When Peter Crossan thinks about what location intelligence can do, he envisions a long line of double-parked buses disappearing from a crowded street outside any one of the Boston Public School District’s 128 schools. BPS also has 112 charter, private or parochial schools where children are transported.
Crossan, fleet and compliance manager for the BPS Department of Transportation, said a beta test involving 50 bus monitors and the Zonar Systems Z Pass tracking solution is eliminating the need for those employees to exit buses to sign time reports at various stops along a route.
“That will end a lot of delays and traffic. Many schools can only load two or three buses at a time. We may have 29 buses waiting. When people are trudging into the office and back to the bus, where do you put a bus on narrow city streets? Crossan asked. “In terms of time saved, bus efficiency and payroll savings, we’re pretty excited.”
For a growing number of school districts, large and small, location intelligence equals business intelligence. And, business intelligence equals greater efficiency, safety and savings.
Wayne Eckerson, founder of Eckerson Group, a consultancy in Hingham, Massachusetts, said location intelligence is the “newest moniker” for spatial analytics, geographic information systems (GIS), or simply mapping software.
“Location intelligence is more than just a map with dots on it: (It) is a full-fledged analytical system. These so-called geographic information systems specialize in storing and manipulating spatial data, which consists of points, lines and polygons plotted as coordinates in space,” Eckerson explained.
Peter Klemm, a routing and GIS specialist with mobile video surveillance provider Seon, said advancements in global position systems (GPS) and their increased affordability have “thrown open the doors to intelligent mapping.” The result is the company now has video products integrated with routing software and fleet management and tracking tools.
“What was once a system that only a few wellheeled local government departments would use for locating their manholes and water network shut-off valves on a map, is now everywhere — including our smartphones. Now anyone with a smartphone and a mapping app can track themselves on a map using the phone’s built-in GPS,” Klemm noted.
He explained that GIS is a broader spectrum of location intelligence that can be accessed through a single mapping application. GIS calculates distances from point to point, “as the crow flies” or along a specific route.
“It can be the determination of the demographics or the counting of the collection of points within a defined area … or something as complex as the length of time it would take a bus to complete a route based on stop information such as number of students and boarding requirements, distances traveled and speeds applied along the route,” he added.
Klemm reminded transporters to recall the days of pins and string on a paper map mounted on a wall. Routes were and sometime still are laid out and buses assigned to each. The result, he said, can be “a whole lot of disconnected paperwork for driver assignment and directions, bus servicing and general accounting.”
“In this world of GIS, the transportation specialist can easily plan routes with ’what if’ scenarios, track buses and students live, compare planned versus actual routes for potential deviations and even view secured live audio and video broadcasted from their vehicles over a cellular network … Days, possibly weeks, of planning are reduced to hours,” he said. “This ’all-in-one’ solution for school transportation is exactly what Seon’s vMax Compass Web-based transportation application has to offer.”
Of course, this all depends on the unique needs of districts balanced against their budgets.
NO PRICE TAG ON SAFETY
Julie Hale, a Manteca (Calif.) Unified School District school bus instructor, said officials have a strong affinity for monitoring drivers and students that transcends onboard cameras that have been in place for a decade. The district is launching its own Zonar Z Pass trial monitoring/tracking system for approximately 125 students, including 35 children with special needs, at one elementary school this month before extending the system to all students.
In all, Manteca transports 1,300 students each day on 18 home-to-school routes and 27 special needs routes.
“Each student will be given a card with a tracking number, which the students will scan as they enter and exit the bus. This will help parents track students and also help us find a student if someone is unaccounted for. A bonus of the Z Pass is that parents will have the opportunity to use the Z Pass+ website or the Z Pass+ application for smartphones to track their children’s time on and off the school bus,” Hale said.
Transportation Director Walt Brookshire said administrators believe the system, funded in part by a $50,000 Zonar grant in partnership with NAPT, meets a commitment to student safety and the district’s ongoing digitalization. The Z Pass card can also be used as a student ID card for food service and other functions. Other cost savings will come from ending the need for special needs bus drivers to chart student comings and goings on paper.
“If a driver calls and says they’ve been in an accident, we’ll be able to bring up a list that tells us exactly who is still on the bus, their address and their parent’s phone numbers,” Brookshire said. “Our whole district is going digital. Every student in the district is getting a laptop device as part of going paperless. Our department is working to keep up with technology.”
Added Klemm, “You cannot put a price on having the ability to know where your bus is and who is actually on the bus at any given moment in time.”
‘WAY BEYOND ROUTINE GPS’
With a 15-minute, on-time window before the opening bell, Boston Public Schools also maintains a list of the top 50 buses that are running late in order to address driver performance issues.
“With (location intelligence), we have the ability to run a scheduled report for each school individually. If someone says the buses are always late … we can go back and look. Buses run in tiers, with stops at as many as three schools. We can identify when a bus left the first and second schools and arrived at the third,” Crossan said. “Now, we can look at the schools and buses with the most troubles and see if it’s the traffic, the drivers, the route, school delays or something else. We can look at yard performance — who is getting out on time and who is chronically late.”
The data boosts the district’s business intelligence by helping with the logistics associated with preventative maintenance on 50 buses each day and state inspections for every vehicle three times a year.
Real-time data is also reducing the amount of time it takes for individual school officials to determine why a bus is late. Instead of calling dispatchers, they’re able to log on with smartphones or tablets to see a vehicle’s exact location. “Rather than calling and waiting to find out where a bus is, they can get that information themselves, and it’s a real time-saver,” Crossan said.
Parents can also log on to the password-protected site to get similar updates.
Crossan, who acknowledged he’s a big fan of location intelligence, recalled the difficulties of years past.
“We were buried in paper: three and a half cases a day. It was an enormous burden,” he said. “We use GPS heavily. (Location intelligence) goes way beyond all the routine things GPS can do. We can manage on-time performance proactively before service complaints arise. The trick is all in how you’re using the information on the backside.”
