Student Transportation - Competencies
Beginning about every autumn and ending the following late spring, bright yellow-painted buses provide a reliable, critically important service of transporting our most precious and vulnerable people in our lives – our children – to and from school. It seems that regardless of poor weather or heavy traffic, we still take for granted that school buses will pick up and quickly drop off tens of millions of our children across the USA safely, cost effectively, and on time…without exception…every school day.
School districts are recently viewing proven telematics and security technologies such as vehicle location, accident detection, and CCTV as increasingly economical tools for improving the safety, management, and cost effectiveness of its student transportation service. As a natural extension of our long history successfully helping the
mass transit bus sector incorporate similar technologies to plan and manage fixed-route bus and paratransit van services, we more recently have been called upon by school districts and school bus services to review how these proven technologies might help meet their respective, increasingly demanding, student transportation needs.
Through our extensive work with the mass transit bus sector, our firm has been able to make available to school districts and school transportation companies, an extensive, core knowledge base and experience level in telematics technologies now available using the same system engineering principles and best-practices that have made telematics technologies today commonplace in mass transit bus and paratransit agencies worldwide.
There are no firms in the USA that can offer student transportation more experienced consulting engineers than here at Macro. Nearly every planner, engineer, or project manager at our firm within this practice area touts an unparalleled and unblemished track record of hands-on experience successfully serving between 3-5 different transit and transportation agencies over the last 15 years. School bus fleet operators, therefore, can rest assured that Macro’s staff has the requisite knowledge of the most current fleet management systems, telematics, and related voice and data communications infrastructures to ensure state-of-the-art technology is leveraged for student transportation in the most cost effective manner possible.
Macro has been serving bus transit and transportation agencies since 1991. By employing a large, diverse cadre of professional planning, engineering, and project management staff members who specialize in one or more areas of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), advanced public transit systems (APTS), and associated telecommunications fields – all operating under one cohesive firm – our firm is regularly seen by our clients as the expert in the field. These staff members have already worked together closely as a team on various projects, and so can now seamlessly complement each other's talents to the ultimate benefit of our student transportation clients. Our firm is commercial, long-standing member of the American Passenger Transport Association (APTA) and ITS America.
Only Macro offers student transportation the broadest, most complete practical understanding of today’s fleet management and telematics technologies that promise safer, less costly, school buses. We are not only planners and engineers, but we also regularly help our clients prepOnly Macro offers student transportation the broadest, most complete practical understanding of today’s fleet management and telematics technologies that promise safer, less costly, school buses. We are not only planners and engineers, but we also regularly help our clients prepare highly competitive bid documents, facilitate contract negotiations, and oversee their subsequent design, installation, and acceptance testing. Our field-proven competencies in this practice area include:
- Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) – manages and controls voice and data communications between dispatchers and school bus drivers. Provides vehicle status information displayed to dispatchers in an easy to read, “tabular” format. Mobile data terminals installed in vehicles display canned and ad-hoc text messaging between dispatchers and drivers.
- Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) or “Telematics”– GPS receivers installed on school buses providing real-time vehicle location information back to dispatchers on map displays. Allows for real-time tracking of pupil pick-up and drop-off locations, route departures, and response to service disruptions (e.g. detours, traffic delays, breakdowns, etc.) by dispatchers, police, fire, etc.
- Records Management – Secure, online access to and completion of incident report forms; historical accumulation of daily school bus performance and quality for management, school administration, school boards.
- Passenger Information – audio/visual systems that delivering real-time bus service status to bus stops, terminals, transit centers, personal mobile devices, and the Internet.
- On-board Systems – centralized driver login and control over video camera and recording equipment; on-board computerized drivetrain and vehicle management computers.
