A municipality paints its routes over the streets instead of building them from addresses (see paint a road route). On your phone such a dispatch has no stop list to tick off: progress is how much of the painted road you have driven.
The dispatch opens from Home like any other. The info card shows Work type, Planned time, Drivers assigned and Dispatch note, plus Length in km and Roads for the painted geometry. The map at the top carries a chip such as 62% driven.
Drive the route
- Open the dispatch and press Start route. The first time, the app explains GPS while you drive: it records your position while you drive, also with the app in the background or the phone in your pocket, to draw your progress and document the work. Press Continue and choose Always Allow when iOS asks. See what the app does with your location.
- Press Open navigation. The button sits at the bottom of the screen and is greyed out until the run is started.
- Drive. Blue lines are the planned roads, green is what you have driven. The panel under the map shows the percentage with of the route driven and how much is left, for example 4.2 km remaining (metres once less than a kilometre is left).
- Finish from the dispatch screen, see below.
The map is a free-drive map: it follows you and shows the roads, it does not give turn-by-turn directions. The first time, Google asks you to accept its navigation terms; if you decline, a plain Apple map is used instead. The controls on the map are Close map, Satellite view and Voice guidance; a muted voice stays muted on later drives. The screen stays awake while the map is up.
Closing the map does not end the drive. GPS keeps running and the card on your Lock Screen keeps counting (GPS active, Started 06:40, 38% driven) until you finish. There is no pause button: to stop recording, finish.
How the roads turn green
Your phone sends its positions in batches, roughly every 45 seconds. The server works out which pieces of the painted road they cover, and the dispatch screen picks that up every ten seconds. So a road turns green a little after you drove it, and a corner that looks missed usually heals on the next batch. The office sees the same percentage on the dispatch on the web.
Start route is shown once
Start route appears only until a driver has pressed it, then it is gone for good. If you close the app, reinstall it, or are a second driver joining the same route, press Open navigation: that re-arms GPS on your phone and opens the map.
If you start a road route while another dispatch is being tracked on your phone, the app asks Another drive is running: starting this one stops GPS tracking on the other dispatch, which stays open so you can start it again later. Press Start anyway or Cancel.
If location access is off, Start route shows Location access is off with an Open Settings button; set Location to Always for SnowManager and try again.
Finish
Which button you get at the bottom depends on your route's settings.
- Finish route (62%) closes the route for everyone. It is there when the route allows drivers to end the dispatch themselves, or when you are an administrator. At 95 percent or more it goes straight through. Below that, the app asks Finish route at 62%?, tells you You've cleared 12.4 of 20.0 km, and wants a Reason from the list (the first is preselected). Confirm finish ends the route, Cancel keeps driving.
- Finish driving is the driver-level button: it signs you off and stops your GPS, but the dispatch stays open for the office to close on the web.
Either way the Lock Screen card reads Route completed and disappears. Tracking also stops on its own after 16 hours; the dispatch is left as it was. The run, with a replay of your trail, is kept under History, see your routes and past runs.