Editor's Note: Today's blog features Eric Rosenfeld, Vice President of Engineering and Owain Hickey, Senior Product Manager at EverDriven. They share how EverDriven is using Google Maps Platform Mobility services to help deliver on its mission of opening doors to a brighter future for every student, every community, every day— one ride at a time.
The traditional “yellow bus model” of school transport doesn’t work for every student. EverDriven is building a modern, flexible solution for the significant portion of students who require a different kind of transport—such as those with wheelchair access needs or different pickup and drop-off locations.
Our technology is core to delivering on our mission of opening doors to a brighter future for every student, every community, every day—one ride at a time. By investing in high-quality technology, we can provide a transparent, highly visible, and human-centered experience for drivers, caregivers, and educators alike. This commitment allows us to meet the evolving expectations of our customers and reset the bar for student transportation.
Our previous maps infrastructure made it challenging to keep up with both our school district, caregiver and driver needs. This led to support calls from people simply asking for driver and passenger locations. We knew that by providing more accurate, real-time data, we could improve efficiency and build stronger relationships across our users. Our drivers were already asking for Google Maps in app reviews, which, along with the desire for even more real-time tracking from caregivers, district leaders, and teachers, made a new, trusted technology selection essential.
Google Maps Platform was the clear choice.
Adopting technology that helps deliver on our promise
Working closely with Woolpert Digital Innovations and using Google Maps Platform Mobility services has made it easier for our team to address our customer’s needs more quickly and easily. We can now rapidly prototype and test new features, standing up a test app and web portal to show functionality in just a few days. This has been powerful for our efficiency, allowing us to bring new features to market much faster than before.
Consolidating our mapping technologies into a single platform accelerates our path to delivery for real-time tracking. Google Maps Platform handles all of that, giving us the peace of mind that the system will scale with our business. This also ensures a unified and consistent user experience across different devices and platforms for our end users. By simplifying the journey on the end-user side, our team is free to focus more time and resources on our core mission.
Building for the end-user to support more student transport across the country
Improving the quality of our in-app experience was our top priority for moving to a new platform, and the Google Maps Platform Navigation SDK allowed us to quickly build new features and improve the driver app. Our organization is powered by our drivers, and we wanted to simplify their experience so they weren’t switching between our app and the traditional Google Maps app on their mobile phones. The real-time traffic estimates, ETA adjustments, voice navigation, and speed limits from Google Maps Platform help to deliver a more robust driver experience. Offering a consistent and user-friendly application also helps us retain and grow our driver population, which is critical to delivering our exceptional student transport experience.
Beyond our driver experience, improving the accuracy of our location data also gives r caregivers, district leaders, and teachers more peace of mind. We provide updates to these stakeholders about their student’s location at a moment’s notice, and if their location isn’t accurate, it creates challenges. More accurate data can reduce support calls related to student locations, allowing our support teams to spend less time on basic inquiries and more time on building stronger relationships.
Moving forward, our integration with Google Maps Platform, especially the Navigation SDK is a key part of our growth and technology strategy. It gives us the confidence to expand into new school districts and states, knowing our technology can keep pace with our business. Meanwhile, we can spend more resources on ensuring our services continue to be safe, reliable, and human-centered for the students, families, and school districts who depend on us every day. This commitment to continuous innovation ensures that we can always deliver on our promise to meet the unique needs of every student.
