and taxes we get slapped with, this one is like the ‘sin tax” on a carton of ciggies. If you don’t want to pay it, don’t buy the smokes, or don’t order the cell phone. Both are hazardous to your health and often extremely annoying to others, so put the fee where it belongs.

Kudos to Allegheny County