We have a customer in San Francisco who wanted to be able to reconcile the # of trips they make across the Bay Bridge (since they pay a toll when coming into the city).
Here is a picture of the landmark they defined (along with a nice 3D representation in Google Earth):
GPS Insight Landmark of the San Francisco Bay Bridge
We added a “Passing Through” option to our standard landmark report to help with this requirement. Before this, the landmark visit would have required the vehicle to either stop or idle for a minute to register. If you click the “Passing Through” checkbox, it will count any activity through that “zone.”
GPS Insight landmark report adds "passing through" option
Now when running the report (which took less than 3 seconds), you get each time a vehicle went through that area (I’ve blurred out the vehicle names for customer privacy).
GPS Insight vehicle tracking landmark report
This makes it easy to see that 7 vehicles went a total of 23 times across the Bay Bridge.
But how many tolls is that?
You only get charged on the way INTO the city. Exporting that report to Excel gives us some additional information such as heading (what direction the trip took through the landmark). So only Southwest trips should incur a toll. That shows 8 of them according to this Excel Screenshot:
How many tolls should we be charged across the Bay Bridge?
We added Heading as well to the exported version of the report. Since space isn’t at a premium in Excel, we usually put all columns into the exported versions of the reports there.
This helps our customer, & I thought it would be worth detailing here in case other customers can think of a good use for this.
Thanks,
Rob.
November 29th, 2009 7:07 pm
Happy Thanksgiving, Rob. This is a great feature. Not only for the reconciliation of toll charges that this client can use it for, but I know from personal experiences a large number of companies pay drivers cash for tolls that the drivers pocket by bypassing tolls on alternative routes that cost the company a lot more in time and mileage costs.
I also once had a client who called me with a problem … he said the units I had sold him were not recording stops at clients by his salesmen .. a main tool that he had brought the system for.
Upon investigation, we found, by laboriously looking at the track of each problem vehicle, that the sales force _was_ driving to the client locations as they were being told to, but they were leaving the vehicles running outside the clients’ stores while they dashed in and dashed back out to their vehicles in the winter cold. Not only were they thus giving the client short-shrift, but the theft/liability issues of the unattended vehicles was huge.
What was that line from the “3rd Rock From the Sun” song, “… He leaves the car running, he’ll only be a minute; the car speeds away, teenagers in it…” or something like that?
I also had another client once with a “speeding in School Zones” issue. He wanted a daily report of each school zone passage by each vehicle and the speed traveled. I couldn’t do it with the reporting technology I had available, but it looks like your system could handle that as well.