Bus Route Progress: The MyGeotab Add-In That Shows Which Buses Are On Route, Late or Parked

A live map with sixty buses on it is accurate and useless at the moment it matters. The dispatcher at a school board or bus contractor does not need sixty positions during the morning run; they need to know which routes are on schedule, which are behind, and which have not started, so they can call the driver, warn the school and answer the parent on the phone. Bus Route Progress is a MyGeotab add-in that reads the same GPS data and presents it as three lists: on route, late, parked. Each bus appears once, with its route, its last stop and how far behind schedule it is.

Each route is defined in the platform as an ordered set of stops with scheduled times, and each stop carries a geofence. As the bus moves, the add-in matches its position against the stops, records the time it entered each geofence, and compares that with the schedule. A bus that reaches a stop after its scheduled time by more than the tolerance the operator sets moves to the late list, with the minutes behind shown; a bus that has not left its start geofence after the route's start time shows as parked. There is no driver input, so the status is the same whether the driver remembered to tap anything or not.

Transportation offices at school boards and consortia use it during the morning and afternoon runs, with the late list open on a second screen. Contractors use it to answer the board's calls and to prove on-time performance under a contract that measures it. The same on-time record feeds the parent app where one is deployed, so the parent's 'running late' notification and the dispatcher's late list come from one source. High Point GPS deploys the add-in as part of school bus telematics installations for boards and contractors in Quebec, Ontario and the northeastern US, and builds the route definitions from the operator's own schedules.

A GO device in every bus, route definitions with stop geofences and scheduled times, and the add-in installed in the operator's MyGeotab database. Routes change with the school year, so the operator or its reseller updates the definitions at each bell-schedule change; the add-in reads whatever routes are current.