So following on from the previous blog post, i fitted the new and improved GPS trackers on our 3* 8 freight cargo bikes this week.
The live tracking has been fantastic, being able to see where your riders are in real time is a great thing from my perspective, it’s standard practise with traditional car/van couriers so i believe it improves our service greatly to compete with them at the professional level, i’ve included some points at the bottom as to why but want to move on to talk about the distance and Co2We’ve covered a pretty big distance between all three bikes of 233 miles this week displayed below, it would of been more but we knocked the antenna lose on Tuesday on one of the gps units and had to fix it and on thursday the unit fell into a pharmacy box and got delivered to a client near the start of the round, at least by the time he got back it was easy to find it again thoughTaking the distance, i just have to find out the per mile co2 emitted by a van to give a very simplistic savings idea. 233 miles to km is 375 km rounded up.
A diesel class 1 van is our most realistic comparison, due to it being the most popular and most likely van we will replace and literally replace, woodlands pharmacy and Gatineau both used diesel class 1’s before we replace them with our service. Goverment figures are pretty good on the co2 produced per km, i’ll link the study at a later date when i find it again in our folders but i have the figure from working our rough estimates of co2 savings for clients about a year ago.
Diesel class 1 – Emits 143.4 grams of CO2 per km / Emits 1.25 grams of NO2 per km
375km * 143.4grams = 53775 grams or
53.7kg of co2 this week
468 grams of NO2 this week
COULD LEAVE IT HERE….. but
The ECF (european cycle federation) did a study on this a while ago and actually factored in a lot of detail, They worked out
•- THE PRODUCTION PHASE which includes the energy and material inputs required to manufacture the vehicle. • THE OPERATION PHASE which includes fuel production and utilisation. • THE MAINTENANCE PHASE, which includes all activity required to keep a vehicle as safe as possible on the road.
Interestingly, bike’s aren’t technically 0 emission, they produce about 16 grams of co2 per passenger km cycled (less if your vegan/veggie as food counts as the fuel) and produce about 5 grams of co2 per km cycled in the production phase so total 21 grams
Compared to a car at 229 grams per passenger km in the operational phase and 42 grams of CO2 at the production phase totalling 271 grams
Cars release 14 times the amount of CO2 of a bike. Dam i dont really have time to look into this more today, i’m off to go collect a beat up giant defy road bike for personal use but i’ll try and go further into this soon
The trackers themselves lasted 6 days without being charged which works out perfectly to quickly swap them out at the end of the week, a big improvement on our first attempt at using car trackers that only lasted 48 hours at best.
Info on how the units have improved our service too
- No longer have to wait on messages or phone calls riders might not pick up or see due to being busy or no signal etc to find out there location.
- The above makes the office side move faster, if a customer enquires where there package is, we can tell them instantly and fairly accurately how long it will be before we reach them
- having gps on the bikes themselves means we no longer have to rely on mobile phone GPS, which is wildly inaccurate and drains your phone battery like you wouldn’t believe, the phone is like molten metal in your hand.
- Improves safety, if a rider’s phone runs out of battery, hes gone dark and we don’t have a location or contact method which is not good. This gives us an alternative at least to know the rider is on the move/safe/provide there location
All in all not a bad start to this project, keen to work on getting the trackers hooked up to the dynamo’s this weekend and see how long they can stay charged for, we are aiming for 3 months of not touching them and constant data collection
Have a good weekend!
Hi, what brand of GPS trackers are you using? Thanks! =)
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Hello,
There from a great company called WRD systems, we have some of there older style trackers as we can mount them on the underside of the cargo bikes but they are developing ones to fit within the headset i believe. Our contact was a guy called Andy
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They seem to have a lot of stuff they do, any idea on the model name for the stuff you are using? Thanks.
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They don’t have any visible markings / model numbers , but give a gentleman called Andy a call and explain you’ve seen ours, he knows of our project in Oxford and that you would be interested in something similar, he’s been really helpful with ours.
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Never one to miss the chance for a shameless plug, you can find all the info for our tracker here http://wrdsystems.co.uk/geonode_datasheet.pdf
There will be a retail version available soon
Andy
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