Actually, it does show where the trucks are. Well, at least the trucks in the owner's fleet, anyway. It won't from that link because you're not logged in on the OwnerWeb (that's why you get the time-out request error). I don't know, but I would imagine that when it becomes live on the DriverWeb that at least that particular driver's truck would show up.
When you log in to the OwnerWeb and look at the maps, it will show all of that owner's trucks. What is should show is the location of all of the trucks, same as dispatch can see (well, probably not the truck numbers, tho, that would be an insane invasion of privacy). Knowing where the other trucks are located would be actual information that we can actually use to better position ourselves, and thus, the fleet. We need to know how many and where they are on a board, as well as how many are en route to a given board, either by being on a load or by being sent there in an empty move. The way it is now, everyone will end up being bunched together at the same few locations, or within a rather small radius, where if we knew where the others were, we could avoid bunching up like that, putting more trucks even closer to the freight.
We also need to be able to tell the computer if we are going to move, on our own, to another board, and then send an arrival macro when we get there, which will let the computer know to give one less truck an empty move to that board, and will greatly mitigate the problem of dropping to the bottom of the board as long as other authorized trucks keep rolling in who were sent there because the computer didn't know you were en route. Con-Way NOW had a macro for both the driver-initiated move, as well as the arrival to that board. You simply typed in the city and state (spelling mattered, cause if you spell it wrong the computer won't know where yer goin'), and it worked great. The computer can make better decisions if it has all the information it needs. Just like us.
I don't know if we need to know the location of every truck in the nation, but certainly all of the trucks on the board we are currently on, the board we've been authorized to go to, and the immediate adjacent boards to the authorized board. If I'm in Richmond, VA I could care less how may trucks there are in El Paso or where they are located, but I'd sure like to know where they are in Raleigh, Suffolk and Baltimore, not to mention the other ones in Richmond.
I'd be shocked it they give us this information, however, but it's precisely the kind of information a Fleet Manager at the carrier would require, and since we are self-positioning we'd need the same information. This is but one small part of the major fundamental flaws of the new board system. The most glaring of these is the absolute need to have all of the boards be a 120 mile diameter circle. Most of the boards probably should be that way, but there should be several that are only 100 miles, or 80 miles in diameter. Louisville and Lexington, for example, should each have its own board, and be about a 100 mile radius board. Likewise Cincinnati. And I promise you, we do not need a 120 mile diameter board in Williamsport, PA. We need smaller boards in Harrisburg and Wilkes-Barre, instead. The Williamsport board takes into account the radius mileage only, but completely ignores the extended drives times around that part of the state. Two smaller boards could account for that.
The Detroit board needs to be smaller, and Toledo needs it's own smaller board. Instead of trying to cover the entire state of Michigan with two large boards in Detroit and Lansing, we need about 5 boards in that state with 60-80 mile diameters each, otherwise we're just laying a foundation for unnecessary and time-wasting deadhead all around.
