"What is School Transport Management and why is it needed? "

Why is school transport management important?

School transportation management enables transportation service providers to offer students on-time, responsive, safe, and comfortable transportation where visibility into the transportation services is also provided. This feature allows parents, teachers, and school administrators to assess the transportation services quality.

A school transport management system can keep track of transportation vehicles, including their locations, statuses, upcoming trips, or cancelled trips. The system can provide live updates to waiting students and can even guide transport vehicles if there is a potential re-route or temporary stopping of services because of an unexpected disruption such as a riot. 

How can a school transport management system help students?

• Get updates on bus location – Students can get real-time updates on the school bus or transport vehicle location. They can accordingly pace their activities to reduce waiting time.
• Identify points of boarding and alighting – There could be situations when a student may have to board or alight a school bus at a different location. Knowing these points of boarding and alighting helps students plan their schedules accordingly.

Provide feedback on the ride – If the driver is riding rashly or not courteous, feedback can be provided by students to school management. 

What are some of the typical features of school transport management software?

• Collection of transport fees – Using the school transport management software, school administration can collect transport fees from students. They can also disburse salaries and any other service fees to transport drivers. 
• Alerts and notifications – This feature helps inform teachers, parents, and students of bus trip statuses, schedule changes, and arrival/departure times.
• Attendance – This feature tracks the attendance of students on the bus, and alerts stakeholders if a student scheduled to be on the journey is not present. The feature will also track driver attendance.

What are some of the many benefits of school transport management software?

• Easy route management – The school transport management software can be integrated with external route management software, and get the best non-clogged routes on a particular day to get to the school on time.
• Safety – The school transport management software can log safety incidents with respect to driving patterns. This data can be used to better drive efficiency. 
• Scalable – It is easy to add more fleets because it becomes easy to track all fleets using a single system. It is also easier to manage bus rides covering several hundreds of kilometers. 

Time to think about the environment too. The school transport management software can log the idle time, traffic stoppages, emissions, and such data to determine the carbon footprint of the transportation system.