School Bus Routing and Transportation Management Software

School Bus Safety: Know Your Drivers

Every day we trust school bus drivers all across the country to safely transport our children to and from school and any programs in between.  Most of us probably never give it a second thought. I just read an article that explains how a 17 year old passenger on a school bus prevented a traffic accident which would certainly have resulted in passenger injuries or maybe even deaths.

The school bus driver suffered a heart attack while driving students home from school at the end of the day.  The driver did not survive, but all of the students on the bus were spared injury by the quick reactions by this brave teen.  She steered the bus to safety and then put it in park.

My immediate thought was about school bus safety.  Could this situation have been prevented?  Probably not! Accidents are accidents, and they cannot all be prevented. But, there are procedures and policies that can be put in to place that may reduce the likelihood of this type of accident.

Every state and country has regulations regarding who can drive a bus.  The regulations from state to state and country to country vary, but they all have one thing in common.  These regulations are meant to promote safety.

There are school bus routing and transportation software products, like BusBoss, that allows you to keep track of various tests and licenses for your drivers.  With BusBoss, you can track license numbers and their expiration dates, physicals that are due, recertifications, criminal background checks, child abuse background checks, immigration status, defensive driving, basic & advanced, etc.  You can also keep track of driving violations, and absences, among other things.

I am not suggesting that this particular situation could have been avoided by using software to keep track of your drivers.  My point is that you will be better informed to make appropriate decisions regarding student safety by having more information available to you.  If you are not already using software to keep track of this information, I strongly encourage you to see what BusBoss can do for you. 

School Bus Safety: Don’t Turn That Bus Around

School buses are big.  Really big! Whenever a school bus needs to turn around, especially when backing up, the potential for an accident is a lot higher.  There are quite a few blind spots at the back of the bus that could prevent the driver from seeing a parked car or even a child.

When you are creating bus routes, it’s in your best interest to create them in a way that does not require the bus to turn around.  Sometimes this means that the bus needs to drive around the block or pull into a large parking lot (like a grocery store) to turn around.

It may not be possible to eliminate all of the turnaround situations, but the more you can eliminate, the safer your bus routes will be.  School bus transportation management software, like BusBoss, can generate routes that prevent your school buses from turning around.  With BusBoss, you can configure each vehicle for its ability to turn around.  Often times it is possible (and safe) for a small special needs van to turn around, but not possible for a large 72 passenger bus.  When you configure the individual vehicles to allow or not allow turnarounds, BusBoss will use the configuration setting assigned to each bus when optimizing school bus routes.

If you are a school transportation director, and you’re concerned about safety, you should learn more about BusBoss.  You’ll see how easy it is to create routes that do not require the bus to turn around.  To learn more about this feature and many others, please download the BusBoss product guide.

 

School Bus Safety: Special Medical Condition Reports

Nobody likes to think about accidents or medical emergencies, especially when you’re also thinking about school buses and students.  Accidents do happen.  Medical emergencies do happen.  It’s important that we prepare for them.  One important thing you can do is to make sure you have details of each student’s special medical conditions on the school bus.

Not all students will have special medical conditions, but for those students that do, you should have the information available to the school bus driver, EMT’s and paramedics that may be dispatched during an emergency situation.

 

School Bus Safety: Tracking Student Incidents

School Bus Safety is an often neglected topic for many people, which is unfortunate because millions of students are transported daily on school buses.  We have a civic responsibility to promote school bus safety whenever, and wherever, we can.

When a student misbehaves on a school bus they cause a distraction for the bus driver leading to a potentially unsafe situation.  School districts have policies regarding behaviors on the school bus, but it is important that this information is tracked so those policies can properly be enforced.

When tracking your incidents, you should be recording:

Is Your School Bus Stop Safe?

In a previous post, I talked about registered sex offenders that may live near your child’s bus stop "Are There Sex Offenders Near My Child's School Bus Stop". This is important to know, but it doesn’t mention other threats that may exist for your children.

1. Crowded Stops.  We all have perfectly behaved students, right?  After reality sets in, we can clearly see that not all students behave themselves properly.  Bus stops are often un-chaperoned.  When children are left alone, they sometimes can get rowdy.  Larger groups of unsupervised students tend to have more problems than smaller groups.  If your child is waiting for a bus with a large group of students and there are disciplinary problems, you should contact your school and accompany your child to the bus stop until the problem is resolved.
2. Heavy Traffic. America is a country of automobiles.  Traffic accidents can occur anywhere and at any time.  Statistically, the more traffic there is on a road, the more likely there will be an accident.  If your child is waiting for the bus on a busy road, they are more likely to be involved in a traffic accident than if they were waiting on a less busy road.  The amount of traffic on a road cannot be changed, but there are still things you can do to alleviate this problem.  It may be possible for your school district to move the location of the bus stop to a safer location, or you could accompany your child to the bus stop.
3. External threats (like drug activity).  There may be known locations in your school district where you wouldn’t want your children to wait for a school bus, or depart from a school bus.  If there are external (non-school related) dangers at your child’s bus stop, you should contact the school to see if the bus stop can be moved.  You can also call law enforcement to see if there are steps they can take to remove the threats at your child’s bus stop.

You can use transportation management software like BusBoss to identify problematic locations within your school district.  Once the hazardous locations are identified, BusBoss will notify you if there are students that are assigned to stops within the hazardous areas.

Regardless of the threat that exists at your child’s stop, it is important that parents, students, and school district administrators are made aware of the problem.  There are usually steps that can be taken to reduce or eliminate the risk.  Our children are worth the effort!

BusBoss: School Bus Routing Software Backups

It’s happened again.  A customer called recently saying that their server crashed and now they need help getting BusBoss back up and running.  If your Transportation Management Software does not have backup and restore functionality, please take a close look at BusBoss.

Under normal circumstances, it would be as simple as installing the SQL Server database engine, restoring the data from last night’s backup, and you’re done.

With this particular customer, they thought they were making regular backups but they weren’t.  In this case, they lost about 1 months’ worth of work.  This should never happen, but it is a common enough mistake for our customers to make.  As a BusBoss user, you may feel like you are at the mercy of your IT department, and in some respects, you are.  New to BusBoss School Bus Routing Software Version 2011, you can actually find out the last time a backup was created, and it’s super easy to do.

In BusBoss, click Tools -> Database -> Restore or click on the “Restore Database” button on the toolbar.

 

When you click this button, you will see a screen similar to this:

 

 

Take a close look at the dates listed in the box. The dates will be listed in descending order (newest on top). The dates that are displayed represent date and time when a backup occurred. If this box is empty, it means that your database has never been backed up. If the top item in the list is more than 24 hours old, this means that your database is not getting backed up regularly.

Backing up a database is not hard to do, however, it is extremely hard to recreate your data if there is ever a data loss.  

You need special database permissions to backup and restore your BusBoss database.  Some of our customers will already have the necessary permissions, and some will not.  If your data is not getting backed up on a regular basis, please demand that your IT department configure the system to back up the data on a daily basis.

 

Bus Routing - Dealing With School Bus Conflicts

 

As a transportation director, much of your day may be spent dealing with conflict.  You may need to set up a meeting with a parent whose student is misbehaving on the bus.  The parent may blame the bus driver for picking on their child; the bus driver may want the student suspended from the bus; the parent may want the bus driver fired.  You will deal with multiple parties that have different expectations for an outcome.  It is your job to come up with a resolution that will be acceptable to all parties.  This is not always an easy task.  Here are a few tips that may help.

1. Investigate the situation – Try to get input from all sides prior to a meeting.  Find out what the parent wants.  Ask the principal to interview students on the bus.  Try to get any video of students on the bus if available.  Speak to the bus driver and get their side of the story.
   
   
2. Listen – Many times an angry parent just wants you to listen to them.  Make them feel that you are going to be objective in your decision and that you understand their concerns.  Be careful not to promise anything that you can’t deliver.  Try to be non-confrontational and avoid getting emotional during the conversation.  If the conservation turns ugly, politely indicate that you will need to continue at another time when the parent has calmed down.
   
   
3. Explain your reasons for a decision – If you can’t give the parent what they want, explain your reasons.  Include any state laws or regulations that may apply.  Assure them that you will continue to monitor the situation for any future issues.  Try to end the interaction on a positive note.

Realize that many times it may be impossible to give all parties the outcome that they want.  However, if you are professional and caring in your interactions, it will serve you well in your career.

Bus Software - Display Dead Ends to Find Map Problems

School bus route optimization requires accurate map data.  Different map sources are available but there are several aspects of map data that determines its quality.

1. Are the roads drawn correctly?
2. Is the information for each road segment accurate?

Each aspect of map quality is important, but for different reasons.  There are occasionally times when the map data causes problems with school bus route optimizations.  To optimize paths and routes, it is vitally important that the map is drawn correctly and “connected” properly.  Specifically, the roads on the map must connect to other roads on the map.  There are situations when it can appear as though roads are connected properly, but upon closer inspection, we see that there is a break in the road.  Sometimes there are unexplained breaks in the middle of a road, and sometimes we see breaks at intersections where not all of the roads are connected properly. 

At certain zoom levels, it can appear as though the road is connected properly without any breaks, but a zoomed in view shows the break.  This situation can be very frustrating while creating bus routes because the software will attempt to route your buses around the broken road.  This leads to inefficient routes.

BusBoss has a "Display Dead Ends" function that you can use to detect this problem.  There are features in BusBoss that can help you correct this type of problem.  Simply click the "Display Dead Ends" button on the map toolbar and any dead end within the visible window will be displayed.

As you can see from the image above, there is spot on the map with overlapping dead end road symbols.  With BusBoss, you can zoom in on that area and connect the ends of the road using the "add road" tool.  Once the road is added, BusBoss will immediately be able to use the road for route optimizations.

Use School Attendance Zone/Boundary to Save Money

What is a Zone or Boundary?

Zone/Boundary: An area or stretch of land having a particular purpose, for example: "a pedestrian zone".  An attendance zone is an area of land that defines a school that a child should attend.

How can an attendance zone save money?

Each student that a school district accommodates will cost them money.  Every child deserves an education, but if a child lives outside your school district’s attendance zone, a different school district should be providing that education, not yours.

In my experience, it is not uncommon to have several children attending the wrong school based on where they live and the school’s attendance boundary.  Many of our customers have discovered this exact situation when they start using BusBoss and create attendance zones. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, it costs approximately $10,000 for each student enrolled in the district.  Of course, this value will vary from district to district, but you can clearly see that if you have a student enrolled that should attend a neighboring district, you can save money.

With BusBoss Transportation Management Software, it is easy to determine which students live outside your attendance zone.  Once you have the zone created, you can simply display all your students and the attendance zones.  You can click to get detailed information for any student displayed on the map.

There are times when it is acceptable for a child to live outside the attendance zone for a school, so it is important to investigate the situation prior to acting on it.

School Bus Route Optimization

Fleet Optimization was never one of my favorite subjects when it came to BusBoss.  However, as the years have gone by this functionality has greatly improved. I would recommend this to anyone who asks me where to start when creating new routes.

Fleet Optimization is a tool in BusBoss that will automatically create routes based on the specifications entered by the user. Users have the following options:

• The maximum time you want a student on a bus
• The maximum time of the entire route
• Load the bus to capacity or balance the loads
• Group the students by school or route them all together. 
• Whether the routes should stop at each school or routed to a transfer point.
• Select vehicles you wish to use from your fleet or a specific bus size and the preferred starting location for each vehicle.

Routes are created based on the students selected to be included in the route sets.  They can be added according to their current school, route or the boundary/zone they are transported to.

Once the route optimization has completed you can go through each one and see it visually with the stops displayed on the map. Reports are also available to be printed for review. When the district decides they would like to implement the route(s) then they would make them active.

This process can be run multiple times and doesn’t affect the current routing information in BusBoss until they are made active. The important factor to keep in mind is this is merely a starting point. Once you activate the route, you have the option to manipulate the routes making them work for the needs of the district.

In my own experience, a school in Pennsylvania wanted to redistrict and implement school bus route optimization. I helped them run the fleet optimization and then went onsite to assist them in ‘tweaking’ their routes. As soon as the fleet optimization was completed, it had already eliminated a handful of busses and by the time we were finished with the project we had eliminated more than five busses allowing the customer to save a substantial amount of money.

If you’re looking for new ideas with your routes or just want to see how it works, I definitely recommend checking out our Fleet Optimization tool in BusBoss. You might find ways to cut a route or two and save your district money.