GPS Insight Blog » Driver Accountability

Feb 02 2010

HUGE safety addition to GPS Insight — the Speed Summary Report

Category: Driver Accountability, Identifying and eliminating speeding, New Features, Reporting, Reports, Safety — rdonat @ 6:24 pm

This new report shows the speeding and “slow-poke” tendencies of your individual drivers.

It can be run for a month at a time, and is available here (we are running the report for just the OKL group for the month of January):

Launching the GPS Insight Speed Summary report

Here is the part which allows you to rank by any of the major columns (click on the column heading) and you can see that OKL-69633-Service-Jasoncb is the top speeder on average. This is relative to the speed limit ONLY when he is exceeding the speed limit.

Ranking your speeders using GPS Insight's new Speed Summary Report

Conversely, you can click on “Laggard Avg” which will give you the top “slow-poke” (tie between the Manager and Chadc). This is ONLY when the driver is going LESS than the posted speed limit.

This is useful because both activities are undesirable. Padding hours by going slow is just as bad as being reckless and wasting fuel by speeding.

Clicking on any of the “at a glance” graphs to the right brings up a graph which compares a single driver’s speeding profile to the the entire group:

Graphically showing differences between a driver and the group average

This is the 4th in a series of enhancements to our speeding reports and graphs.

Since occasional discrepancies between GPS Insight’s data and actual posted speed limits occur, we have found it much more useful to run on a month-by-month “Macro” level to indicate undeniable trends in speeding.

Future enhancements will include posted speed limit alerts, group-by-group comparisons of speeding/lagging trends, and historical comparisons to prove that progress has been made in improving efficiency and curbing speeding using GPS Insight reports and alerts. Additionally, certain fields within these reports will launch supporting reports (e.g. a speeding report for just that single vehicle, to include violations on a map, etc.). Rapid acceleration and deceleration will be detected and reported upon for certain GPS Insight devices (notably the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000).

This report is available for all customers immediately, and currently has data going back to December 2009. We will add support for earlier months as we add functionality.

Thanks,
Rob.

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Jan 09 2010

I lost my keys — and got to use our improved Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping as a result

Category: Driver Accountability, Driver Assignment to Vehicles, Driver to Vehicle Mapping, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Reporting, Reports, Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 6:43 pm

I lost my keys the other day which is awesome. I think they’re in a toy chest somewhere courtesy of my daughter.

So today after we rolled out a new improved Driver-to-Vehicle mapping product, I grabbed a new DriverID at work and put it on my (new) keychain.

I forgot to “log in” — we do however support mandatory login using a really obnoxious buzzer which goes off after 30 seconds until you press the driver ID button to the reader.

So after dinner, I decided to test everything for myself. Since I’m not the only person who will lose a DriverID or their keys, we made sure to make it easy to give out & assign new driverID’s.

After my drive, I logged in and launched the right administrative screen where we see 3 unassigned driverID buttons — one has been used in my car (Rob 4000) and has today’s date and a recent time.

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So I choose my previously defined Driver record with the drop-down:

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So then we run an activity detail report for my vehicle for today to see the driverID switch. My “wife’s” driverID had been recently assigned to my car, so the change was very apparent. (I quote “wife” not because she’s not real, but she doesn’t really use a driverID — she might be more colorful than some of our customers’ drivers about telling me where to put my driverID if I asked her to use one…)

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

So here’s the switch — exactly when I took the car for a quick spin around the neighborhood:

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

And here is my path with my name now in the Driver field within the information bubble:

New DriverID assigned to my vehicle after losing my keys

After working diligently lately, we’ve streamlined this process as much as possible for as many use case/problem cases (e.g. drivers losing their keys…) as possible, and it’s trivial to reassign a new driverID to a driver now.

I wish we tracked keys though…

[Side note, I found them today, 1/24/10, finally, outside by the hose, rusted after a couple weeks of sitting out in the rain, but the car door openers still work...]

Rob.

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Jan 04 2010

2 major new additions coming in January 2010 to GPS Insight!

Category: Driver Accountability, Identifying and eliminating speeding, New Features, Safety, cell phone capabilities, mobile mapping — rdonat @ 5:52 pm

Well, the holidays are over, and we’re getting back to business at GPS Insight.

There are 2 MAJOR additions coming in January.

We will release our Posted Speed Limit Report late this week or early next week
We will release an iPhone App toward the end of January (although Apple may take longer to approve for the App Store than that)

The Posted Speed Limit Report will let you know where your drivers are driving fast relative to the actual speed limit. It will come with other graphing enhancements to our regular speed alerts which will let you graph the 30 minutes before & after the speeding event in order to better understand what your drivers are doing. Additionally, if you use GPS Insight’s 3D Mapping with Google Earth, you will be able to click on the graph for an instant download of that vehicle for those 60 minutes.

Here are some screenshots:

Running a Posted Speed Limits Report on the “Robgroup” (my vehicles, and “Rob” has several devices installed):

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Disclaimer!!!*** — I was not really doing 28 MPH over the speed limit — I’ll explain this after the report:

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Clicking on the “Google Earth” button shows this:

GPS Insight 3D Posted Speed Violations View

That street is actually a 40 MPH zone (although I was definitely speeding — I live in the middle of the desert and it was 50 MPH when I moved there so I’m grandfathered in — is that a good excuse? How about I only needed some sample data for this article? My scofflaw COO borrowed the car? How about I have big brakes? Either way, I was speeding and this report picked it up.)

What is important to know is that the standard speeding report wouldn’t have really called attention to it so much. I was only doing 63 [65 max]. It’s 65 MPH standard on the highways out here. What’s important is the difference between ACTUAL and POSTED speed limits. 28 (really 23) in this case.

So how do you check to see what the real speed limit is? Just quickly go into street view in that area & find a speed limit sign:

Finding Stop Signs in GPS Insight's Google Earth Mode

Soon we will allow our customers to “override” certain street speed limits in order to accurately report on violations. Not every speed limit in our system is 100% up to date. It’s the ease of using it which makes this a quick and powerful tool. We plan to begin a “sanity check” service on our customers’ behalf where the most flagrant speeding will result in our double-checking the actual speed limits in that area.

Even if they are off by 5-15 MPH, this report is REALLY good at finding your opportunistic speeders.

Note the “inline” graph in the 3D “bubble” will also show up in the report for an instant check of recent/subsequent activity. Clicking on it gives a 30 minutes before/after map in Google Earth.

Speed Graphs in GPS Insight

[we're still working on the best way to graph it, so this will change soon]

Here is the 60 minute “quick map” you get when clicking on the graph:

60 minute "quick map" around a speeding violation

This is useful in order to get some context for what the driver was doing.

So this report will be EXTREMELY USEFUL to companies, and comes with a lengthy disclaimer that you need to put some time into investigating the speed limits initially before going off and firing drivers. It will also come with a follow-on report which “ranks” your drivers with graphs which show their typical speeding patterns. Since speed limits differ from our data equally across drivers, you will quickly get a feel for which of your drivers are speeders, which are ideal, and which intentionally go slower than they should in order to pad hours.

Moving on, we have an iPhone app coming in January. It will do a nicer job of mobile fleet management than the current GPS Insight Mobile Mapping option. Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight iPhone App coming soon!

You launch it from the iPhone like a normal app.

You are then given a set of options to choose from in terms of moving/stopped vehicles, various vehicle groups, etc.:

List of vehicles within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Choosing one will give you various information, to include a map of just that one vehicle (or choose “Map” to see them all):

Vehicle location within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Quick View lets you choose just a few vehicles at a time

And you will be able to set certain settings (right now they’re pretty limited):

Settings tab in the GPS Insight iPhone App

So that about covers the 2 new exciting features coming soon in January 2010. Based on licensing restrictions, both capabilities MAY have an additional cost, either now or in the future. If they do, it won’t be much, and chances are they’ll both be free to customers or cost the same as the existing mobile mapping capabilities.

Happy New Year everyone!

Rob.

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Dec 24 2009

Story about a city vehicle being used to sell drugs!

Category: Driver Accountability, Safety, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 6:35 pm

Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Detroit city employee’s vehicle which had been used to BUY crack cocaine.

Now in Key West, FL, an employee was just arrested for selling cocaine, near a school or church, even!

We are seeing quite a few municipalities show interest and purchasing GPS tracking systems.

With problems like this, I can see why! We hear a lot of stories, but these two in the last couple weeks are pretty shocking.

Use GPS Insight! Know where your drivers are at all times! And let them know they’re being tracked. Then they won’t do this type of thing most likely…

Rob

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Nov 29 2009

Counting & Reconciling Tolls using GPS Insight fleet tracking

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, Driver Accountability, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Landmarks, New Features, Reporting, Reports — rdonat @ 2:47 pm

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.

Tags: bay bridge, GPS Tracking, landmark report, san francisco, toll collection

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Oct 31 2009

I’m guessing this is not authorized usage…

Category: California, Driver Accountability, Fuel Savings, Vehicle Tracking, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 2:34 pm

Funny, we saw this truck on its way home from Disneyland. I think I’ll have a salesperson call to see how they keep tabs on unauthorized usage on Monday:

Unauthorized usage of Company Vehicles

GPS Insight prevents this! Not only will you prevent your drivers abusing/using their take home vehicles on weekends and at night, but you won’t have to worry about your drivers causing accidents when couches fall off of YOUR vehicles. Plus you won’t have to pay for the fuel to move their apartment.

Rob.

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Oct 23 2009

DriverID buttons now in production to help identify drivers to vehicles being tracked

Category: Driver Accountability, Driver to Vehicle Mapping, New Features — rdonat @ 4:57 pm

We recently introduced driver-to-vehicle mapping. Now we support driverID buttons and readers to quickly allow drivers to identify the fact they are driving a vehicle. A really obnoxious alarm goes off in 30 seconds after ignition on if they forget this (optional — I left it off my vehicle…)

Here’s how it works:

You touch your driver ID button to the reader before or after turning the vehicle on. In dispatch, a list of all the “unassigned” driver IDs is shown (on the bottom). Note that my driver ID (Robert Donat) is assigned only to “Rob” at this time. The Driver ID reader is on “Rob 4000″ and I used that button earlier today:

GPS Insight shows "unknown" driver ID buttons

After clicking “Assign Driver Button” you can now choose from a list of drivers — I choose myself:

Assign a driver to our gps tracking and driver tracking system

Notice I am now listed on BOTH vehicles (really 2 different devices in the same vehicle, which is not typical, but there for our testing purposes):

Then that “unknown” button is no longer in the list of buttons to assign:

No longer unassigned in the driver button box

Now whenever I use a different vehicle, I can use my button on that vehicle and I will automatically be “assigned” to it for reporting/mapping/alert purposes.

We recently completed an API to achieve this as well.

This makes things much easier and more automated when assigning drivers to vehicles. That allows you to tell which PEOPLE are speeding, idling, using the vehicles off hours, getting parking tickets, etc. — not which VEHICLES.

Rob.

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May 30 2009

Rob gets a speeding ticket — GPS Insight proves the speeding activity unfortunately…

Category: Arizona, Driver Accountability, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Navigation, GPSI-4000, Garmin Integration, Google Earth, Identifying and eliminating speeding, Mapping, Routing, cell phone capabilities — rdonat @ 1:41 pm

So yesterday I took my 9 year old son, a friend and his son to the Diamondbacks game (they lost…). Thanks to Mike Greco at bluemedia for the tickets…

On the way home, after dealing with the 101 being closed (Arizona doesn’t know how to work on roads without closing them entirely), yours truly got pulled over 2 miles from home after punching it to make a stale yellow light. In my defense, there was no one around (except the police officer apparently, who I never saw).

Anyway, I got pulled over shortly thereafter and was informed I did 67 through the light in a 50. Oops.

I haven’t had a ticket for 15 years, so there goes that streak.

I got home shortly thereafter & guess what, he was right.

My GPSI-4000, which takes speed samples once a second, got me doing 68.

Here’s a picture which pretty much tells it all:

Here is my idle stop while receiving the ticket:

I pulled over near a community’s entrance to get over from traffic:

I brought an EZ-1000 with me for my son to hold on to at the game in case I lost him, & it was set for 10 second updates.

It got me at 67 MPH going through the light too (and shows I immediately slowed down):

So, the moral of the story is: I was speeding. It was literally for just a few seconds to catch a yellow light rather than slam on the brakes and wake the kids up (that’s my story), but both the police AND my GPSI-4000/EZ-1000 caught me. FYI, the GO-3000 is equally accurate, and our 3500 lineup checks speed every 20 seconds, so it catches speeding, just not the rapid up & down speeding like I exhibited yesterday — it got me at 62 MPH. To put it in perspective, many of our competeitors check speed once every 5 minutes and don’t report max speed — just instantaneous. We report max, instantaneous, and average, and this is detailed in several “speeding” related blog articles.

On a less depressing note, we had a nice time at the ballgame, and stopped at Alice Cooper’s Cooperstown before which we tracked on the EZ-1000. I landmarked it while I was there by sending a text message of: ‘gps rob 1000k landmark cooperstown’ so now it shows up here like this:

A quick landmark report shows we were there for 41 minutes:

41 much more worthwhile minutes than sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ticket 2 miles away from home.

I’ll let you know how traffic school works out.

Now that I think about it, had I been using my new Garmin routing capability I would have been directed to take the shorter path home after getting detoured, and would have avoided this ticket altogether… Grr…

Never mind all those other light green speeding dots where thankfully there weren’t any police or speed cameras.

Rob.

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May 26 2009

Forgetting my car at the car wash (part 2)

Category: Alerts, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, Driver Accountability, GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES, GPS Insight Employees — rdonat @ 1:26 pm

I didn’t really forget it there (yet). But since a few months ago I put an alert out there when I leave my car at the car wash for 4 hours or more, I just got this email alert along with a cell phone SMS text message alert:

I don’t want to forget, then have to find the manager at the gas station to get my keys from wherever they lock them up at night.

So I’m heading there now, thanks to my alert. Here is the article where I set this alert up last time.

Rob.

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Mar 23 2009

Banana Boat Tracking with GPS Insight’s EZ-1000

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, Driver Accountability, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Identifying and eliminating speeding, Mapping, Mexico — rdonat @ 11:35 pm

So we went on a short vacation to Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point) Mexico for our kids’ Spring Break last week.

I took an EZ-1000 with a Mexico-compatible SIM in it, and tested out the coverage AND the water-proof-ness (if that’s a word).

Here are my 2 boys on the banana boat (a towed inflatable boat which we bought rides on for $5 each).

Note the boat states “not to be towed at more than 15 MPH” — we can show where the ride took us and that they exceeded that speed, not that there are any Federales out there enforcing the banana boat speed limits.

So the first “lap” I was holding on to Sarah (my 3 1/2 year old) and so I couldn’t get a picture of us all at once.

I pull up the 3D history of our banana boat trip, referencing the picture’s date & time, like so (choosing “Beach Patrol” — what I named the unit, and 3/20):

Then I click on each point and see the speed at that particular 15 second update — they’re all between 8 and 11 MPH since I had my young daughter & I asked them the boat “Captain” to drive slow for one lap until I dropped her off with my wife Kristi on the shore:

Once we got back to shore after lap 1, a wave knocked both Sarah and me off into the Ocean. She & I got soaking wet but made it into shore. The EZ-1000 is fairly water resistant so it kept on reporting and didn’t get damaged even though it was completely underwater for some time in the waves (It won’t make it on a dive trip though…) I also looked at the time stamp on the picture & noticed that Kristi took the picture after the first lap (14:49:52).

So we go on laps 2 & 3, which are about 2/3 of a mile from one end to another based on the “ruler” I use in Google Earth (note the white line I drew between the farthest points — I could also trace a “path” and see how many miles it was in total).

By checking some of the points, I see the speeds go from a peak of 11 MPH up to 25 MPH — definitely more than the 15 MPH safety limit on the side of the boat, not that anyone minded:

Here is a picture taken by Kristi as the boys & I were getting off the boat after the last 2 “laps”:

Note the time is 2:59:00 (not sure it’s 100% accurate on my camera, but it’s close).

Look at the “picture” from GPS Insight with Google Earth:

I was able to “dial in” exact time the picture was taken with the new Google Earth 5 “time Slider” by entering the exact time into the control (press the “wrench” to bring up this dialog box):

A couple days later we took another longer banana boat ride with just the boys from town. I had used the GPS Insight interface to put the EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode vs. the 15 second mode for the first trip. You can see how much more accurate the path is with that refresh interval here (in red, vs. pink):

Incidentally, we get 16 hours on a battery charge at 8 second updates (I tested on the way back from Mexico, that’s another story for another blog article).

And that’s about all I have to say about Banana Boat Racing with the kids — here’s a good picture to leave off with:

Now we’re home — back to school and back to work.

Rob.

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