Every school transport in-charge knows the 7:30 a.m. phone calls: "Where is the bus?", "Has it left?", "Why is it late again?" The bus is not usually the problem. The lack of information is. TransitGuide gives schools a single place where the bus, the driver, the route and the parents are connected.
The problem: anxiety, rumour and no record
Parents cannot see the bus, so they call the office, the driver or the in-charge. Phone lines clog exactly when staff are busiest. When something does go wrong (a breakdown, a long delay, an incident) parents often hear it through other parents first.
Afterwards, complaints turn into one person's word against another's. Did the bus run late? Did it take the right route? Did it stop where it should? Without data, nobody can answer.
Live tracking guardians can open themselves
Guardians are linked to their child, and can follow the bus on a live map with its current status: moving, idle, offline or paused. For visitors and one-off cases, staff can issue a tracking link that opens a live view without any login.
The tracking page keeps the last known position on screen through a brief network blip and shows a small "couldn't refresh" note rather than going blank, which is what a parent on a patchy mobile connection actually needs.
Alerts before the bus arrives, and when something goes wrong
A guardian can subscribe to a stop and be alerted when the bus is approaching it, so a child is not standing at the roadside for twenty minutes. If a driver raises an incident, or the system detects one, linked guardians can be notified by push, SMS, email or WhatsApp depending on what the school has enabled.
Every message names the vehicle and the school instead of an internal trip ID, and shows driver and vehicle names in both English and the local language where the school has entered them.
Routes, shifts and driver assignments that match reality
Admins build routes with ordered stops and morning and afternoon shifts, and assign drivers to vehicles, routes and shifts. When a substitute driver steps in, the driver app suggests the assigned vehicle, route and shift and warns on a mismatch. Route mining can also propose routes and stops from what drivers actually drove, for the transport in-charge to approve.
A trip is deliberately one shift. When a driver is due to start the afternoon run, the app nudges them at the shift boundary so morning and afternoon data stay separate.
Proof when a complaint or a regulator asks
Each trip stores timestamped GPS points with accuracy information, and admins can replay the trip on a map. State changes such as trip start, pause, stop and incident acknowledgement are written to an audit log. Speed thresholds raise alerts, and a driver-behaviour report summarises harsh braking and similar events. On higher plans, compliance exports and immutable incident history are available for boards and inspections.
- Trip replay with timestamps instead of recollections
- Audit log of trip and incident changes
- Driver behaviour and speed alerts
- Exportable records on plans that include compliance export
Frequently asked questions
Do parents need an account to see the bus?
Parents linked to a child use the passenger web or mobile experience. Staff can also share a tracking link that works without a login for visitors.
What happens if the driver's phone loses signal?
The driver app queues location data on the device and uploads it when the connection returns, so a dead zone leaves a gap in live view but not in the trip record.
Can names appear in the local language?
Yes. Drivers, vehicles, routes, stops, shifts and passengers can carry a local-language name next to the English one.