FLEET TRACKING, A MOBILITY MANAGEMENT TOOL Dr. Marguerite Zarrillo Background & Need Accessment Often, a key reason that low-income families, the elderly, unemployed, students and citizens with disabilities lack financial stability is due to the barrier around access to transportation. Most of the persons entering the workforce who were previously on Medicaid do not own vehicles. In addition, buses do not operate on second and third shifts. In Southeastern Massachusetts, transportation has been a constant barrier for our elderly, students, disabled and low-income persons due to its prohibitive costs. Data demonstrates 95,350 citizens in Bristol County alone are over the age of 60 years (US Census 2000) or roughly 17% of the population in the SRPEDD region and still growing. Statistics for disabled are also staggering with over 99,689 persons aged 5+ years and above disabled and 42.3% of elders disabled. 10% of the population lives below the poverty level. Benefits & Lessons Learned 1.By knowing the location of their vehicles throughout the day, providers improve the efficiency of their service to their clients. There is also the bonus of saving gasoline and maintenance costs on their vehicles. 2.Students gain an engineering learning experience with a real world problem. They also gain social and people skills through their interaction with our community partners. 3.Students recognize that there are many small transportation providers that are in need of technical assistance to deploy economical mobility management tools. 4.Students recognize that there are many people, such as the elderly and disabled, who don’t have access to transportation. 5.There is an abundance of free software and cheap hardware to help small transportation providers. 6.We looked locally: the NBCA, CCAV and DartVan had a great need for volunteers with technical skills. 7.We observed that agencies lack resources, technical skills and time to solve their technical problems. 8.Basic mobility management required two tools: fleet tracking and data management. 9.The three Transportation Providers improved their operations as a result of these two tools. 10. It’s possible to do fleet tracking in an economical way. Service Learning Project Description This is the story of engineering students performing service learning activities for three community partners who provide transportation to the underprivileged: the Community Care-a-Vans, CCAV, the New Bedford Council on Aging, NBCA,and the DartVan service on their University's campus. They designed and developed the framework of their client/driver/destination-point databases and installed software on computers in partners’ offices. Six GPS devices were deployed into six vans for the NBCA; two into the large 30-van CCAV fleet and one into the DartVan fleet. Personnel were taught how to perform the installation so that partners could take ownership. This technology enabled piloting of one simple mobility management tool, fleet tracking. Vehicles are tracked real-time with free downloadable software. Students customized the software and installed it on the GPS devices as well. Software also was developed and installed onto the server at the University. It provides free database access via the internet to these community partners. With current lower costs for fleet tracking software and hardware, implementation was financially and technologically possible. For this project, individualized web based databases were linked to a mapping decision support systems (DSS).