While computerized routing has reinvented transportation processes, real people remain necessary to verify route plans and to account for variations, said David W. Ramsay, director of transportation at Howard County Public Schools in Maryland.
Meanwhile, an ongoing national conver- sation 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. Te 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 com- puter-assisted routing, Ramsay said he still believes such data should be viewed as a platform for staff to make final decisions. “Tere’s really no substitute for area man- agers 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 optimiation efforts.
EXPECTATIONS REMAIN HIGH Brian Mann, director of sales and market- ing at the busHive Transportation Systems in Ballston Lake, New York, and Antonio Civitella, president and chief executive officer 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 track- ing 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 schools 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 develop- ers 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. “Tat creates new opportunities for us to share data through mobile devices, but it also creates high expectations.” He encourages transportation profession- als to keep their fingers on that pulse. For instance, Mike Brassfield, director of trans- portation 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 perfor- mance,” Brassfield said.
42 School Transportation News • APRIL 2017
CELEBRATING25YEARS
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