With 28 states facing budget deficits this year, the school bus community senses big trouble ahead.
That is largely because states and school districts can make fiscal choices in only two areas of transportation costs – vehicles and drivers. Fuel, maintenance, insurance, fringe benefits, facilities and other expenditures lie pretty much beyond a district’s control.
The good news is that there are ways to respond to shrinking budgets without compromising the safety of pupil transportation. Rearranging the temporal and spatial relationships among schools, students and other variables affecting pupil transportation is one good example.
Several years ago our firm designed and supervised an operation in which 650 developmentally disabled students were transported daily, door-to-door, to 27 schools and programs in a 300-square-mile Los Angeles suburb. Transportation service to one program provided by another firm was put out to bid. About 150 students were receiving transportation in that program, which was located in the center of the service area. The incumbent contractor bid roughly $38,000 per month, its current costs. We bid zero. But only under one condition – that we be allowed to establish the start and end times of the new program and the 27 other programs we already served. (We did not alter the duration of any programs.)
Obviously we won the bid. After applying our analysis, and changing program start and end times, we reduced total vehicle hours from 360 hours per day for the original 27 programs to about 340 hours for those programs plus the new program. In other words, we effected a 5.5 percent reduction in total vehicle hours while at the same time increasing passengers by 23 percent.
As program hours were staggered further, our vehicles began averaging nine hours per day on the road. That spread amortization costs over more service hours, and expended the fleet’s useful life before factors like corrosion could take effect. We also reduced “deadhead” and other non-passenger travel time to about 20 percent of total vehicle time.
Another benefit from the consolidation was the ability to attract better drivers by offering a choice of either full- or part-time work, with ample opportunity to earn overtime pay. In addition, having a quality, stable work force enabled us to increase our vehicles’ on-time performance to 99 percent.
We urged the funding agency to decentralize one program, in which we transported 150 clients, and relocate half of them to a site on the opposite side of the service area. That would have reduced vehicle service hours and transportation costs by an additional 12 to 15 percent. Of course, all the other program hours would again have to be adjusted to optimize the temporal as well as spatial relationships among them.
A number of school districts around the country, to their credit, have begun to explore methods to reduce transportation costs. For example, many districts have staggered bell times among their schools to improve fleet efficiency.
The more complex, decentralized and diverse the district is, the more opportunities there are for improving productivity and reducing costs. The closing of a school, and even the opening of a new school, provide a special opportunity for savings.
The principles involved in making a transportation program more efficient, though difficult to master, are extremely simple to identify. For instance, a trip on the way to another trip costs nothing, assuming that the vehicle has the capacity for additional passengers. Furthermore, an efficient route heading, say, southwest, must consist primarily of route segments traveling south or west.
Key factors involved include the location and decentralization of operating divisions, vehicle deployment patterns, vehicle “posting,” vehicle storage locations, route design, and scheduling and dispatching virtuosity. In simple terms, the key to solving a transportation problem lies in rearranging the variables.
School transportation, like most transportation, is used traditionally as a Band-Aid to compensate for the arbitrary arrangements of schools and student residences. School board members and transportation directors who have the knowledge and skills to identify needed changes are rarely included in the community’s planning process. Productivity is further undermined by curriculum specialization whereby only a select number of schools provide certain programs like vocational training or special education.
Providing school bus service to disabled students age five to 18 and simultaneously providing separate transportation to disabled non-school age passengers, with both groups traveling to and from the same basic areas, also wastes a significant amount of money. Finally, the provision of transportation to achieve social goals, like mainstreaming disabled students and busing for racial integration, costs more than transportation designed solely to maximize mobility and minimize vehicle service hours.
Very few people or companies involved in pupil transportation have had an opportunity to practice and perfect the skills needed to effect the savings that are possible. Hiring a consultant is not an automatic solution either. Few consultants possess the knowledge and expertise to rearrange the temporal and spatial variables of a school district’s transportation program.
Computers can help. In many-to-one situations (hundreds or thousands of students traveling to and from a single point or centralized area), some excellent computer programs are helpful. The bad news is that computers still cannot “think.” So programs designed for many-to-one situations have little or no application in, for instance, 850-to-28 situations which are considerably more complex.
However, computer capabilities are expanding, and some programs can actually solve some pieces of the puzzle. But one must know what to ask the computer to do. And even where computer programs can perform some analyses, the data entry time and cost can be prohibitive. Because families move, holiday schedules conflict and a thousand other glitches occur constantly, it is impossible to integrate all the variables into a computer program. That is particularly true with special education service, where individual student needs add many layers of complexity to the problem.
While you may not possess the skills to reduce transportation costs 20 to 30 percent just from reading this article, you can make a start. Making a few simple changes, for example staggering bell times for schools, may reveal a myriad of possibilities, particularly in medium-sized service areas where there are a relatively small number of variables.
If you stagger the hours of two schools by the travel time between them, plus some time added for a few additional pick-ups, you might be able to consolidate two separate systems or sets of routes, one for each school, into a single system serving both schools. That would “thicken the density” of the service area, decrease the distance and time between pick-ups and decrease the number of vehicles and drivers needed.
You might also consider staggering hours for vehicles serving a school that starts early to enable a bus to pick up another load of passengers to transport to a school that starts later. That would increase the hours a vehicle operates each day, which amortizes vehicle costs over more hours, and decreases deadhead time.
Another thing you can do is begin to recognize the difference between costs and rates. That is particularly true when hiring a contractor. If Contractor A can transport 10 pupils per vehicle at $40 per hour, while Contractor B can transport 20 pupils per vehicle hour at $60 per hour, one can clearly see that Contractor B is a better buy.
Ask yourself: Which of those contractors would win in your bid process? Does your bid process place any value on productivity and bottom-line cost as opposed to rate? Does your bid process contain the means to determine and measure differences in contractors’ ability to improve productivity, as well as their respective understanding of the principles involved? Is your community prepared to implement the changes necessary to effect those cost savings once they are identified?
It is not difficult to see that cost savings from time and space planning are clearly preferable to other alternatives. If we are to sustain, much less improve upon, the outstanding safety record of the school bus community in these times of fiscal belt-tightening, then we must begin to understand what changes affect productivity and cost, and we must begin to learn how to make them.