GPS tracking for waste haulers: tie it to your routes, and connect the tracker you already have

What plain GPS shows you

Most tracking screens answer one question well: where is the truck? A dot on a map, a trail behind it, a speed, and whether it is moving or stopped. Over a day that adds up to miles driven, time on the road, and how long the truck sat at each place.

That is useful. It finds a truck when a customer calls. It shows when a truck left the yard and when it came back. It shows a long stop where there should not be one.

What it does not show is the work. A trail on its own cannot tell you whether the truck drove the route it was given. To answer that, someone has to hold the trail up against the route by eye, one truck at a time, and know every route well enough to see what is missing. With a dozen routes out, that rarely happens.

What GPS tied to the planned route shows

Put the planned route and the GPS trail on the same map and the question changes. Not “where is the truck?” but “is the truck running its route?”

How much of the route was driven

A planned route is a line on real streets. Lay the day’s GPS trail over that line and you can measure how much of it the truck actually covered. A finished route should show nearly all of its line driven. A route still half undriven at 3 p.m., when it is usually close to done, is worth a call before the truck comes back, not after a customer does.

The measure needs some slack. GPS.gov puts a GPS-enabled phone’s typical accuracy at 4.9 meters (16 feet) under open sky, and notes that accuracy gets worse near buildings, bridges and trees, where signals are blocked or reflected off walls. A fair comparison counts the truck as on the route when it passes close to the line, not only when it sits exactly on it.

Trucks moving with no route

A truck that drives on a day it has no route is easy to miss when you only look at routes. Tied to the plan, it stands out on its own: GPS activity with no route. Sometimes it is a spare covering for a truck in the shop. Sometimes it is a run nobody wrote down. Either way, you want to know.

A day replayed beside the plan

The past is where tracking tied to a plan pays off most. Pick a day and a truck, and replay it at speed beside the route it was meant to run. Where it left the route and where it came back. Where it sat. Whether it went to the dump when the plan said it would.

Side by side, the plan’s numbers and the GPS numbers tell the day in a few lines:

• When the truck was planned to leave and come back, and when it did.
• Planned hours against hours on duty.
• Planned driving time against time moving, and time stopped, with the longest single stop.
• Planned miles against miles driven.

Camera footage at the moment you are looking at

Many trucks carry a dashcam on the same unit as the GPS. Where the unit has a camera, a replay can lead straight to the footage from that moment: the road ahead where the truck left its route, or the cab during a long stop. Where the unit has no camera, there is nothing to show.

What GPS cannot tell you

GPS shows where the truck was. It does not show that a container was emptied. A truck can pass a stop without lifting it, or service a stop from the next street over. That is why a trail works best beside the driver’s own mark on each stop: serviced, skipped or blocked. Two records that agree are strong. Two that disagree are the ones to look at.

Data can also arrive late or have gaps. Positions recorded where the truck had no signal can come in after it is back in coverage, and tracker makers’ own documentation notes that location history can miss points lost to connectivity problems. A day that looks short at 4 p.m. may fill in by evening. Look at a finished day again before drawing conclusions from it.

Why keep the tracker you already have

Swapping trackers to get route-aware tracking is the expensive way to do it. The units are installed and wired. Drivers are used to them. Cameras are mounted and aimed. Each truck’s history lives in that tracker’s account, and the shop may use its app for diagnostics or maintenance.

Route-aware tracking does not need a new device. It needs the positions your trucks already report, read from the tracker maker’s interface and laid over your routes. The tracker keeps doing its job. The route system adds the comparison.

What connecting a tracker involves

Connecting has two parts: access, and matching devices to trucks.

Access

Each tracker maker offers an interface for other software to read positions. Access is set up in the tracker’s account, not on the truck, and the details differ by maker. Samsara issues API tokens from its dashboard settings, and a token can be limited to certain vehicles, by tag, and to certain kinds of data. Verizon Connect pairs a dedicated integration username and password with an application ID, and the sign-in it hands back lasts 20 minutes, so the connected system signs in again as it needs to.

Treat these credentials like a key to your fleet’s location history. Give them only to software you trust. Keep them out of email and text threads. Prefer a system that stores them where no screen shows them again. Once they are entered, the first thing to do is a test that signs in and lists the devices on the account. If the list is empty or wrong, stop there.

Matching devices to trucks

The tracker knows devices. Your routes know trucks. Each device has to be tied to the truck it is in. That matching is usually the slowest part of a setup, and the place mistakes hide.

Most fleets already have what is needed to match: the name or number the device carries in the tracker, the plate, an asset ID, or the fleet number on the door. A careful match:

• Suggests a truck only when one device fits one truck, and that truck fits only that device. An ambiguous pair is left for a person.
• Never moves an existing link on its own. It only fills gaps.
• Lets someone review every suggestion before anything is saved, then saves them together, so a half-matched fleet is never left behind.
• Flags a truck linked to a device the tracker no longer lists, which usually means the unit was swapped.

Keep it one device to one truck. When a unit moves to a different truck, change the link the same day, or a replay will show one truck’s day under another truck’s name.

TrackNow, connected for you

RouteNow’s TrackNow works this way. It reads your trucks from Verizon Connect, Samsara or Tracksolid today, with more trackers on the way, and RouteNow connects it for you: we enter the tracker’s sign-in, and each of your devices is suggested beside the truck it most likely is, for you to accept. Then every truck shows live, any past day replays beside its route, and where a truck’s unit has a camera, its footage opens from the same screen. MobileNow puts a simpler TrackNow on a phone: find a truck, and see where it is and where it has been.