If there’s one thing pupil transportation technology has in common with other technology it’s that innovation never stops, according to the experts who design it and those who rely on it. And, the route optimization software recently developed by a University of Maryland (UMD) College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences team led by Dr. Ali Haghani for the Howard County Public School System outside of Baltimore illustrates that story well, said transportation director David W. Ramsay.
“When you look at the evolution of routing school buses before computers, we used the old grease pencils on laminated maps or pins and yarn to connect everything,” recalled Ramsey, now marking his 30th year in pupil transportation. “Like technology in general, there’s been an evolution over the years. I believe Dr. Haghani and his team are doing cutting-edge work and we’re very, very excited to be working with them.”
The mathematical model devised by Haghani and his team uses data on routes, stops and schedules to cluster the most efficient trips into new routes. The result is routing that requires the fewest buses to safely get the district’s 40,000 students to and from school, keeps students’ time on buses to a minimum and reduces the amount of deadhead time and overall miles driven.
“School bus operations are usually so expensive that improving efficiency by only a few percentage points could mean savings on the order of millions of dollars,” said Dr. Ali Shafahi, a member of Haghani’s team. “But these potential reductions are significant not just in terms of transportation dollars saved but also for the cuts to fuel consumption and air pollutants that come with fewer buses on the road.” (See sidebar for more on this project.)
Howard County was already using some routing software in 2015, but Ramsay said it lacked some of the functionality his team wanted. When reaching out to the private and public sectors for solutions, he connected with UMD’s Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) Honors Program for undergraduate students to create a method for analyzing the efficiency of the district’s transportation system.
“We recognized this was a very, very complex problem. With a short timeline, the team fulfilled several of the district’s deliverables, but not all of them,” Ramsay said. “Dr. Haghani thought the problems were fascinating and he started to work on them.”
Meanwhile, an ongoing national conversation intervened: With research indicating high school students need more sleep, should school start times be pushed back? A district task force directed the department to evaluate four different starting schedules for all grades to determine how many vehicles would be needed to transport students in each scenario. The answer was “more” in all four cases, as the number of trips some buses ran fell from four to three or two. “When you start compressing that time, a bus just can’t do it,” Ramsay said.
Each of Haghani’s models showed the district would need to add vehicles to its 453-bus fleet.
While he has tremendous faith in computer-assisted routing, Ramsay said he still believes such data should be viewed as a platform for staff to make final decisions. “There’s really no substitute for area managers to look through what the computer is suggesting, knowing there are variations in play, and saying, ‘I believe that one would work,’” he said. “It would be irresponsible for us to do it any different.”
In fact, Haghani’s data has shown the district’s current routing is 98.7-percent efficient, a perfect temperature for Howard County’s optimization efforts.
Expectations Remain High
Brian Mann, director of sales and marketing at the busHive Transportation Systems in Ballston Lake, New York, and Antonio Civitella, president and CEO of Transfinder in nearby Schenectady, agreed that the march of innovation, the expectations of fleet directors for something new and better and the way technology is provided won’t slow any time soon.
“Over the last few years we have seen a few different trends: higher demand in cloud or hosted solutions, an increase in the tracking of field trip costs and the need to reduce driver overtime,” Mann said “Traditionally, school districts would purchase a software license and host the platform on one of the schools internal servers. IT departments would be tasked with securing and backing up data of all of the systems that are utilized throughout the entire district. We have seen an increase in interest in the software as a service model, which is subscription-based. In this model, technology providers take care of all of the general maintenance of their database, which reduces the responsibilities of the school’s IT department as well as the requirements of the school’s hardware.”
Mann added that busHive also has seen more customer interest recently in products that track the costs of field trips. “Along with this, there has been a high demand in being able to predict driver overtime,” he said. “Drivers that pick up multiple field trips in a week often pose the risk over going into overtime and increasing costs. busHive also allows transportation departments to easily view this information to predict unnecessary overtime.”
Civitella said mobile technology has changed consumer attitudes, creating an everything-on-demand, give-it-to-me-now expectation. Users also expect all technology to be simple to use. One result is a “wild, wild West” landscape of technology developers who come and go.
Often, he said, the advanced technology that parents and students possess drives demands of transportation departments to up their game.
“Consumers have standards. Mobile platforms have become sophisticated and someone out there working in a garage can’t do it,” Civitella said. “That creates new opportunities for us to share data through mobile devices, but it also creates high expectations.”
He encourages transportation professionals to keep their fingers on that pulse. For instance, Mike Brassfield, director of transportation at Fort Bend ISD in Sugar Land, Texas, relies on Transfinder’s Viewfinder product to manage his fleet.
By giving school principals browser access to live bus route data, they can benchmark their loading times against all other schools.
Providing mobile access to all stakeholders “is key to improving our on-time performance,” Brassfield said.
As expectations change, so, too, do approaches to technology acquisition.
In Canada, an initiative to help British Columbia public school districts establish shared product and services contracts is tackling the challenges of delivering consistent, cost-effective student transportation management software. The BC Education Marketplace (BCEM) signed an agreement with Tyler Technologies’ Traversa solution last year.
BCEM Director Maria Melan indicated in a news release that the system will be piloted in nine school districts this year.
The company’s first provincial Corporate Supply Arrangement (CSA) with the BC Education Marketplace includes software licenses, professional services, training, and support to meet the initiative’s requirement for scalable, easy-to-use, cost-effective software for routing, fleet maintenance and office operations.
Ted Thien, vice president and general manager for Tyler’s transportation group, said Traversa’s scalability in prior implementations in similar-sized districts were all factors in the successful bid result. Tyler provides K-12 transportation solutions to school districts in five Canadian jurisdictions, including Yukon Territory and the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Alberta and British Columbia.
Back in Ellicott City, Maryland, whether or not the Howard County school board opts to change school hours, Ramsay said he is sold on the latest step in innovation’s inexorable march.
“In my mind, you can’t test enough. You test, test and test some more, because it’s got to be done right,” he said. “You have to have the highest degree of confidence when bus routes are redesigned that they are going to work…. We have that high degree of confidence in the information our system is yielding.”
Editor’s Note: Reprinted from the April 2017 issue of School Transportation News magazine.
