Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
The School District 55 Transportation Department is using recently purchased software to help make its routing more efficient.
Up till November 2005, the district used Microsoft Word documents to keep track of each route, Driver Trainer Deborah Maskal said. The information would have to be typed out in the document for each route, including directions, names, schools, all of the important information.
It was all manual, Maskal said. “We had to route the buses the way we see fit and guess this is the best way to go.”
Then along came Edulog.
The software combines databases with maps that can be used in a variety of functions.
A map shows the location of every district student’s home within school attendance boundaries.
At a glance, transportation officials can pull up maps of routes and print them off.
To find what route a student is on, Maskal said, she just punches in the name.
“I don’t have to go into each route (in Word documents) and look,” she said. All of the information is quickly available. “I’m pretty impressed with the program.”
If something changes, it is simple to recalculate the route for the drivers.
Setting up routes has been handy, Maskal said. She has been learning the software since its installation on transportation computers, and next summer the district will probably use the software to calculate new routes.
Right now, the software is primarily used to set up existing routes, adding students to a route or removing them, with an automated reordering of the route maps, directions and documents.
The district is so spread out that it can end up with three buses running to Cascadia and a couple up the Calapooia, Maskal said. Edulog was able to reduce duplication on those routes last year.
The software has also helped determine whether students are eligible to ride the bus, since the district requires elementary students to live more than a mile from their school, and high school and junior high students to live more than mile and a half away to be eligible to ride the bus.
Finding out whether a student is eligible in close cases used to mean a transportation official had to drive the route to find out, Maskal said. Edulog measures that now, and she can give parents an answer quickly by phone.
Next school year, the district will make wider changes to bus routing, she said.
The district, which puts 440,000 miles a year on its bus fleet, has not seen significant savings on mileage due to the new software, according to Transportation Supervisor L.D. Ellison. Next year, when routes are fully reworked, he does expect some.
At the same time, officials will need to make sure each route is realistic by weighing factors, such as intermittent riders, that software cannot, he said. His goal is to reduce ride times as much as possible for students who ride buses up to an hour at a time.
The district would also like to mirror routes so that it has the same routes in the morning as it does in the afternoon, Maskal said. That will probably require new bell times.
Right now, the district has three more routes in the afternoon than it does in the morning, Ellison said.
While enrollment is down, Ellison said, bus ridership is up. Right now, the district is carrying 1,943 passengers per day, up 65 students from last year.