02 In detail
Two products built for the job
Most comparisons in this space are with a consumer or HGV sat nav that was never meant for blue lights. This one isn’t. While Sygic are focused on commercial fleets, they also sell Sygic Professional Navigation to emergency services. It has published case studies with fire services in the Czech Republic, police in Germany, Bratislava and São Paulo, and St John Ambulance in Australia. Its routing can send a vehicle with special permission through manoeuvres and roads closed to ordinary traffic.
So the question is less whether it handles exemptions from traffic restrictions and more whether it provides a first-class experience for the other needs of emergency services.
Where Sygic is strong
It is proven at scale. Sygic’s case studies name services that run it fleet-wide. One says it is used in all fire trucks in the Czech Republic, and another describes more than 15,000 police cars in São Paulo.
It embeds. Sygic’s navigation SDK runs inside another company’s app on Android, Windows and Linux. Blue Light Maps offers the same thing: system integrators can build it into their own products, and Airbus offers it in SAFEcommand ScResponse. If your MDT supplier already works with one of the two, that may decide it.
It’s deployable. Licences can be activated in bulk by device, and Sygic names the major MDM platforms for managing its settings. Dispatch can push a destination to the device and read back a live ETA.
It handles freight-grade truck routing. Axle loads, trailers, hazardous materials and ADR tunnel codes all go into the truck profile.
How Blue Light Maps and Sygic differ
Weight limits. Many weight limits are environmental. They’re set to keep through-lorries out of a village or residential street, not because a road can’t carry the load, and many carry an emergency exemption. Sygic’s truck profile takes weight and axle loads, but its material doesn’t say whether emergency routing can treat a weight limit as exempt. Blue Light Maps crosses exemptable limits and marks each one on the route. Height and width are never relaxed. If a service has a local instruction about a particular bridge, crews can tell the app to respect that limit.
Speeds and ETAs. A vehicle on blue lights gets through traffic a car would sit in, and loses time on tight turns and narrow streets where traffic has nowhere to pull over. Blue Light Maps learns road speeds from anonymised telematics of emergency vehicles that have driven those roads on blue lights. ETAs reflect how a response vehicle actually travels, and routes favour roads that suit response driving: wider, with fewer turns. Sygic is unclear on how, or if, its speeds or ETAs account for emergency driving.
Map updates. Blue Light Maps publishes monthly responder map updates in each country we cover, including restrictions, addressing and marker posts. Sygic’s FAQ describes map updates four times a year, built on HERE, TomTom and OpenStreetMap data.
In the cab. Blue Light Maps runs on the phones, tablets and Windows Toughbooks crews already carry, and on CarPlay and Android Auto. Sygic’s professional product lists Android, Windows, Linux and iOS. Its material doesn’t mention CarPlay or Android Auto for the professional product.
Beyond the route. Shared ETAs, live location sharing between crews, and layers such as hydrants, hazmat and vulnerable persons all sit in the same app. Blue Light Alert also warns drivers ahead through Waze. Sygic’s emergency material focuses on routing and dispatch.
Making the choice
If your in-cab supplier already builds on Sygic, it’s a serious option and worth evaluating.
If your frontline staff want a modern solution designed just for them, it might be worth trying Blue Light Maps in your own area. No commitment until you’ve seen the benefits for yourself.