GPS Tracking ROI

So, what’s newsworthy about this? In my view quite a bit.

First of all, I’ll admit to being a Chinafile. Regardless of anyone’s viewpoint regarding how China is not the US’s friend and China will take over the world, and they are all still a bunch of ChiComs, the world still goes on. Those who ignore China are no better than ostriches sticking their heads in the sand. those who discount China, especially in business or government, do do at their own risk.

Ok, here’s the situation. The Three Gorges area on the Yangtze river is kind of the Niagara Falls of China. It’s coming into New years there (Chinese New Year, D’oh), and the Chinese are big, big tourists. So demand for cruise ships of all sizes and description is booming. The Three Gorges area is also notoriously dangerous.

So the Yangtze River Maritime Safety Administration , good government bureaucrats that they are .. you know China, don’t you .. huge, slow-moving bureaucracy, “Chinese Fire drills”, etc. .. had two choices. They could sit on their butts like, say, Michael Brown and FEMA and then tsk, tsk, tsk at the inevitable accidents that would occur, or, they could take action.

The action they took is simple, cheap and effective. Instead of waiting for some kind of law to force ship owners to equip their vessels with GPS, the administration just bought GPS units and placed them, temporarily, on any ship wanting to enter the danger zone. result: Safety enhanced, goals met, out of pocket expense near zero in comparison to the non-supervised results. Also, some good public relations as a fallout.

Several years ago when I was consulting for a GPS tracking/GIS (Geographic Information Systems) firm we spent a lot of money to attend a useless TSA (Transportation Security Administration) trade show and show off our products. One product was a utterly reliable self-contained GPS receiver/satellite transmitter that reported vehicle positions anywhere there was WWW access. A US Coast Guard officer approached me and outlined a situation very similar to the Yangtze Three Gorges issue. He wanted to track, monitor, and in case of safety or international law violation, control ships in a certain hazardous river “chokepoint.

The commander was very impressed with our live demonstration …. most of the attendees at the show were merely selling brochures and Power Points of what their systems would and could do if the government just coughed up bucks) but when I got down to brass tacks about how the system could be implemented he lost interest.

Too expensive? Hardly, the systems were (and still are) very cheap for the work they do .. costing on the order of say two or three days of fuel costs for a ship. Much less than the food bill for the crew for a month. But the “Coastie”, could only think of the tremendous overhead of having a law passed that would mandate all ship owners (many non-US owners) to buy one specific box to transit the problem waters.

How simple it would be and how much cheaper it would be to just provision the Coast Guard (who stops and inspects all ships entering these waters) with ‘loaner’ GPS units for that portion of the voyage and collect them at the other end. (the units wouldn’t go missing, they track themselves, remember?).

Know why the idea will never fly? It will always fail because it would involve the US government actually performing a function that served someone .. rather than imposing a restriction on someone.

Read that Yangtze article again and then ask yourself (and, perhaps your Congress-critter), what has government done _for_ business rather than _to_ business?