Adding GPS cheaply – hardware side
Your idea seems like a great opportunity for making an impact with open tech, and it would not be that much effort. Adding GPS hardware at least can be quite cheap. A proposal would be:
- Put an ordinary Android smartphone into the microbus. It can also simply be the driver's phone, or more reliably, a permanently installed phone with a permanent power supply.
- Put an app on the phone that logs GPS locations via a data connection. There are tons of these, some for tracking people, tracking ones phone and other purposes.
- GPS reception of a phone can be poor, esp. inside a car. To improve GPS reception and accuracy, use an external GPS receiver ("GPS mouse") that is externally mounted to the car. It should get a permanent power supply. Usually these connect via Bluetooth to the phone, and for that there are several apps: BlueGPS (open source) and Bluetooth GPS (freeware) for example. I tested the latter one with my receiver, works well.