School Bus Route Planning

When you are planning your bus routes, what are you thinking about?  I suspect that most transportation directors are thinking about accommodating all of their students and “hoping” that they won’t need to add additional buses.

Unfortunately, this is probably the most inefficient way of planning your routes.   This is like looking at the trees instead of the forest.  When you are using a transportation management software application like BusBoss, you should focus your attention on making your routes efficient because the software application should take care of the individual “trees”.

Using BusBoss, there are several ways to accomplish this, each with its own benefits and drawbacks.

Most people tend to gravitate towards our fleet optimization process.  While it’s true that the fleet optimizer will generate a set of routes that minimizes the number of buses, times and miles, this is not always the best course of action to take.  The problem with the fleet optimizer is that all of your routes will change.  This means that students that were the last one on the bus last year (with a short ride time) may be one of the first students on the bus next year (with a long ride time).  Many people don’t like change, and the fleet optimizer will change everything, so you should expect to get some complaints from parents. 

This is not to suggest that the fleet optimizer should not be used.  I recommend that all of our customers use the fleet optimizer to check what the most efficient routes could be.  You should then compare the results of the Fleet Optimizer to your existing routes.  If your routes are already efficient, there is not likely to be too much difference in terms of the number of buses or travel times and miles.  In a situation like this, it is better to continue using your existing routes.  However, if the fleet optimizer generates significantly better routes, and all school district administrators are made aware of the probable cost savings with the likelihood that some parents will complain, then you can decide whether to implement these routes.

The alternative method for school bus route planning is to use your existing routes and change them in a way to make them more efficient.  With a robust school transportation management software application like BusBoss, you can easily display your existing routes and overlay them on the integrated map.  At this point, you can look to see if there are any significant overlaps in your routes.  This occurs when multiple buses are traveling the same roads.  This cannot be avoided in and around the schools, but if this is occurring in other areas further away, it is a good indication that your routes can be made more efficient.
You should also examine your existing routes and the bus capacities involved.  If your buses have a lot of empty seats on them by the time you arrive at the school, there is likely room for improvement.

Using BusBoss is significantly easier for planning and optimizing your school bus routes which leads to higher efficiencies and lower costs.