Creating and Tracking a Route

Samsara’s Routes feature allows you to build routes and track and share driver progress in real-time.

To create a route, select Fleet > Routes and click + Create New Route button. 

In the New Route page, input a descriptive route name and assign the route to a vehicle or a driver. If assigned to a vehicle, drivers who are signed into the vehicle can access this route on their Samsara Driving App.

Note: Routes may also be left unassigned, but unassigned routes will only appear in the Samsara Driver app if you enable unassigned route selection for drivers. Otherwise, progress for unassigned routes is not tracked. 

When all your destinations are added, you can finalize your route by selecting Create Route. Your new route will appear on the Routes dashboard in the timeframe you set, as well as in the Samsara Driver app for the Driver or the current Driver assigned to the Vehicle you selected. Drivers can see the currently assigned routes, route up to two days in the past, and routes up to two days in the future.

Tracking your Route

In the Routes tab, you can view all of the routes that you have created and see the status of those routes. In the Route Timeliness column, the green sections indicate that the driver is On Time to a stop, the red sections indicate that the driver is Not On Time to a stop, and the gray sections indicate that the stop has been skipped by the driver.

When you click into a route, you can view all of the stops on that route in more detail. This Route Detail page provides:

• Ability to see the route path on a map and compare the planned vs. actual path using the "Planned Route" checkbox under "Map Options"
• Ability to click on a route stop's geofences and edit it from the page if the stop's location is an address book entry
• Ability to Play and Pause the playback of a route once the route start

When you click into any stop on that page, the map will zoom into that stop's geofence. If you click "View Details", you can view the Stop Detail page for that stop which provides deeper information regarding the status of that stop's completion.

On the Stop Detail page, you also have the ability to augment route statuses with knowledge of what happened at a route stop. Simply click “Edit” in the Schedule section to manually mark a stop as completed, or edit the times for stop arrival & departure.

Repeating Routes

You can set up Repeating Routes by selecting the Repeat this route checkbox. This will open a pop-up window where you can set the parameters of your recurring route.

Note: For repeating routes, check out the Route Analytics report (Reports > Route Analytics) to gain insight into your recurring route historical performance.

Setting Route Start and Stops

Typically, routes require at least two stops, a start and a stop destination. You can create the route’s stops in the Route Schedule section. Select your route’s desired start date and time in the Scheduled Departure field of the first stop if the checkbox saying "route starts when vehicle departs the start location" is checked. If it is unchecked, add it to the Scheduled Arrival field.

Add stops along your route by selecting the Add a Stop button. From there, select the destination (either manually or from your Address Book), set the scheduled arrival time, and, if applicable, add departure time, or notes.

Note: Routes works best when addresses are added to your Address Book. For more information, please reference our guide on Using the Address Book.

In order to start a route, a vehicle must leave the start location. This will set the route status to En Route instead of Scheduled. For more information on statuses, please review our article on Route Timeliness.

Note: Notes added to route stops will be visible to drivers in the Samsara Driver App under the respective stop. The route view for fleet administrators does not include the driver notes.