Art Watson, routing supervisor for the Royal Oak (Mich.) School District, has been using BUSTOPS routing software by MicroAnalytics in a novel way. BUSTOPS is a school bus routing and management program that enables districts to conduct route and run optimization using individual time parameters.

After moving to Royal Oak days before the start of school, a young family inquired about bus transportation for their daughter, only to discover that they fell within the designated walking area to the nearest elementary school.

"The parent was concerned that this was quite a distance for the little girl to walk," Watson says. With the parent's authorization, Watson offered to contact a few other parents of nearby students in the same grade and walk area and to put the families in touch.

The little girl now has some new friends to walk to school with. Everyone concerned thought this was a cute story. So Andy Linell, executive director of Business and Technology Services for the school district, started to pass similar situations of walk-area students on to transportation department for help.

Watson says BUSTOPS Transportation software makes it easy to pull up a list of nearby students in the walk zone, using any criteria he wants, such as grade and school.






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