Transportation is a crucial budget item for schools and districts. Tight budgets or complicated approval processes can be a source of stress for administrators.
The easiest way to ease this stress? Find ways to optimize your school bus transportation.
When you can be confident you’re meeting budget targets, daily operations run more smoothly, and budgets are maximized. Optimizing school transportation begins with identifying hidden costs. Even smaller costs add up, creating real expenses for your school during the year.
This blog will help administrators identify the hidden costs of school bus transportation and explore how Bustrak can address them through optimization and increased efficiency.
The Cost of Inefficient Bus Routes
Fuel Expenses
There are three essential components to school bus transportation: vehicles, drivers and fuel. Poorly planned bus routes experience more issues that affect fuel consumption, including wrong turns, idling at stops, delays, and traffic.
Combined with rising fuel costs, consuming more fuel than necessary can add strain to your transportation budget.
Driver Overtime
Inefficient bus routes may require drivers to work longer hours. Whether your district handles driver wages on an hourly or a salary basis, extra driving time may increase expenses and driver dissatisfaction.
Even for drivers who are keen to receive overtime compensation, more hours behind the wheel increase the likelihood of fatigue and burnout. While overtime may be welcomed by some, increased wage expenses will negatively impact your transportation budget.
As well, driver shortages in your area can worsen the problems of overtime and burnout. When relying on substitute drivers, they may struggle to keep routes on track. Long, inefficient routes are also less appealing to potential drivers, which may prevent them from accepting a position with your school or district.
Bus Maintenance and Issues
Extra time on the road due to route inefficiencies and wrong turns contributes to increased maintenance costs. Maintenance costs add up regardless of whether you own or outsource your transportation fleet. If you outsource, extra costs may arise when contracts are renegotiated for a new period. Although delaying maintenance may work in the short term, doing so can lead to more frequent bus breakdowns, requiring substitute buses – all while costing you more in the long run.
Student and Parent Impact
Not every aspect of transportation optimization is purely financial. Ultimately, the goal is to get students to/from school safely and on time. Students and parents are affected when this goal isn’t achieved, decreasing satisfaction.
Due to long routes or delays, administrators may receive increased calls from concerned parents, adding stress to the process.
How to Make School Bus Routes More Efficient
As an administrator, planning ahead and being proactive are the best ways to reduce transportation inefficiencies.
Here are our best tips for improving efficiency with Bustrak.
Route Planning
Route planning primarily happens at the beginning of the new school year. This can make it tedious to update a route when changes are necessary, having to manually edit the order and stop times.
To save time and stress, consider using Bustrak’s Route Planning features. Simply drag and drop stops to rearrange the route order. With the included map view, you can visualize how changing the stop order will affect the directions for the entire route.
As you rearrange the route, stop times will update automatically, allowing you to observe the impact of changes on the ETA.
Bustrak makes it easy to create new routes, too. With just a few clicks, you can duplicate and convert an AM to a PM route, reversing the stop order.
Turn-by-Turn Directions
Once your route is planned and optimized, Bustrak makes it easy to share the route directions with bus drivers, providing them with the most up-to-date information possible.
Drivers equipped with Bustrak benefit from turn-by-turn directions. Based on traffic or delays, drivers’ ETAs will automatically update, helping them avoid traffic and maintain timeliness.
Bustrak provides drivers with the information they need to keep routes running smoothly, all hands-free.
Real-Time Bus Tracking
Administrators may feel that they lack control once buses begin their routes every day. Previously, administrators had limited ways of knowing bus status or location.
Real-time bus tracking is an essential feature of Bustrak. While routes are running, administrators can view status from their dashboard, whether buses are early, on time, or delayed. Having the most accurate information in real-time means administrators are better equipped to answer parent questions and ensure student safety.
As well, with the Bustrak Parent App, parents can benefit from this same peace of mind. Real-time bus tracking for parents means they can check the location of their child’s bus, even before pickup.
Route History
How can administrators know which routes are suffering from inefficiencies? Especially when managing multiple bus routes, optimization often takes a back seat.
With Bustrak, your insights are easy to access using Route History.
Similar to real-time tracking, Route History enables you to follow the route a bus travelled, but on a specific date. Especially useful for addressing parent questions or complaints, Route History helps you troubleshoot issues the bus may have encountered at a specific time.
With fresh data at your fingertips, it’s easier for administrators to pinpoint frequent delays and plan for route optimization.
Preparing Parents & Children
Especially for young children, riding the bus on their own can be intimidating. This can result in delays as parents try their best to help their child onto the bus.
Bustrak’s Parent App can help parents and children see where the bus is along the route, giving time to prepare before the bus arrives. With push notifications, parents will be notified when the bus is 5 or 10 minutes away. Preparation and transparency reduce bus delays, improve efficiency, and ease children’s transition between school and home.
The Benefits of Optimized Bus Routing and Management
Inefficient bus routes cost administrators stress and districts time and money. Whether it be increased fuel costs, driver expenses, maintenance, or unhappy parents, finding ways to reduce these costs helps administrators meet their budget targets with confidence.
Identifying inefficiencies in your transportation helps you better understand where your money is going and how these issues can be resolved. Equipped with real data from Bustrak, your annual budget approval is no longer a daunting task. Bustrak is an easy solution to integrate into your transportation with a monthly or annual billing structure.
With numerous planning features included, Bustrak is an all-in-one software designed to support administrators. In addition, your bus drivers receive better directions with Bustrak, and parents benefit from bus location tracking and notifications.
Curious how Bustrak can change your transportation management? Contact us to book a Live Demo – we can’t wait to show you everything Bustrak has to offer.
If you’re a busy administrator who’d prefer to walk through it in your own time, you can begin a Free Trial.
Have other questions? Please reach out – we’d be happy to discuss the transportation issues you’re seeing and how Bustrak can help address them!
