Driving a bus or a private vehicle

Step 1

A public bus or a private vehicle does not receive ride offers at all. Your screen is Start Journey and End Journey, with the route, your running time and distance, and the vehicle type and number below the route card.

Trains are public transport too, but only MageRide registers a train. There is no train option anywhere in the driver app, and that is deliberate rather than missing.

Step 2

Start Journey when you set off and End Journey when you finish. That is the whole of the daily routine — there is no fare to settle and no code to enter.

Step 3

If you forget to end one, it ends itself after thirty minutes without movement and tells you why. You have five minutes to restart it if that was wrong. You can also switch on ending automatically when you arrive back where your last journey finished.

None of this costs anything. A public bus pays no daily platform fee, and a private vehicle is billed monthly to whoever owns it rather than daily to whoever drives it.

Step 4

A GPS device changes who reports the vehicle’s position. Pair one from Pair GPS tracker: choose the vehicle, then type its IMEI number, scan the code on the device, or enter a bind code MageRide gave you.

Step 5

From then on the device is the only thing publishing that vehicle’s position — your phone stops sending it. On a bus or a private vehicle the journey then starts when the engine is switched on and ends when it is switched off, with no app involved at all.

Step 6

So you may open the app and find the journey already running. That is the device reporting, not a mistake — and you can still override it. Start Journey and End Journey on your dashboard work whatever the device is doing.

On a standby vehicle the same device behaves differently: its position is only used while you are online. Two vehicles, one device, two behaviours — worth knowing if you drive both.

Step 7

Sharing controls who can follow a private vehicle, and it is kept separately for each vehicle you hold. Pick the vehicle at the top, then grant access by User ID with an expiry date, or accept the requests waiting under it.

Step 8

A fleet can also assign you a vehicle without your owning it. It appears in My Vehicles under “temporarily assigned”, you select it and drive, and it disappears on its own when the assignment runs out.

If a fleet takes an assignment back, the vehicle leaves your list. The fleet that assigned it is who to ask about that, not MageRide support.