The Student Mobility Efficiency Pyramid

4MATIV’s efficiency framework summarizes crucial system design choices and levers for containing costs and driving efficiencies. The efficiency framework outlines three broad categories that impact the efficiency and effectiveness of a transportation system:

1. System Design Choices

2. Ongoing Operational Practices

3. Adaptive Management Strategies

In general, while most school systems focus on the bottom layers of the pyramid (system design choices), they struggle to make meaningful change, they are overly reactive or inconsistent at responding to the middle layers (ongoing operational practices), and few have the tools to take action at the top (adaptive management strategies).

Establish a Strong System-Level Base

At the bottom of the efficiency pyramid are system design choices: the long-held, hard-fought district and system decisions that may be reviewed and revised every few years, or sometimes less frequently. Examples include choices like facilities planning, drawing eligibility boundaries, and rethinking school locations. Policy changes at this level have the largest impact because they determine who is transported in the first place and what efficiencies are possible higher up the pyramid. However, they can also be the most difficult to implement because instead of simply purchasing new equipment or adopting a new technology, system design changes require political will and expend political and community capital. State law typically establishes minimums for the geographies and students systems are required to serve, but most often systems at baseline offer far more service than what is minimally required.

A bit easier to alter—but still huge levers for creating efficiency—are school bell times, bus stop locations, the modal mix, and network practices. Consider school bell times, which do not change very often. If a district adopts a two-tiered bell-time model where one set of schools starts at 7:30 AM and another set starts at 9:00 AM, and if routes are perfectly paired to maximize trip utilization and if each vehicle maximizes seat utilization given the large window between bell times for picking up students, the school system can reduce its vehicle and driver needs by half compared to a single tiered system. Likewise, school system policies typically allow for a reasonable distance between students’ homes and their assigned bus stops, but transportation department and operator practices are often far more accommodating. A thoughtful reevaluation of stop locations and stop distances from student homes can significantly improve the efficiency of the entire system by enabling the design of more direct and denser routes.

Similarly, school systems infrequently change their mix of vehicle sizes and types (e.g. swapping out buses for vans where routes can only accommodate a few students), expand the variety of modes they support (like adding specialized outsourced services, building carpool networks, launching walking school buses, and working with city transit, etc.), or go out to competitive bid for long-term operator contracts. Careful planning, execution, and differentiation of service at this level has dramatic downstream impacts on supply, reliability, and costs.

Effectively Manage Regular Operations

Once the larger system design considerations are in place, maintaining them is critical. To do so effectively, systems need annual and ongoing operational practices in place.

Optimize the Static State

Every year before the school year begins and when things aren’t moving, school systems have a chance to reset the system and start fresh. At this point the school year’s policies are in place and the system is static, allowing transportation planners to re-optimize the transportation plan. At the same time, the system has introduced new students, students have advanced in age and grade level, and many students have left. Additionally, in partnership with Special Education Departments, school nurses monitoring 504 plans, and system staff working closely with students who had been considered homeless in the previous year, many students’ circumstances may have changed – allowing them to be routed on regular bus routes, and making room for students who may need increasing accommodation in the coming year.

This is the time to do all the things that are difficult to do once the school year gets going: consolidate routes where loads have reduced, move and eliminate bus stops as students have aged or moved schools, re-pair trips to minimize deadhead time between trips, and create the most efficient system possible. Without disciplined “spring cleaning” and a mindset to reset each year, school systems tend to simply start each new year with the previous year’s routes and stops as a baseline. Stops in particular tend to be “sticky” year over year, resulting in ever-increasingly accommodating home to stop distances for students even as they get older.

Reoptimize Semi-Regularly

But once the school year begins, most systems undergo a high degree of flux with late enrollees and a backlog of unknown moves or changes of circumstances that bubble up as families return from summer break. Transfers also tend to be front-loaded as the year begins. Furthermore, even the best designed systems need the early weeks of a school year to work out kinks in routes, adjust to processes at schools that are highly variable, and understand actual ridership and new traffic patterns, so naturally routes need some adjustment once the year has started. The system’s initial static state theoretical efficiency can deteriorate and need to be revised.

Four to six weeks into the school year is an ideal time to make bigger moves to solve problems that families and schools might be experiencing and to adjust assignments with drivers. Thereafter, significant revisions to routes, stops, and driver/vehicle assignments can happen week-to-week, but they can also cause disruption to family, school and driver routines. As the volume of performance issues and enrollment or accommodations changes starts to settle, systems should be mindful and hold larger changes like wholesale re-routing to a quarterly cadence.