With school bus carriers being the largest mass transportation fleet in the United States, mapping and navigation technology is crucial to get students to and from school safely and on-time. On any given school day, the K-12 industry transports 26 million students all across the US. This results in millions of miles logged annually for drivers.
In addition to a high safety demand, there are many other daily challenges school bus fleets and drivers have to face:
- Specific pick-up and drop off time windows
- Need for efficient routing for bus utilization and quick, real-time route recalculation if a detour is required
- Quick response when a maintenance issue or emergency arises
- Staying on-time by avoiding traffic and unsafe road conditions
- Substitute driver learning curve
- Parents or guardians requiring current location information or school arrival confirmation for their child(ren)
What can be done to help reduce driver stress while ensuring a safer commute for students?
Our interactive mapping platform not only provides access to real-time fleet visualization, but also accurate ETA updates. Additional features include:
- Easily track buses on high quality maps, including street-level satellite imagery
- Geofence boundaries and locations and notifications when a driver enters or exits those areas
- High volume batch and reverse geocoding
- Quickly obtain dynamic ETAs based on a vehicles location and distance to destination, along with real-time traffic congestion and weather conditions
- Identify speed compliance issues with post-trip analysis
Vehicle-specific navigation is also vital for safe and efficient guidance before and after the school bell rings. A companion solution to our web-based mapping and routing platform, CoPilot, provides turn-by-turn, voice-guided GPS navigation and includes the following:
- Safe and accurate directions and navigation
- Navigation takes into account road restrictions based on vehicle dimensions and current traffic conditions
- Offline navigation for reliable routing and maps in out-of-coverage areas
- Quick re-routing of vehicles or send support if a maintenance issue or emergency arises
- Improvement of driver adoption and overall safety with a familiar, driver-friendly interface that reduces driver distraction
- Posted speed limit display and audio speeding alerts
- Over 250 API function calls to pass information between applications
Visit our Trimble MAPS booth at our upcoming K-12 events and get a guided tour of our mapping and navigation solutions! Or learn more about our solutions by clicking the banner below.
- 2019 STN EXPO Conference & Trade Show- July 26- 31, 2019 (Reno, NV)
- National Association for Pupil Transportation- November 2- 5, 2019 (Columbus, OH)
Source: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/nsta/6571/Yellow-School-Bus-Industry-White-Paper.pdf