School Bus Route Optimization: What is it and Why do I care?

School Bus Route Optimization is a process where the transportation director at a school generates a set of bus routes that ensures all students are transported to their required school on time.

Eliminating Bus Routes

A bus route optimization that leads to fewer buses will result in the biggest cost savings.  This is not always possible to do, but it should certainly be a goal.  Each bus you have on the road will cost your school district money. When you eliminate a bus route, you will save costs not just this year, but each subsequent year.  The cost savings will continue for years to come.

Based on the average per-pupil expense and the average number of children per bus, a school district saves an estimated $37,000 per school year by eliminating one bus route

School Bus National Stats

Reducing travel distances

Fuel is expensive, so any bus route optimization that results in less traveled distances will allow you to save fuel costs.

Average fuel consumption (mpg) for school buses (ASBC estimate, assuming large capacity buses, diesel engines) is 7 mpg. 

American School Bus Council

There are various ways to optimize your bus routes to minimize travel distances.  Sometimes, a simple stop order optimization will result in fewer miles.  Stop order optimization is when you keep the same stops on your routes while changing the order in which the bus visits each stop.  An alternative for bus route optimization is to examine stops on multiple routes to determine if grouping the stops differently would result in less distance travelled. When doing this, you need to be careful that you don't overload and assign too many students to each route, and also make sure that the bus has enough time allocated to complete the route. 

There are a lot of components that need to be considered while you are performing school bus route optimizations.  Keeping track of all these manually is overwhelming and is likely impossible for many people.  School bus route optimization will be most effective by using School Transportation Management Software like BusBoss. BusBoss will help you to optimize a single route or your entire fleet.

You'll be saving money for your school district with a minimum of time and effort!