It’s only natural for parents to worry about their children anytime they’re out of sight. When the school bus doesn’t arrive on time, it’s hard not to imagine the worst.
Parents have good reason to worry – according to ABC News, school bus crashes send about 17,000 kids to the emergency room every year.
But when a school bus doesn’t arrive on time, it’s usually because of traffic rather than an accident.
USD 457, a school district in Garden City, Kansas, adopted a school bus tracking app a couple years ago in order to solve this problem. Many others have started investing in vehicle tracking as well.
Indeed, there are many benefits of school bus tracking, which we will detail below.
#1 Quickly Identify And Address Problems
GPS tracking software gives you the ability to monitor your buses and drivers on a map in real time. If a bus gets stuck or breaks down, you’ll know about it immediately, so you can help resolve the problem and get the bus back on track as soon as possible.
#2 Plan Better Routes
The best school bus tracking solutions help you plan routes and track vehicles all with one piece of software.
In fact, with Route4Me, you can plan accurate and efficient routes in 30 seconds or less while accounting for weather, construction, and many other factors. And with Route4Me’s traffic prediction feature, you won’t need to worry about your school buses getting stuck in traffic.
Better routes mean your school bus drivers will be able to pick up and drop off students on time more often. This improved performance is sure to work wonders for your reputation.
#3 Control Speeding
Speeding is incredibly reckless and often leads to accidents. Even if no students are hurt in an accident, you’ll still need to deal with vehicle repairs and increased insurance premiums.
A real-time school bus tracking app will help you prevent this dangerous driving behavior. That’s because, in addition to recording location, it also records speed. You’ll know when your drivers are speeding, so you’ll know exactly when to tell them to stop.
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#4 Avoid Unnecessary Delays
Traffic isn’t the only thing that can delay your school bus drivers. There might be a particular stop on a route that takes more time than the others for some reason, which would throw your driver off schedule and waste a lot of gas.
A good bus tracking app will have a reporting and analytics feature. You can use that to identify problem stops and figure out how to fix them.
#5 Stay On Top Of Vehicle Maintenance
Poorly maintained vehicles have a higher risk of breaking down and are less fuel-efficient than vehicles that are in good shape.
Tracking systems make vehicle maintenance a breeze. The reporting and analytics feature shows you the total distance covered, stops completed, stops made per day, and many other helpful stats. This data will help you keep track of when it’s time to take a bus to the shop for a check-up.
#6 Maintain School Bus Attendance
If your drivers also have the responsibility of recording attendance, then a school bus tracking app will make their job much easier.
Using pen and paper for this task is a bad system, as physical writing materials are easy to lose. With an app, you can automatically save attendance information to the cloud.
#7 Keep Parents Updated
Perhaps the greatest benefit of a school bus tracking app is that it allows you to give parents some peace of mind.
Route4Me has a customer portal that parents can use to monitor the status of the school bus they’re waiting on. You can easily send parents the login details for this portal through text or email.
The portal has an access restriction feature, so you can decide how much information you want to reveal to the parents. For example, you can choose whether or not to share the driver’s identity.
Route4Me also comes with a customer alerting and notification feature that will automatically send notifications to the parents when the school bus is about to arrive.
So, do you now realize the importance of GPS tracking school buses? Have you ever explored any school bus tracking solutions? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.
Finally, answering these three questions correctly will confirm that you understand the benefits of a school bus tracking app:
- How does a school bus locator help you keep your vehicles in top condition?
- How does tracking your school buses improve safety?
- How can real-time GPS tracking help you control speeding?
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