10/29/2026
One is a fact. The other is a promise. These get confused constantly.
AVL is automatic vehicle location. Where the vehicle is right now, reported by the vehicle itself rather than by a driver on the phone. It is data.
An ETA is a prediction built on top of that data. It is a calculation, and it is only as good as what feeds it.
Knowing where a vehicle is does not tell you when it arrives. That needs traffic, the remaining stops, how long the assist takes at the next door, and whether the rider is ready. Plenty of operations have excellent location data and arrival times nobody trusts, which is worse than having none, because now your dispatcher is overriding the system on instinct and your rider was given a time that was never real.
It runs the other way too. A confident arrival time with no location data behind it is a guess in a nicer font.
The question worth asking is not whether you can see your fleet. It is whether the times you give riders hold up, and whether anyone has checked that against what actually happened.
