Driver Connect

The problem

Once a bus leaves the yard, the office is blind. Did the run start on time? Was that stop serviced or driven past? Radio calls answer one question at a time, and only for whoever thought to ask.

The pre-trip inspection is the sharper version of the same problem. It is a legal requirement and a genuine safety check, and it is also a paper sheet that can be filled in on Friday for the whole week from memory. Everyone knows this. The paperwork cannot tell the difference.

What Driver Connect does

A driver signs in with a PIN and confirms which vehicle they are actually in — which sounds trivial until the record has to say what was inspected.

The inspection comes first, and it is enforced. Checklists are driven from templates, signed on the screen, and a run cannot be started until the inspection for it is complete. The tablet’s flashlight is built into the flow, because a proper walk-around happens in the dark half the year. Defects raised in the cab go straight to the shop rather than onto a sheet that arrives next week.

Then the run. Stops appear in sequence with a map, position is recorded continuously, and arrivals are detected automatically, so the boarding log is built from what happened rather than what was planned. Boarding can be recorded by scan at the door.

Rural coverage is not a solved problem, so the app assumes it will lose signal. Everything is written to a local database first and synced when there is a connection — a driver in a dead zone loses nothing and does not have to think about it.

Field trips appear in the same app, so a driver doing a trip instead of a run is not working from a printout.

How it is built

Flutter for Android, running on Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 5 rugged tablets, with a local Drift database so the app works fully offline and syncs when it can. It talks to Registration Connect and Trip Connect over a REST API.