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Case Study: Grandview School District #200Automated school bus route management for a small rural school district“It makes my life so much easier! It makes every aspect of managing my operation so much more efficient.” SNAPSHOTService area: 40 square miles BUSINESS PROBLEMThe Grandview School District needed a basic software product to manage their school transportation routing needs. After reviewing several products, they decided on Trapeze-Smartr because of its simplicity and flexibility. Many of the other software products available for school transportation were “overkill”, so a product that is simple in design was in need. Grandview also had some unique needs which were dictated by the State of Washington, so flexibility was needed on the software product of choice. Every school district in Washington needs to report a list of students that are in grades K through 5 which live inside a one mile radius from their school of residence. So not only was a simple “off-the-shelf” bus routing software product needed, but rich mapping or GIS functionality and analysis was needed as well. Since Smartr runs “on top of” the industry standard mapping software known as ArcGIS from ESRI, this type of functionality would be included with the purchase of Smartr. Dale Fleischbein, Grandview’s transportation director, previously used another school transportation routing package at another, but much larger, school district. He knew that the same software package that he was already familiar with would be “overkill” for Grandview School District. So Fleischbein knew he needed to choose a software product that addressed the simplicity of small school districts. After reviewing a few software products for small school districts, Trapeze-Smartr was ultimately chosen. SOLUTIONAfter an on-site training course from one of Trapeze’s implementation experts, Fleischbein learned the software over a period of a couple of months. On-going and ad-hoc telephone and Internet technical support from Trapeze’s support staff helped him along the way after the initial training. A street map was easily acquired and imported from Yakima County’s mapping department. Grandview has a mix of both urban and rural stops—urban being located near street corners and rural being at student residences. Fleischbein quickly inputted the approximate 300 bus stops located around the Grandview School District. As each bus stop was inputted into Smartr, they immediately showed up on the map. Just like many other school districts that are new to automated school bus routing, this was the first time bus stops were viewed on a map by Grandview transportation staff, giving them a whole new perspective on where bus stops are located throughout the district and how they relate to other geographic places of interest. The next step for Fleischbein was to connect the various bus stops together and create individual bus routes. Since he didn’t want to make big changes right away, he mimicked the same bus routes that were currently being driven. Smartr was then used to collect the various bus stops together and determine the shortest travel path for each route. If Smartr routed a bus down a street where buses should not be After all the route were completed, Fleischbein used Smartr to create student rosters and driving directions (route sheets) for his bus drivers. Other standard features inside ArcGIS were used to create special bus route maps that Fleischbein also gave to his bus drivers to use. For the Washington State requirements, a combination of functions from Smartr and ArcGIS were used to obtain that list. The RESULTSAccording to Fleischbein, the time savings and concise method of creating bus routes using Smartr were significant. Not only did Fleischbein now have all the information he needed to manage his department, but now all the bus stop information was available to secretaries at the district’s school sites. This made it possible for district staff to easily provide bussing information quickly to parents and students whenever it was needed. District staff that needed such information had updated reports in PDF format, created by Smartr, e-mailed to them on a regular basis. Before Smartr was put into use, route directions were created and managed by the drivers that drove them. When Fleischbein came on board at Grandview, he reviewed all of the current routes. It took him a good deal of time to improve the efficiency of the routes. Later he learned that it would take him 4-6 hours to adjust each route accordingly. He did this every year over the summer before the beginning of school. Now with Smartr, it takes Fleischbein 15 minutes per route instead of the 4-6 hours. Furthermore, Fleischbein learned that after a year using Smartr, drivers were beginning to “buy in” to the idea of automated bus route management and began working with him to fine tune their route. Fleischbein would sit down with a bus driver in front of the computer running Smartr and look at the map to discuss the best way to run the route. The Grandview Police Department and Yakima County district attorney’s office also took interest in the district’s new Smartr software. They learned that it was now easy to identify crime incidents that occurred within 1,000 feet of a bus stop. Using ArcGIS and data from Smartr, Fleischbein now regularly prints a wall map for the police department so they can look at currently used bus stops. If the district attorney has to negotiate a criminal case that occurred within a given distance of a bus stop, they would verify it to Fleischbein, which he in turn used tools in ArcGIS to get the answers. Hopefully by the next summer, Fleischbein will have Smartr automatically determine which students should be assigned to which bus stop based off a safe walking route. This will allow for more efficient loading of school buses by using their maximum seating capacity. Route sheets generated by Smartr can be given to bus drivers showing which students get on or off the bus at assigned by stops which should eliminate disruptive bus overflow situations.
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