Today a customer of ours in Southern California near our Orange office let us know that they used our product to both help 7 of their ambulances get to the scene of a California police chase that ended in a “horrific crash.” They also let us know they were able to use GPS Insight in order to assess their responsiveness to this large scale emergency.
Here is a video of the news story, where a drunk woman in a stolen SUV tried to escape police and crashed into 5 vehicles going the wrong way down the street in Tustin, California:
http://www.cbs2.com/video/?id=63039@kcbs.dayport.com
Using GPS Insight, their dispatch personnel can view their vehicle locations in real time (1 minute map updates and 2 minute vehicle updates). That screen allows them to also visualize their custom-built color-coded zones, click for a zoomed in detail of a vehicle or speed/stopped time type details. This particular screen shot is from a different company since the ambulance company’s regions and vehicles require understandable privacy. However it gives a good example of what a mid-sized fleet looks like in the GPS Insight dispatch map view.
When the call comes in for the emergency, they probably only had the cross streets, Warner Avenue and Red Hill Ave, in Tustin (technically close to Tustin in Santa Ana). By typing that into the GPS Insight “Find Address” box and zooming/marking it, the location can be instantly found:
This brings up the following map view, from which turn-by-turn directions to (or from) that location to any vehicle or other location/landmark can be brought up just by clicking on the “directions” links:
Now using the mouse scroll wheel, the zoom level allows you to see the two closest ambulances, 76 and 79, as well as their recent history as a “trail.” They are yellow which indicates they’re turned off but haven’t been stopped more than an hour (then they would be red, and this is all configurable by the customer with GPS Insight). By clicking on them we see more information. Ambulance#76 has been stopped for 27 minutes.
Not that this company needs directions — they know exactly where they are going to get to the calls in the most efficient way possible, but for many of our customers, turn-by-turn directions are necessary. All that needs to be done is to simply click on “Directions From Here” and exact directions are shown from that vehicle to the crash site. Note that you can turn on real time traffic and adjust the route simply by dragging the purple route line from one road to another.
Now the dispatcher has all the information necessary to send that emergency vehicle to the scene of the accident.
As for what it looks like in the GPS Insight 3D history at that time, we can run an all vehicles 3D history for that date like this with just a couple clicks:
Now we can “dial in” the time of the accident by gradually opening up the time slider until the first vehicle “arrives” on the scene at 3:22 PM (shown as a green vehicle “78 3/24 15:22″) — since this is a historical map history, we show the date as well.
Then we can open up more “time” to see which other vehicles arrived. The differently colored lines correspond to the paths of different vehicles.
While there may be too many “dots” to easily see which vehicles arrived when, and how long they stayed, quickly clicking on the blue ones will show length of visit information (blue = idling):
Then if we want an exact report, just draw an exact polygon landmark around the crash site (we name it CrashSite here), and run a report as such:
Here is the report which takes less than a second to run, and which tells you exactly which vehicles arrived, and at what exact time (to the second), along with how long they were there.
This data can be exported to Excel for further analysis, and of course the times and speeds of the ambulances from their prior locations when they were dispatched can be investigated as well in great detail using GPS Insight.
We’re glad we helped this company out, and hope the victims recover quickly. Thanks to the ambulance company for helping the victims (and even the suspect) so quickly.
Rob.
Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking
