Bus Route Progress: Bus Route Tracking That Shows Which Buses Are On Route, Late or Parked

Bus Route Progress is a High Point GPS platform add-in for bus route tracking that sorts every bus into three lists: on route, late and parked. It reads the same GPS data as the live map, but it answers the question a transportation office asks during the morning run. With sixty buses on a map, every dot is accurate and none of them tells the dispatcher at a school board or contractor what to do. 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. Each bus appears once, with its route, its last stop and how far behind schedule it is.

In the platform, each route is an ordered set of stops with scheduled times, and each stop has a geofence. As the bus moves, the add-in matches its position against the stops, logs the time it entered each geofence and compares that with the schedule. If a bus reaches a stop later than its scheduled time by more than the tolerance the operator sets, it moves to the late list with the minutes behind shown. A bus still inside its start geofence after the route's start time shows as parked. Drivers enter nothing, so the status stays the same whether or not a driver remembered to tap a button.

Transportation offices at school boards and consortia keep the late list open on a second screen during the morning and afternoon runs. Contractors use it to answer the board's calls and to prove on-time performance when their contract measures it. Where a parent app is deployed, it draws on the same on-time record, 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 each operator's own schedules.

You need a GPS tracking device in every bus, route definitions with stop geofences and scheduled times, and the add-in installed in your High Point GPS platform database. Routes change with the school year, so the operator or High Point GPS updates the definitions at each bell-schedule change. The add-in reads whichever routes are current.

At 07:19 bus 12 is at stop 4, seven minutes behind the schedule the add-in holds for that route. Its status changes to late, the row on the dispatcher's board turns amber, and the parent app updates the arrival time for riders at stops 5 through 9. By 07:24 the dispatcher can see the cause on the map, a closed lane on the approach road, and reroutes three other buses heading that way before they lose the same seven minutes. At 07:31 the bus is ten minutes late at stop 7, the notification threshold fires, and the school gets a message that 38 riders will arrive at 07:52. The bus pulls in at 07:51. Nobody made a phone call, and when a parent writes to the board that afternoon, the record of that sequence is the reply.