In the beginning there were paper maps, transparencies, push pins, colored pens and crayons, and dispatchers working feverishly to find the most effective bus routes to save their bus drivers time and money, and deliver children to school and home safely and on time.

As the 20th century wound down and America entered the new millennium however, significant changes occurred in the way buses are scheduled and routed. Adopting operations research, a century-old branch of applied mathematics, technology shifted the paradigm to a fully digitally mapped environment.

Computerization, and its inherent ability to permanently archive information in a digital format, has made routing and scheduling easier for bus dispatchers who now rely on GIS software to understand and manipulate spatial data.

Digital maps have eliminated driving city streets to calculate distances, and allowed transportation supervisors to create customized routes, geocode student addresses, enter bus schedules complete with bus stops, monitor drivers' mileage and overtime, and so on.

More importantly, savings of up to 20 percent appear to be a decade-long norm when transportation operations in any business segments convert to the digital environment.

But what exactly is routing and scheduling software?

With the exploding popularity of several related technologies, including new wireless and Internet technologies, all kinds of software products are appearing that offer some or all segments of routing and scheduling programs. While the technology will continue to evolve there appears to be a consensus among the major suppliers of the system, of the several primary functionalities that are required to comprise a fully functional system. At least four or five of these must be present to comprise a fully functional, routing and scheduling software program. They are: routing/scheduling, boundary planning, fleet maintenance, field trips, special education, driver records and accident tracking.

What about the related technologies? This article describes the several key technologies and features that comprise school bus routing and scheduling.

Core Technologies
GIS, or geographic information system, is a mapping technology. It provides geographic information about the world, explains George Dailey of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), "and is represented by geographically-referenced layers" of information. These data are provided "at any scale, local to global, and can be explored on a computer with GIS software," he said.

GIS software employs geography to analyze data such as demographics, business activity, housing patterns, highways, street intersections, railroad grade crossings, landmarks, rivers, etc. Instead of presenting the information in mind-numbing rows of numbers, the data is presented in a user-friendly graphic format.

Meanwhile, GPS, or global positioning system, utilizes a constellation of satellites in stationary orbit 11,000 miles in space to define precise locations on the surface of the planet, based on centuries-old standards of latitude and longitude. In addition to supplying geographic lat/long, elevation and time information, GPS provides tracking and navigation data that can be analyzed with GIS software.

Long the purview of the U.S. military, GPS became commercially available in 1997 when the Clinton administration decided to cease degrading the GPS signals it made available to the public. Overnight, positional location accuracy increased to 15 meters from perhaps 100 meters, and now to perhaps a centimeter.

Combining the two technologies allows school transporters to route and schedule their bus fleets with efficiency and precision undreamed of in the earlier era.

Digital Maps
There are an estimated more than 100 digital map developers in the GIS world. The largest and oldest provider of a nationwide digital database is the U.S. Census Bureau, in business since the early days of the GBF/DIME and TIGER database projects more than two decades ago.

Now, three commercial companies, Tele Atlas, Navigation Technologies (NavTech) and Geographic Data Technologies, Inc., specialize in the development of digital maps for transportation purposes. NavTech offers up to 34 layers of information; Tele Atlas offers more than 100 road attributes. Both companies gather data by driving millions of miles in GPS-equipped cars. Routing and scheduling software vendors such as VersaTrans, Transfinder, EDULOG and others utilize these maps for school transportation routing and scheduling programs.

Digital maps in the 21st century are based on lat/long coordinates. But that wasn't always the case.

From the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, mathematicians turned software developers who assigned unique values to their coordinates developed many of the early maps for school transportation purposes. Some of these so-called "legacy" maps continue in use in transportation departments nationwide. Translation tables within the legacy maps, typically convert the unique coordinate values, to standard latitude longitude coordinates.

These translation tables render the differences between the older generation of legacy maps and the newer generation of lat/long maps almost invisible to users.

Moreover, older maps, possibly due to incompatible coordinate systems, may be limited when it comes to sharing data with other agencies that utilize lat/long maps. Particularly when school buses travel outside the district's service area, or across state line, for activity trips.

A benefit of the legacy maps for school transporters, however, is the customized transportation data they often contain, and the investment of time and money the customization represents.

Even the new generation of digital maps require some customizing. "Despite claims to the contrary," said Lois Schlyer, EDULOG's vice president of implementation, "very few digital map files are 'ready to go' for sophisticated routing operations without further work by either the vendor or the school district."

GIS Software
The software vendor typically performs the initial merging of school district databases into the digital maps. The vendor adds transportation attributes such as school sites, bus maintenance facilities, street names and numbers, children's home addresses, one-way streets, the average speed of a school bus, hazardous sites, school accesses, traffic restrictions, etc. It's often a several month long interactive process between vendor and district to customize the map.

For school districts, however, there are several key subsets to routing and scheduling. The first is the ability to edit their maps. School districts are often the first to know about new subdivisions, hazardous road conditions, changing home addresses of students, etc. Districts simply can't wait months or even weeks for the vendor to update their maps. They need the ability to geocode for accurate location.

Second, is the ability to optimize. Optimizing describes the process of altering routes and schedules based on rules and user constraints defined by the district and recorded in the transportation-planning database. "Optimization comes into play for bell time analysis," said Rick Bacchus, president of Trapeze Software. "The objective is to develop the best possible (travel) scenario by mathematically calculating the lowest possible cost."

Third is geocoding which describes the ability to attach data to a digital map at a specific geographic location. For example, a student profile at their home address, the name of a bus stop, etc.

Some vendors even offer runtime routines so the transportation department's map can be maintained by outside agencies such as county or municipal governments. EDULOG's ShapeServer software, for example, allows shapefiles to display directly on the screen concurrently with EDULOG information.

Shapefiles
Digital maps are known by different terms, depending on the vendor. Whatever the name, think of digital maps as layers of information, something like a stack of pancakes. For instance, layer one contains natural features such as rivers and lakes; layer two offers transcontinental highways, transmission lines and railroads; layer three offers transportation attributes such as boulevards and streets, school sites, one-way streets, highway hazards and so on. These layers of information can be added or removed as necessary.

The two most popular providers of GIS software to interpret the digital map information in shapefiles are ESRI with its ArcView and ArcInfo software programs, and MapInfo with its MapX, MapXtreme and Map Professional suite of products.

Because an estimated 85 percent of federal, state and local governments in the U.S. utilizing ESRI's GIS software, the ESRI map format, known as shapefiles, have become the defacto worldwide standard format for digital maps.

That doesn't mean everyone uses ESRI's format or that everything in the GIS world is equal. MapInfo refers to its map file format as MIF layers. Proprietary data formats continue to exist. Moreover, "simplified" mapping software available on the web or in electronics stores has emerged. Some of these maps are practically worthless for bus routing purposes - they are poorly designed and created. Some offer accurate centerline GIS sets but no transportation attributes. Still others are simple graphics files, instead of being true GIS maps.

Automatic Vehicle Location
A third core GIS technology is remote sensing, which provides precise location coordinate values. Remote sensing via GPS provides automatic vehicle location (AVL), which allows a user to find out where buses are at any moment.

The question with AVL is how to communicate the buses' location at any given moment back to base. The choices range from recording positioning data for download at the end of the day to instantaneous wireless communication.

Laidlaw adopted GST Tracker, a GPS-based real-time vehicle-tracking system, in 50 school buses for the transportation service it provides for the St. Louis School District. "We're using 800 MHz frequency which reduces the ongoing monthly communications costs per month and therefore makes it very affordable for school districts," said Bill Swendsen, general manager of Laidlaw Planning Solutions.

According to Jim Folks, Laidlaw's v.p. of business development and marketing, the company has several GPS operations in the U.S. "They are beyond the piloting stage," he said. "We are just waiting to see how the market shapes up."

Meanwhile, the Palm Beach School District in Florida is also using the GST Tracker system. "We've installed it on 75 buses and have 70 more to go," said Willie Saul, transportation specialist with the district. He added, "We own an 800 MHz radio frequency and communicate with the buses by voice or data channel." Sauls said the cost to install all the needed hardware to operate the system is approximately $625 per bus.

But AVL not achieved the same penetration in school transportation as GIS has.

Last year, Hunterdon Central Regional High School District in New Jersey conducted a GPS pilot project in association with VersaTrans and TracerNet. The program required 300 high school students to use their student ID cards to scan in and out each time they entered or departed the bus.

The pilot project was eventually abandoned, but that doesn't mean it wasn't successful. "Our first phase was successful, we accomplished our goals and then some. There were some minor problems that we couldn't control, like dead zones. For the most part our issues were with the faults of GPS and cellular technology, not with the software or our program," said assistant transportation coordinator Agnes Mazeffa.

Meanwhile, early in 2002, when a Pennsylvania school bus driver hijacked a busload of students and took them on an unscheduled daylong outing to Washington, D.C., legislators in the Keystone State began demanding mandatory installation of GPS on all 21,000 school buses in the state. The idea died for lack of funding.

Internet
Web access is an imprecise, tricky concept. Its ranges from viewing limited transportation data to running software across the Internet.

"It means you have information accessible via the web," said Tony Civatella, president of Transfinder. "It's a service to the community via the web."

Some vendors offer web-enabled or eLink portals for their school district customers. District employees access transportation data via the school's Intranet, the public accesses data via the Internet.

These portals allow parents to pull up records about their children, but do not allow parents to change the information listed there. Only authorized school personnel are allowed to change information.

Web portals typically offer an area for parents to comment by email back to the transportation department. The web portal of the Durham District School Board near Toronto allows parents to supply their home address and register their children on the transportation department's website before the start of school, or when they move. The child's bus stop can be provided in minutes.

Some routing and scheduling vendors offer "lite" programs for smaller school districts. The routing and scheduling software resides on the vendor's server and all routing and scheduling is done remotely.

"We enabling is a minor application, a feature," said Terri Fallon of VersaTrans.

Conclusion
GIS and GPS have made such an impact on an industry which had previously relied on paper maps and manpower, the only thing holding many districts back is deciding which system would be best for them, and whether they have the funds to pay for it. Currently, it is estimated that more than about 25 percent of the school districts in the United States use some type of computerized routing and scheduling system. How should school transporters contemplating adopting GIS technology proceed?

"No one should ever purchase a transportation routing program without thoroughly investigating their options and understanding exactly what they are getting into," says Chris McAllister of the Conyers Public Schools in Georgia. McAllister adopted Smartr after nearly two years of study.

"First, investigate every available option, read articles, search the Internet, attend conferences, visit other school systems, participate in software demonstrations, and provide data to potential vendors, " said McAllister. "Second, do not think that using a computerized routing system will reduce your workload. The workload will increase in proportion to your expected results. Third, provide adequate user training for your employees, and if necessary hire a computer specialist or contract your initial setup with the vendor. Finally, be creative and organized. Every school system has unique operational procedures. Decisions need to be made concerning such things as custom database design, report content, or interface with a student information system; someone needs to be in charge and take responsibility," he said.

He advised, "Don't buy a software program and expect every operational decision to be answered automatically. Computers are stupid at blinding electronic speed; they solve equations based on input from an operator, and they are only as accurate as the information you provide."

Reproduced from the May 2003 issue of School Transportation News, All rights reserved.