Protecting Vital Supply Chains in a Time of Crisis: Keeping Truckers Informed with 511 Ontario’s Trucker Mode
Date
April 16, 2020
The current global pandemic has prompted the temporary paralysis of critical sectors of the global economy. While the pause is necessary, it does not preclude the need for basic provisions, including food, household goods and medicine. In North America, truckers have provided the backbone of this supply chain, traversing the continent and completing deliveries with comforting regularity. IBI Group is supporting the Ontario government in its efforts to keep these vital supplies in transit via our Travel-IQ product, a cloud-based platform that allows customers to seamlessly travel and plan trips across jurisdictions and countries.
IBI Group worked with the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) to provide truckers a real-time resource within its existing 511 ON web application, which provides valuable traffic information to road users across the province. With the addition of our Trucker Mode feature, the MTO is now able to connect truckers to essential touch points along their transit routes, including service stations and rest stops that will remain open for business throughout the crisis.
Building on the success of these enhancements, we worked with the province to deploy a mobile application compatible with iOS and Android devices. The newly released app offers a number of innovative features, including a hands-free drive mode, and provides commercial drivers access to critical information such as seasonal load restrictions and truck rest areas. Alongside the MTO, our team worked swiftly to deploy the new web feature and mobile application, and we’re proud to contribute to the Province’s broader effort to respond to the crisis.
Our Trucker Mode feature offers significant, longterm benefits to commercial vehicle drivers, within and beyond the current pandemic; it allows operators to toggle the viewing preference on the map page to emphasize trucker information and automatically displays all relevant trucking information. Our Travel-IQ platform offers a number of additional features, including one that allows commercial vehicle operators to enter a destination and uses their origin, destination and truck dimensions to obtain the optimal route.
To learn more about IBI Group’s Travel-IQ product and our new Trucker Mode feature, please contact Traveller Information Systems Director, Geoff Carter at gcarter@IBIGroup.com.
