School bus GPS tracking: how to tell real-time from a position log

5 min read

Every school ERP claims GPS transport tracking. Most of them mean a table of coordinates written every few minutes that a member of office staff can open a report to read.

That satisfies a tender requirement and helps nobody. Here's how to tell during a demo which one you're being shown.

Ask who can see it

This one question separates real tracking from a compliance feature faster than anything else. If the answer is "the transport in-charge can view it in the admin console", you're buying a log.

The person who needs the information is the parent standing at a stop wondering whether to keep a six-year-old outside in the rain. If they can't see it on their phone, the feature has not reduced a single phone call to your office — which was the actual problem you were solving.

Ask for the refresh interval, and watch the screen

"Real-time" is used loosely. Ask for the number, then watch the map during the demo. A vehicle that jumps between positions every two minutes is being polled; one that moves continuously is being streamed.

For a parent deciding when to walk to a stop, a two-minute-old position on a bus in traffic can be most of a kilometre wrong.

Ask whether stops are records or just pins

A route should be a structured record — an ordered list of defined stops — not a freehand line on a map. That's what makes arrival and departure into events you can act on, rather than something a driver phones in.

Geofencing around each stop is what turns "the bus is somewhere near here" into "the bus has reached this stop". Without it you have a moving dot and no events.

Ask what happens to the fee when a route changes

Transport is usually a billed component. If your transport module and your fee module don't know about each other, every route change becomes a manual billing correction — and the corrections that get missed are the ones you hear about from a parent.

Ask to see a student moved between routes, and then ask to see their fee. If that takes two systems, you've found a source of ongoing work.

The short version

Ask who can see the map, ask for the refresh interval and watch it, and ask what happens to the fee when a route changes. Three questions, and they're hard to answer well without a real implementation.

More from the blog

Book a demo