Well, many readers may be tired with my continual rant about government agencies that refuse to do what they are paid to when it comes to fleet management.
Two pieces of good news today:
PGCPS Leads the State in Advancing Bus Safety; Nextel GPS Tracking System Installed on School Buses:
http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/4845/
Prince Georges County Maryland gets a tip of the hat today. Unlike the average school board who somehow think it's cheaper to be sued for failing to monitor their drivers and protect their children than to use technology that pays for itself, here's a group that realizes the time is now.
An additional nugget is hidden in the bottom of the press release .. they'll be using the slick Nextel PTT (walkie-talkie) service to allow dispatchers and drivers to instantly be in touch. One impediment to modern tracking and fleet management technology have been the voice radio peddlers of the world. Persisting in marketing their archaic technology they have used up the budgets of agency after agency selling and expensive, limited utility product. Personally, _if_ I had ever owned any Motorola stock I'd be dumping it like a hot potato. (if you read the article linked above, look around the GIS User site that published it. It's run by a friend of mine who really knows the business and continually finds informative ways to demystify the technology.
More Good News Here:
Snow removal trucks to help pick up the slack :
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-hside24.html
The city of Chicago has had a terrible few months with allegations and proof of mismanagement, bribery and waste showing up in the street department and city fleets. You've heard me rail before of government managers who refuse to manage. To the great credit of Chicago the managers have started to get their arms around the problem.
The headline is at first sight a 'no brainer'. Who would buy trucks to push snow and then let them sit idle for 8 months of the year when there is no snow? Well apparently Chicago was doing that, now they've decided to move away from the sort of 'personal organizational ownership' of the se vehicles and putting them to work through the year.
The best part of the article is at the end .. the city is currently source selecting a contract to provide 3rd party trucks in support of city needs. They had the foresight to put GPS tracking in the SOW as a requirement to insure the city gets what they pay for from the contractors. hat's off.
Tomorrow is Good Friday, I may or may not be posting. If I don't 'see' you before then, Happy Easter and blessings to all.
24 March 2005
23 March 2005
"You can observe a lot just by watching."
Or so, it is claimed, said sports great Yogi Berra. Just a few minutes ago I took the short walk to my mailbox ... on the way I passed a house under construction and there were guys from the cable TV/Internet supplier in our community. I won't call them by name, they're that outfit with a name though that has an 'a' at both ends.
There were three vans and three workers present. Normally it takes only one guy to do the installs but, not being a cable guy, I'll make a guess that three were needed. What caught my attention though, was one of the vans just sitting there idling for no apparent reason. I continued on to the mailbox, got SatViz's mail, stopped to watch an irrigation guy installing sprinkler pipe, and fully 15 minutes later walked back past the A------a vans. Yep, you guessed it, the idling van was still running. By now a guy was sitting in the driver's seat, not driving, just watching the other two installers.
This isn't really note-worthy, I see this kind of wasted time and fuel loss everyday. What is note-worthy, though is the fact that the owners of these fleets just don't care. The company in question has the 20th largest fleet in North America .. more than 8,000 vehicles. If they all idle for not profit 15 minutes a day, that's an hour and 15 minutes per week... 8,000 trucks, time 1.25 hours times 50 weeks times (let's say $2.50 a gallon for gas), that's $1,250,000.00 going out the tailpipe for no purpose at all, just polluting our neighborhoods.
This is a company that's had untold profitability challenges, cries poor mouth often, and seems to be one of the 'sick puppies' of the communication industry. One just has to wonder just how an extra one and a quarter million in pure profit would help them in the profitability trek? Not to mention the labor cost they might recover if they tracked how often all these guys were meeting up and sitting around watching their workers watch each other work. They claim. GPS tracking of their vehicles doesn't make business sense. Do you think the same as they do? Are you sure?
One other thing Yogi is alleged to have said is: "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." Is your route planned out?
Dave
www.satviz.com
There were three vans and three workers present. Normally it takes only one guy to do the installs but, not being a cable guy, I'll make a guess that three were needed. What caught my attention though, was one of the vans just sitting there idling for no apparent reason. I continued on to the mailbox, got SatViz's mail, stopped to watch an irrigation guy installing sprinkler pipe, and fully 15 minutes later walked back past the A------a vans. Yep, you guessed it, the idling van was still running. By now a guy was sitting in the driver's seat, not driving, just watching the other two installers.
This isn't really note-worthy, I see this kind of wasted time and fuel loss everyday. What is note-worthy, though is the fact that the owners of these fleets just don't care. The company in question has the 20th largest fleet in North America .. more than 8,000 vehicles. If they all idle for not profit 15 minutes a day, that's an hour and 15 minutes per week... 8,000 trucks, time 1.25 hours times 50 weeks times (let's say $2.50 a gallon for gas), that's $1,250,000.00 going out the tailpipe for no purpose at all, just polluting our neighborhoods.
This is a company that's had untold profitability challenges, cries poor mouth often, and seems to be one of the 'sick puppies' of the communication industry. One just has to wonder just how an extra one and a quarter million in pure profit would help them in the profitability trek? Not to mention the labor cost they might recover if they tracked how often all these guys were meeting up and sitting around watching their workers watch each other work. They claim. GPS tracking of their vehicles doesn't make business sense. Do you think the same as they do? Are you sure?
One other thing Yogi is alleged to have said is: "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." Is your route planned out?
Dave
www.satviz.com
22 March 2005
Good news is still Due
Brethren, I take for my text today the Gospel according to FedEx:
----------------------------------
http://www.satviz.com/images/fedex01.jpg
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I skipped the blog entry yesterday, no excuse, boss, except for the fact that since Friday afternoon I've been an unpaid employee of FedEx Ground, trying to get an important shipment the final few miles from their local terminal to our office.
Although FedEx themselves were the originator off online tracking of shipments they still ignore the principal of verifying easily verifiable data in their scheme of things. Nobody cares that a package allegedly travels ~90 ground miles in 6 minutes. (see the activity on 17 March where the package traveled 85 or 90 miles from the facility near Denver International Airport in Henderson, CO to the facility at the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport in 6 minutes. That's roughly 900 miles per hour, not allowing any time to scan the package at both ends .. damn they are fast!)
This kind of result shows that the multi-million dollar system doesn't really track items the way it was designed to, it must be updated manually after the fact by someone who manually types something in to try to disguise the fact that an employee somewhere failed to scan the package when he/she was supposed to.
I won't take issue with all the other lies represented on the screenshot above, (there are many equally as egregious as the one I pointed out), but the fact that the package either rode around two business days on the truck without a second delivery attempt, or sat under the manager's desk at the local facility (my guess) while my company lost tremendous goodwill and perhaps thousands of dollars in future business can easily be proven.
Folks, although I am no fan of our dear departed President Reagan I do remember and take to heart his oft quoted cautionary phrase. "trust but verify". Can customers trust your business? Can they verify that trust? Can you afford to allow your business data to not be verifiable? Obviously, FedEx can, but how many more millions of profit could they clear in a year if they adopted the policy of the three v's : validity, veracity, verisimilitude. Worth a thought? Or a venture in learning more?
Dave
www.satviz.com
----------------------------------
http://www.satviz.com/images/fedex01.jpg
----------------------------------
I skipped the blog entry yesterday, no excuse, boss, except for the fact that since Friday afternoon I've been an unpaid employee of FedEx Ground, trying to get an important shipment the final few miles from their local terminal to our office.
Although FedEx themselves were the originator off online tracking of shipments they still ignore the principal of verifying easily verifiable data in their scheme of things. Nobody cares that a package allegedly travels ~90 ground miles in 6 minutes. (see the activity on 17 March where the package traveled 85 or 90 miles from the facility near Denver International Airport in Henderson, CO to the facility at the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport in 6 minutes. That's roughly 900 miles per hour, not allowing any time to scan the package at both ends .. damn they are fast!)
This kind of result shows that the multi-million dollar system doesn't really track items the way it was designed to, it must be updated manually after the fact by someone who manually types something in to try to disguise the fact that an employee somewhere failed to scan the package when he/she was supposed to.
I won't take issue with all the other lies represented on the screenshot above, (there are many equally as egregious as the one I pointed out), but the fact that the package either rode around two business days on the truck without a second delivery attempt, or sat under the manager's desk at the local facility (my guess) while my company lost tremendous goodwill and perhaps thousands of dollars in future business can easily be proven.
Folks, although I am no fan of our dear departed President Reagan I do remember and take to heart his oft quoted cautionary phrase. "trust but verify". Can customers trust your business? Can they verify that trust? Can you afford to allow your business data to not be verifiable? Obviously, FedEx can, but how many more millions of profit could they clear in a year if they adopted the policy of the three v's : validity, veracity, verisimilitude. Worth a thought? Or a venture in learning more?
Dave
www.satviz.com
19 March 2005
Another case of the Tail trying to Wag the Dog
Well it seems a day doesn't go by that I don't see another government agency being abused by their employees. See:
http://www.abc-7.com/articles/readnews.asp?articleid=2594&z=2&p=
It looks like the school district here is trying to do the right thing, but instead of looking at safety for their own driver members and safety for children (which in my naive' "outside looking in" perspective I thought was the overriding principle in pupil transportation), the driver's union is on the warpath, stirring up the TV stations and complaining about the "invasion of driver's privacy". Excuse me? You want to put 40 or 50 children on a bus and drive off at your own discretion and have privacy?
Didn't Florida just tragically lose a 9 year-old girl to a sexual predator? And a proven method to make children and drivers safer, to reward good drivers and to eliminate the few bad apples among the nations dedicated bus drivers is wrong because it interferes with bus driver's privacy ?
There are a lot of people in this country who enjoy working conditions that were improved by the work and sacrifice of unions, and while enjoying the benefits, denigrate the unions who fought indirectly for them. But when I see a case like this, I understand that knee-jerk anti-union sentiment fully.
Just 10 days ago a former school bus driver was convicted and sent to jail for admittedly having sex with a 14 year old girl he met while transporting her and also had non-sexual inappropriate relationships with other young girls he met while driving.
http://www.abqjournal.com/north/319080north_news03-09-05.htm
Now remember, I'm not saying any but a truly tiny percentage of bus drivers would be in this category of sleazy criminals, but as this bus driver goes off to his well-deserved prison sentence, the victim is filing her civil suit ... and you know who one of the defendants is, of course, the school district who employed the errant driver.
Wonder what they would pay now if they had thought to have a record, admissible in court, of when and where this guy was every minute he had control of their bus and authority over their students. Sorry for the negative tone today, hats are off to the Lee County School District and I promise to scare up some good news for tomorrow's entry, I do, I really do.
Dave
http://www.satviz.com/
http://www.abc-7.com/articles/readnews.asp?articleid=2594&z=2&p=
It looks like the school district here is trying to do the right thing, but instead of looking at safety for their own driver members and safety for children (which in my naive' "outside looking in" perspective I thought was the overriding principle in pupil transportation), the driver's union is on the warpath, stirring up the TV stations and complaining about the "invasion of driver's privacy". Excuse me? You want to put 40 or 50 children on a bus and drive off at your own discretion and have privacy?
Didn't Florida just tragically lose a 9 year-old girl to a sexual predator? And a proven method to make children and drivers safer, to reward good drivers and to eliminate the few bad apples among the nations dedicated bus drivers is wrong because it interferes with bus driver's privacy ?
There are a lot of people in this country who enjoy working conditions that were improved by the work and sacrifice of unions, and while enjoying the benefits, denigrate the unions who fought indirectly for them. But when I see a case like this, I understand that knee-jerk anti-union sentiment fully.
Just 10 days ago a former school bus driver was convicted and sent to jail for admittedly having sex with a 14 year old girl he met while transporting her and also had non-sexual inappropriate relationships with other young girls he met while driving.
http://www.abqjournal.com/north/319080north_news03-09-05.htm
Now remember, I'm not saying any but a truly tiny percentage of bus drivers would be in this category of sleazy criminals, but as this bus driver goes off to his well-deserved prison sentence, the victim is filing her civil suit ... and you know who one of the defendants is, of course, the school district who employed the errant driver.
Wonder what they would pay now if they had thought to have a record, admissible in court, of when and where this guy was every minute he had control of their bus and authority over their students. Sorry for the negative tone today, hats are off to the Lee County School District and I promise to scare up some good news for tomorrow's entry, I do, I really do.
Dave
http://www.satviz.com/
Media team who "gets" GPS
So many of today's media seem oblivious to what GPS and tracking really is. This just irks me no end, since in many cases GPS has been around longer than the writer-reporter has been, the writer probably has more education than I have, and, at the practical level, GPS is just not that hard to get. Anyway, rant switch off, here's a news team who did a good job:
http://www.wbir.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=23766
Many people think GPS has been tracking prisoners for years. truth be known the 'ankle bracelets' so popular and widely known for years are just proximity devices. The bracelets send signals to a base station, normally mounted near the monitored person's phone. If the monitored person leaves the proximity of the base station, the base station dials the monitoring agency and provides them the incredibly useful news that the monitoree is no longer there.
If a person came to me with a business plan to build and sell such a limited system I'd fall out of my chair laughing .. it's about as useful as a two-wheeled tricycle. real GPS devices like the WBIR news team profiled actually track where people are ... seems somewhat more useful to law enforcement from a non-law enforcement person's perspective.
The TV report clearly illustrates web-based monitoring, including the use of a GPS-related technology called "geofencing". law enforcement can draw a 'fence' around places that the monitoree should not be (like maybe schools for sex offenders) and around places that a person should be, like perhaps work places for a work-release monitoree (or a school for parents to monitor their teens, but he that is a different rant).
Very nice job by the WBIR team and if this post mostly seems like Chinese, you should visit the link and see how well it's explained.
Dave
http://www.satviz.com/
http://www.wbir.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=23766
Many people think GPS has been tracking prisoners for years. truth be known the 'ankle bracelets' so popular and widely known for years are just proximity devices. The bracelets send signals to a base station, normally mounted near the monitored person's phone. If the monitored person leaves the proximity of the base station, the base station dials the monitoring agency and provides them the incredibly useful news that the monitoree is no longer there.
If a person came to me with a business plan to build and sell such a limited system I'd fall out of my chair laughing .. it's about as useful as a two-wheeled tricycle. real GPS devices like the WBIR news team profiled actually track where people are ... seems somewhat more useful to law enforcement from a non-law enforcement person's perspective.
The TV report clearly illustrates web-based monitoring, including the use of a GPS-related technology called "geofencing". law enforcement can draw a 'fence' around places that the monitoree should not be (like maybe schools for sex offenders) and around places that a person should be, like perhaps work places for a work-release monitoree (or a school for parents to monitor their teens, but he that is a different rant).
Very nice job by the WBIR team and if this post mostly seems like Chinese, you should visit the link and see how well it's explained.
Dave
http://www.satviz.com/
18 March 2005
Changing the Law Just Made It Worse
Today I saw some troubling new news regarding the Federal Hours Of Service (HOS) regulations for commercial trucking. The law was changed at the beginning of the year, with wrenching results to some areas of the industry. The reason for the change in the law was trumpeted as a step to reduce drivers working too many hours and having fatigue and sleep related accidents. Well, as recorded in the Electric Trucker http://www.thetrucker.com/stories/03_05/0315_more_drowsy.html
Not only are more drivers suffering drowsiness and sleep incidents at the wheel, but at least 25% are violating the law, to drive longer, make more money and put themselves and others at risk. For years the law has been enforced by self-recorded paper log books, maintained by the drivers themselves. See an excellent example and explanation here:
http://www.alanburkhart.com/TruckersHours.html
It's no coincidence that for years these books have carried the name "swindle sheets". Sometimes this appellation is earned by cheating people but much more often it's a case of everything being so darned complicated and hard to check up on. You would think, giving the huge costs and serious safety issues involved that this would be handled by computers. Well, you'd be wrong. Exactly 1 (yes one) major long haul carrier keeps their drivers safe and legal solely by means of on-board GPS tracking and a computerized log program. (The company is Werner Enterprises and their GPS tracking partner, Qualcomm, and hats off to them for doing it). There are tons of logging programs that keep the "swindle Sheet" electronically, but the data is still dependent on the drivers memory, integrity and ability to code with the ever more complex regulations.
The purpose of today's rant is to wonder why more companies don't make use of simple, cheap GPS logging systems that could save lives and millions of dollars per year? Perhaps they are waiting for even more government regulations?
Dave
www.satviz.com
Not only are more drivers suffering drowsiness and sleep incidents at the wheel, but at least 25% are violating the law, to drive longer, make more money and put themselves and others at risk. For years the law has been enforced by self-recorded paper log books, maintained by the drivers themselves. See an excellent example and explanation here:
http://www.alanburkhart.com/TruckersHours.html
It's no coincidence that for years these books have carried the name "swindle sheets". Sometimes this appellation is earned by cheating people but much more often it's a case of everything being so darned complicated and hard to check up on. You would think, giving the huge costs and serious safety issues involved that this would be handled by computers. Well, you'd be wrong. Exactly 1 (yes one) major long haul carrier keeps their drivers safe and legal solely by means of on-board GPS tracking and a computerized log program. (The company is Werner Enterprises and their GPS tracking partner, Qualcomm, and hats off to them for doing it). There are tons of logging programs that keep the "swindle Sheet" electronically, but the data is still dependent on the drivers memory, integrity and ability to code with the ever more complex regulations.
The purpose of today's rant is to wonder why more companies don't make use of simple, cheap GPS logging systems that could save lives and millions of dollars per year? Perhaps they are waiting for even more government regulations?
Dave
www.satviz.com
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