Live transport tracking for parents

What families actually see during a bus run, where the position comes from, and why the map goes quiet outside duty hours.

Operations guide for day and boarding schools.

Last updated August 29, 2026

Live tracking answers one narrow question for a family: is the bus near our stop right now. What they see is assembled from three things - the trip the school opened for today, the boarding events recorded for their child, and the most recent position reported by the person on duty. Each of those has to exist for the picture to be complete.

When a position and a geocoded stop are both available, the view also estimates arrival. Distance is straight-line, and speed is the reported device speed clamped to a sensible range, falling back to about twenty kilometres per hour. Within eighty metres of the stop, or five hundred metres in the general case, the bus is described as approaching rather than given a time.

Prerequisites for a useful family view

The student has an active transport assignment to a stop on the route
The stop has latitude and longitude, otherwise there is no distance and no arrival estimate
A vehicle is linked to the route and to a driver profile, so today trips can be created
The person on duty opens the duty screen and allows location access in their browser

What families see

Element	Condition
Live position and freshness	Only while the trip is in progress
Distance and rough arrival	Only when the assigned stop has coordinates
Delay note	Only when staff recorded delay minutes on the trip
Boarding and drop status	Once the person on duty marks the child
Ride skip for the day	When a skip was recorded for that date and trip type

Limits

Boarding marks made during the run are the durable record. Live position is operational and short-lived, but who boarded and who was dropped is kept for years and is what the office falls back on when a family disputes a pickup.

No integration with third-party fleet trackers or SIM-based devices
Arrival estimates ignore roads, traffic, and the remaining stop order; they are straight-line distance over an assumed speed
Only the assigned driver for that vehicle, or transport back-office staff, may start a duty or post a position

Common questions

Quick answers in plain language.

Where does the bus position come from?+

The browser geolocation of whoever is running the duty, posted while the trip is in progress. There is no hardware GPS tracker integration, so if the driver does not open the duty screen there is no position.

Why does the parent view show no location?+

Live location is returned only while a trip is IN_PROGRESS. Posting a position to a trip that has not started, or has finished, is rejected with 409. Outside those windows families see the day context but no dot on a map.

What does the stale marker mean?+

The last position is more than two minutes old. It usually means the driver lost signal or closed the screen; the reading is still shown, flagged as stale, rather than being hidden.

How long is location history kept?+

Thirty days by default, adjustable with TRANSPORT_GPS_RETENTION_DAYS, and the purge only runs if you schedule scripts/run-school-cron.sh with FEES_CRON_SECRET. Boarding events are kept far longer, defaulting to two years.