Live van tracking

Bellmeir turns every school van into a calm, live experience for parents, a moving bus on a map, a clear view of how many stops away it is, and a happy "boarded" alert. Here's how the whole thing works.

How it works

The system has three sides that work together in real time:

• The driver's phone shares the van's location every few seconds while a route is active
• Parents see that location on a live map, with the marker smoothly gliding between updates (never teleporting)
• The office sees every active van on one map in the web console

What parents see

Vans pick up door to door: each family pins their own home, so there is no walking to a shared stop and no guessing which corner the van means. On the parent app home screen, the live van card shows the bus, the route and how close it is. Open the full-screen map for the complete view:

• The bus marker moving along the road in real time
• Your child's own pickup pin, with an arrival time when we can compute one and a stops-away view otherwise
• The road the van will actually take, not a straight line between points
• A clear status: on the way, at your door, on board, or dropped
• A Call driver button that opens the dialer

What drivers do

The driver taps Start route once and hands the whole run to Google Maps, so they navigate in the app they already know. Tracking keeps running in the background, and each child is marked straight from the notification, without switching back and forth at every house. Before a run can be closed, the app shows the driver anyone still unmarked. See the Driver app guide for details.

What the office sees

In the web console under Transport → Live, the office sees a full-screen map with every active van, plus how much of the roster has been marked on each run ("24 of 28 marked"). Transport → Boarding register keeps every past run: who boarded, who was not at their pickup, who nobody recorded, and the exact times. When a parent calls to ask about last Tuesday, it is a ten second lookup.

Alerts explained

Families are told the things that matter, as phone notifications on Android and in the app everywhere. Each pairs a colour with an icon and words, never colour alone:

• Boarded, the driver marked your child on board, with the time
• Nobody was at the pickup, the van reached your door and found no one. This is the one you want to hear immediately, and it is sent as an observation the driver made, never as a judgement about your child
• Dropped off, at school in the morning, at home in the afternoon
• Nearly there, sent once as the van closes in, so nobody stands outside in the sun or the rain

Privacy & safety

Tracking is designed to reassure, not to over-share.

• A van only broadcasts while a route is active, never outside trip hours
• Parents see only their own child. Another family cannot open your child's van, your pickup pin or your address
• Every mark is kept with who recorded it and when, so a question months later has a real answer
• Boarding logs are kept separate from academic attendance, a child marked "boarded" is not affected in their class register, and vice versa
• Students are matched to a van and the assignment is confirmed by the parent

Troubleshooting

• "Van hasn't started yet", the driver hasn't tapped Start route. Tracking begins when they do.
• The marker is greyed with a timestamp, the connection dropped; you're seeing the last known position. It resumes automatically.
• No van shows for my child, your child may not be assigned to a van yet. Contact the school office.