School Transportation

Quick and effective School Bus AVL, no matter your situation

TruFleet™ for School Transportation makes it easy to keep track of your buses, keep parents and schools informed, and keep children safe. If you are running a fleet of school buses, you are in charge of some very “precious cargo”. This adds significant emphasis on knowing where those buses are at any time, as well as understanding how the bus is being driven. Parents want to know where their child’s bus is too. If you can get that information, then why shouldn’t you be able to pass that information on to them … automatically?

Features and Benefits for Fleet Managers

Higher Resolution, lower cost AVL Tracking

Enable simple, precise tracking and monitoring of activity, speed, maintenance, mileage and more and at all times. No matter what network you use, LMR or LTE-M, TALLYMATICS lowers bandwidth requirements while delivering higher, audit friendly resolution using our patented Contrails compression algorithm. Contrails delivers 12x the geo-tracking resolution compared to uncompressed solutions

Network Flexibility – LMR (TW200, TW5344, TW5744) and LTE-M (TW400)

It’s not just about what you prefer, its a matter of what you have. You may have a good LMR network, but coverage might not be complete across an entire school district, and cellular is. Conversely, you may not have good cellular coverage, therefore you HAVE to deploy LMR. We work with both scenarios, and indeed you can have LMR based devices and cellular devices reporting to TruFleet simultaneously, therefore ensuring that no school bus is compromised anywhere in your district. The best part is that local two-radio dealers are well equipped to manage both types of network solution, and therefore make great partners!

The Best AVL Interface, Reports and Notifications

Tallymatics has designed TruFleet with simplicity and ease of use in mind. TruFleet has the best User Interface, focusing on getting the job done as quickly as possible. On top of that, TruFleet comes with a library of appropriate reports that allow facilitate analysis, from scheduling maintenance to monitoring “Trips, Stops and Idles”. Multiple events and event combinations trigger alarms and notifications to management.

Rapid Deployment

There are a lot of solutions out there, and they can be quite “heavy “and complex (which often adds to the cost) albeit with many useful bells and whistles. The downside is the effort it takes to roll out such a solution. The entry level Tallymatics solution is easy to get up and running, including extending functionality to providing parents with the most essential information they need: “where is my child’s bus?”.

Tallymatics’ in-vehicle devices are easy to install and manage. TW400’s can be activated and managed remotely via the cloud-based TallyManager, and the capability of the TW400’s built-in GNSS antenna and LTE-M transceivers make it particularly tolerant to installation placement. Vehicle connection and power is as simple as plugging into the On Board Diagnostic port. Parental tracking is simple: Each parent gets a unique login on the TruFleet website and can see the vehicles they have been given access to right in their browser (whether desktop or mobile). TruFleet autosizes nicely.

Keep track of Bus Events with Digital Inputs (TW400, TW200, TW5344, TW5744)

Sprite TW400 has 4 digital inputs, programmable active high or low, allowing remote tracking and observation of the state of bus equipment such as:

  • Door Open/Close
  • 8-Way Light On/Off
  • End of trip seat check systems like Child Check Mate System®
  • Crossing Gate Up/Down

The state of a particular input can be tracked on the TruFleet Route Replay, showing the state throughout the trip. Reports for each input for each bus can also be created and viewed. There are input restrictions, therefore it is necessary to decide which types of status update is more important.

The TW200 for MotoTRBO applications has 2 digital inputs, and the TW5x44 smart antenna for Tait applications has 1 digital input.

3 Outputs for notification in the Vehicle (TW400)

Sprite TW400 has 3 digital outputs that can be used to sound piezo-electric buzzers, turn on warning lights or any other mechanism for alerting vehicle operators for situations such as:

  • Poor Driving Behavior
  • Failure to present driver ID
  • Dangerous road conditions ahead

Emergency Button (TW400)

Safety is a major consideration when your children are involved. If there is a problem, there are multiple ways in which a driver can alert management to a problem. But there should ALWAYS be a tried and true method to notify management … right on the system being used to track the vehicle day in and out. Key requirements are:

  • Rapid, distinct notification
  • Accurate, persistent location information
  • An error resistant mechanism

With TALLYMATICS emergency feature, when an emergency is triggered (with a programmable depression debounce), the TW400 will send an Emergency event notification to TruFleet and enter an emergency state.  While in an emergency state the TW400/200 ignores the ignition signal and remains continuously active and report location updates until the emergency state has been cleared by an authorized user. 

The Emergency status is presented to the fleet operator visually within TruFleet using event notification pop-ups and a color change of the vehicle ID bar in the vehicle list.  When configured, email notifications will be sent indicating the emergency event.  

On Board Diagnostics – Keep the Buses running (TW400)

You’ve got light duty and heavy duty buses. You need to know when there is a problem so you can take proactive measures to ensure an issue does not escalate into something worse. You also want to keep a watchful eye on the maintenance schedules of your vehicles … and you don’t want to depend on your bus drivers to inform you when the Malfunction Indicator Lamp comes on. TALLYMATICS Sprite TW400 connects to the bus On Board Diagnostic port, J1979 light duty OR J1939 heavy duty, to give you important information about a MIL coming on, Diagnostic Trouble Codes that result from the MIL and parameters such as engine hours of operation, fuel levels etc.

Capability Expansion – Third Party Integrations and more…

Tallymatics School Bus solution enables a rapid launch of a school bus tracking service with the minimal configuration: Straight AVL, Driver ID, Driver Behaviour, Emergency Button, Child Checkmate, Theftmate, Parental Portal and OBD. But you may want more. You may want to interface to a new software package that has been recommended by the wider jurisdiction (state, province or municipality) for fleet maintenance and driver management. No problem. The Tallymatics AVL platform is designed to be added to: in the vehicle with hardware such as RFID readers, and in the cloud via the TallyBroker Application Programming Interface (API), which makes information available to other software applications in an industry standard manner. You can move forward without waiting and be comfortable that there is a path forward for future capability you may want to add. And confidentially …. we have a lot of plans for the future!

Features and Benefits for Parents