“Every mile and every stop has a cost,” pointed out Kacy L. Davis, Sr., the transportation director for St. Louis (Missouri) Public Schools (SLPS) transportation director.
The return on investment in routing analytics is the ability for a transportation department to identify factors that are central to creating fuel efficiency practices in the wake of identifying waste.
Routing analytics is the foundation of fuel efficiency for school transportation vehicles, and fuel efficiency has been top-of-mind in recent months for school transportation departments against the backdrop of rising fuel costs.
Until routing analytics came upon the scene, transportation departments may have focused on driver behavior to identify fuel inefficiencies to the exclusion of other factors.
Through a transportation department’s use of routing analytics, fuel efficiency is no longer viewed as a driver-only issue but is instead becoming increasingly recognized by districts as a product of routing design, operational planning and continuous route analysis, among other factors.
“When a district is operating routes with ghost stops, duplicated coverage between two buses serving the same corridor, or bell times that force buses to idle between runs, no amount of driver coaching recovers those losses,” pointed out Craig Berndt, Geotab business segment manager of people transportation, on the value of using routing analytics.
Routing analytics provide visibility to a wide range of school transportation inefficiencies, Berndt said, adding, “Once you can see it, you can address it.”
Creating route optimization through data and routing analytics is a significant driving factor in mileage — and thus fuel — reductions, transportation directors noted.
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“At current diesel prices, that’s a meaningful budget line,” Berndt said. “And unlike one-time capital purchases, route efficiency compounds over time as the district builds the discipline of comparing planned routes versus actual routes continuously.”
Jason Hibbard, supervisor of transportation for the Chenango Valley Central School District in Binghamton, New York, concurred that school transportation routing analytics are critical to fuel efficiency by highlighting route efficiency issues that had previously been behind the scenes.
Those issues might include multiple drivers assigned to the same neighborhood or area, or students being added to certain routes. Drivers can easily be asked to double back and travel unnecessary mileage. Another factor is a rapid student load change over the school year, drastically affecting the timing of buses reaching schools, said Hibbard.
Kathy Calkins, North Clackamas (Oregon) School District transportation director, agreed with other directors in that using routing analytics helps to address the challenge of deadhead miles when buses travel without students, among other challenges.
“Analyzing ridership patterns helps us align routes with actual student counts rather than outdated historical data,” she pointed out. “Maximizing the efficiency of every mile driven directly reduces daily fuel burn, driver labor hours and cumulative wear and tear across the entire fleet.”
Routing analytics as the foundation of creating fuel efficiency also is embraced by Jackson County Schools in West Virginia where transportation supervisor Rich Castro praises it for offering an “eagle’s eye view of mapping and routing.”
