GPS Insight provides 2 minute updates of your vehicles’ location.
We do not know the exact route the vehicle took, therefore we do not try to guess what route connected those 2 locations, 2 minutes apart.
Why?
- We could be wrong, this would give a mistaken impression about the vehicle’s activity.
- It would take 3rd party road data, which slows things down and costs more money.
- As long as we CONNECT the sequential locations with a straight line a predictable path that the vehicle took will be implied.
- The only way to get exact path data is:
- Pay roughly $40 extra per month per vehicle for an unlimited cellular data plan
- Switch to a “Passive” GPS Tracking product where the vehicle’s location is not known until data is uploaded nightly.
GPS Insight color-codes the route (starting with light green, getting progressively darker to blue) making it easy to determine the overall driver activity for the day.
Below is a sample of driver activity. Red arrows are placed along the true route taken. The green lines show how the two “pins” are connected.
Without the straight, color-coded lines, it is far less intuitive to interpret driver’s activity (uncheck “path” in the Google Earth object to get this view):
To view proper “follows the road” lines, turn them on in the standard mapping, as shown below:
Zoomed in on the same part of the day:
Due to changing road placement the 3-D enhanced version gives a better clue as to the true path:
Speed, stop location, and stop times are accurately shown.
This allows users to intuitively view the vehicles activity. It does not exactly follow the roads between points, but we find that “99% of our customers have no issue deducing what their vehicles have done for the day.”
One other consideration is quick and easy interpretation of the data available. Having routes which “snap to” the most likely route rather than “as the crow flies” may look better, but in some cases, it is easier to interpret the data as shown below, where the 4 obvious paths, with different shades and sizes help to quickly interpret the vehicle’s history. It left out at 5:51 [thin light line], came back at 7:12, left at 9:19, then came back at 10:53 for good [thick, dark line]. The order of the stops is easy to interpret due to the line color as well as the “connect the dots” way in which we draw lines between 2 minute updates.
Here is a screenshot with no markup:
In the following image, the ACTUAL (most likely) roads taken are shown and the line no longer connects 2 minute updates. This is a “cleaner” look but detracts from the user’s ability to quickly interpret the map to determine how many trips were made and which trips were made in which order.
