Short answer
Most tracking silence is a parked truck. Over 14 days of live loads, we logged 250 gaps of more than 45 minutes in driver-app tracking. In 244 of them, the last ping before the gap showed the truck stopped. Six began while it was moving. A tracking alert should look at that last ping, and at where the truck was, before it tells anyone to call the driver.
For a couple of weeks in September, the loudest alert on our load board was wrong most of the time. A red tracking flag kept landing on trucks that were sitting at a shipper getting loaded.
The software runs on live freight at Bronco Logistics, the brokerage FreightVero was built inside, so the complaint came from the desk and not from a test plan. This is what the data showed, the two rules we wrote because of it, and what to ask about your own tracking alerts.
The alert that cried wolf
The original rule was simple. If a tracked load went 45 minutes with no position update, the system marked tracking disconnected, turned the load red and raised a critical alert to call the driver.
On paper that’s the right instinct. A load that has gone quiet is the one to worry about. In practice the alert fired on drivers who were parked at a dock. One load raised it five times across two days while the driver was parked overnight. The tracking session was connected the whole time.
A dispatcher who has watched the red flag be wrong five times stops looking at it. Then it’s wrong on the one load where it matters.
What the pings showed
While a truck rolled, positions came in about once a minute. One load logged 572 of them. When the wheels stopped, the feed stopped too, and it picked up again when the truck moved. The first gaps we pulled looked like this:
| Gap in positions | Speed on the ping that ended it |
|---|---|
| 45.5 minutes | 0.1 mph |
| 45.3 minutes | 0.0 mph |
| 45.2 minutes | 0.0 mph |
| 45.3 minutes | 0.0 mph |
| 90.5 minutes | 0.0 mph |
Five gaps from the first loads we checked, September 2026. Tracking runs through the Load Market integration.
Every gap ended with the truck standing still. With this feed, silence is what a parked truck looks like. You can’t tell a parked truck from a dead phone by position alone, because during the stop there are no positions to read.
Rule one: a truck at its own stop isn’t lost
The first fix went live on September 17. Before the alert fires, the system asks whether the truck is at one of the load’s own stops. It answers that two ways, in order:
- Someone marked the load Arrived at Pickup or Arrived at Delivery. That settles it.
- If nobody has, the last known position is checked against the stop’s address. Within one mile counts as there.
The one-mile radius is generous on purpose. A truck a mile from a big distribution yard is almost certainly in that yard’s line. Being wrong in that direction means a missed alert on a truck that’s fine. Being wrong in the other direction means a red flag nobody believes.
The alert text changed with it: “No position updates in 45+ minutes and the truck is not at a pickup or delivery. Call the driver.” If an alert is already open and the truck turns out to be at a stop, the alert clears itself.
We tested the other direction too. A truck placed about 900 miles from every stop on its load still went to disconnected, and the alert still fired.
Rule two: read the last ping
Rule one didn’t cover a driver parked at a truck stop halfway down the lane. So we pulled every silence over 45 minutes from 14 days of production tracking, September 14 to 28. There were 250. In 244, the last ping before the gap showed the truck stopped: the tracking provider reported it as not moving, or its speed was under 3 mph. Six began while the truck was moving.
So the last ping tells you which kind of silence you’re looking at.
| Last ping showed | Then | What the board should say |
|---|---|---|
| Truck stopped | Quiet for under 12 hours | Stopped, with the city and how long. No red flag and no alert |
| Truck moving | Quiet for 45 minutes or more | Signal lost. This is the real call-the-driver alert |
| Truck stopped | Quiet for 12 hours or more | Signal lost. That’s longer than a 10-hour rest break plus margin |
The 12-hour line comes from the federal hours-of-service rules, which require 10 consecutive hours off duty before a driver starts a new shift. A truck that’s been parked and silent well past that is worth a phone call.
Both rules now run in production. The alert reads: “No position updates in 45+ minutes and the last one showed the truck moving, not parked or at a stop. Call the driver.”
What to ask about your own tracking alerts
This applies whatever TMS or visibility tool you run.
- Ask your tracking provider what the feed does when a truck parks. If it goes quiet, a silence rule on its own will flag every long dock visit.
- Check whether your alert knows where the load’s stops are. Silence at the shipper and silence on the interstate are different events.
- Count how many alerts a single parked truck can raise in a night. One open alert per load per problem is the most people will put up with before they tune it out.
- Make sure the alert clears on its own when the truck checks back in. Nobody should have to tidy up after it.
Our guide to load tracking and check calls compares the tracking methods, and the glossary covers what a check call should confirm when you do pick up the phone.
Where this still falls short
- A phone that dies while the truck is parked looks the same as a parked truck until the 12-hour mark. The appointment is the other check. If the pickup or delivery time is getting close and the truck hasn’t moved, call.
- The arrival time at a stop is also when a detention clock would start. A detention timer built on that arrival time is on our roadmap.
- All of this comes from one brokerage’s freight on one tracking provider. Another provider’s feed may behave differently, and we’d expect to tune the numbers.
How tracking, ETA risk and alerts work today is on the live tracking page.
See tracking on a real load
Bring a lane you run every week. We’ll walk through how tracking, ETA risk and alerts behave on it.