02 In detail
Where response time is lost
Call handling and turnout are measured, audited and tuned to the second. The drive to scene takes more than twice as long as both combined. Yet navigation is often the feature nobody chose. It comes with whichever CAD or MDT platform won the contract, picked for dispatch, messaging and risk information.
That’s a reasonable way to buy a mobilising system. It’s not a good way to buy the tool that decides how long the biggest stage of every response takes. Blue Light Routing explains what emergency routing changes on that drive.
How CAD and MDT apps handle navigation
Mobilising and MDT apps are built around the incident: the address, the call type, the risk information and the crew’s status. Navigation is usually one feature among many, and it tends to be handled in one of three ways.
Handing off to the phone’s maps app. The app shows the incident on a map and passes the location to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze for turn-by-turn directions. Several US-market responder apps document exactly this. It’s quick to build and familiar to crews. It also means the route comes from an app built for ordinary traffic, with no emergency mode, and crews leave the incident screen to drive.
Building on a general-purpose map SDK. The app draws its own map and calculates routes with a commercial SDK. The navigation looks native, but the routing rules belong to the SDK provider. Mapbox is a good example. Its Directions API offers driving, traffic-aware driving, walking and cycling profiles. It can avoid motorways, tolls and ferries, and respect maximum height, width and weight. It has no emergency profile and no option to allow a bus gate or a banned turn. An app built on it can be excellent at everything else and still route a fire appliance the way it would route a delivery van.
Building its own routing. Some suppliers build or license routing specifically for emergency vehicles. In Germany, at least one dispatch platform publicly describes blue-light routing that uses roads closed to ordinary traffic. Among the other suppliers we’ve reviewed, we haven’t found one that publicly states its routing uses emergency exemptions such as bus lanes and bus gates. That doesn’t mean none do. It means it’s worth asking.
Questions to ask your supplier
- Whose routing engine calculates the route? Is it your own, a commercial SDK, or the phone’s maps app?
- In emergency mode, will it route through a bus gate or bus lane? Will it take a no-right-turn? Can you show us one in our area?
- How does it treat weight limits? Does it avoid every one, or can it cross environmental HGV limits that exempt emergency vehicles?
- Does navigation run inside the incident screen, or does it open another app?
- Where do road speeds and ETAs come from: ordinary traffic, or emergency vehicles driving on blue lights?
- Does it keep routing with no signal?
- How often are restrictions in the map updated, and from what data?
If the answers are vague, the route your crews get on blue lights is probably the same one a member of the public would get.
Choose navigation on its own merits
Most services already buy the rest of their estate this way. Radios, vehicles, CAD and records systems each come from the specialist that does that job best, and they’re connected through integrations. Navigation can be bought the same way. Choose it for how fast and how safely it gets crews to scene, then connect it to whatever mobilises them.
Keep it when you change supplier
CAD and MDT contracts run for years, then go back out to tender. When navigation is built into the platform, a re-procurement changes it too. Crews relearn the map, vehicle profiles are set up again, local layers are rebuilt, and routing quality becomes a side effect of a decision made about something else.
Blue Light Maps sits outside that cycle. It connects through an SDK, an API or a deep link, so the next platform can connect to it the same way. Your vehicle profiles, routing policy, custom layers and the habits crews have built stay where they are. Only the integration changes.
Adding emergency routing without replacing anything
You don’t need to change your CAD or MDT platform to get emergency routing. Blue Light Maps connects in whichever way suits your supplier:
- Inside the app, through our SDK. System integrators build Blue Light Maps into their own products, so crews get emergency routing on the incident screen. Airbus offers it this way in SAFEcommand ScResponse.
- Alongside it, through our CAD API. Your CAD sends incidents to callsigns, crews accept in Blue Light Maps, and acceptance flows back to the control room.
- Through the Webfleet API, if your dispatch or fleet system already sends jobs that way.
- Through deep links, so any app can hand a destination to Blue Light Maps instead of a consumer maps app. It’s a small change that swaps a car’s route for an emergency one.
If you’re a supplier, we’d like to talk. If you’re a service, tell us what you run today and we’ll work out the shortest path with your supplier. As always, it starts with a 30-minute walkthrough and a trial in your own area.