Under the hood of BPS busing
Working to make every ride safe, reliable & efficient
As fall brings familiar routines at work and at home, I hope everyone has still been enjoying this beautiful Boston weather! In my household, this time of year means back to packing lunches, balancing everyone’s soccer practices and activities with dinner time, and holding to stricter bedtimes to wake up in time for school.
Overall, Boston Public Schools (BPS) has had a very successful start to the school year thanks to the hard work of educators and administrators preparing all summer with facilities improvements, food service prep, academic planning, and family engagement. We also know our young people are coming back more ready than ever after a record-breaking summer of more students participating in summer learning programs and paid youth summer jobs than ever before. And we’re feeling the excitement! As of this past week, BPS enrollment was 50,173 students, including 2,837 new registrations since early August.
Back-to-school also means hundreds of yellow buses are back on the road. Our talented and extremely hardworking BPS transportation team juggles unthinkable complexity and makes real-time adjustments to serve tens of thousands of families. This year we’ve had challenges with the first few days of transportation, so with the first full week of school in the rearview mirror, I wanted to share how busing works, why we worked to introduce new technology this year, and how this all fits into our roadmap for BPS transportation that is safe, reliable, and efficient. Our teams have made progress each day, and with this new technology our families and school communities will have better information for a better experience than ever before.
Who are we busing?
In Boston, yellow bus ridership is based on students’ grade level and walking distance from home to school. Kindergarteners-Grade 5 students are assigned to a yellow bus route if they live more than one mile walking distance from school. Sixth graders who live 1.5 miles or more from school can choose between riding a yellow bus or getting a free monthly MBTA pass to take public transit. All 7th-12th graders get free monthly MBTA passes that are valid seven days a week, all throughout the year (including summer). In addition, students with disabilities of any grade may be assigned an Individualized Educational Plan that requires door-to-door yellow bus transportation from home to school. All together, so far this year 17,600 BPS students (about 35% of all BPS students) are on yellow buses, and the district is also legally required to transport 4,736 non-BPS students who attend charter schools in Boston or out-of-district special education placements, for 22,336 total riders (30% of bus riders require door-to-door transportation, and 70% are at corner stops).
How does busing work?
To get more than 22,000 students to school, our bus drivers cover 637 routes with three waves of school start times in BPS, plus others. To make this happen, each school day we need:
About 650 buses on the road that are all safe and well-maintained, with a fleet of about 750 total buses to ensure there is always a replacement when needed.
About 745 bus drivers, 750 bus monitors, and 50 other transportation staff who run dispatch, safety training, and road safety and yard safety supervision.
Bus routing that is efficient, familiar to our drivers, and communicated effectively to students and families.
How do we measure whether buses are on time?
School districts across the country really vary in how they measure bus performance. The Council of Great City Schools defines On Time Performance (OTP) as the number of buses that are not late, divided by the total number of buses scheduled, but there is no standard definition of lateness. Many districts define “late” as arriving within 10 minutes after scheduled school start time, and some define it as early as 15 minutes before bell time. To our knowledge, no other district is required to publicly report OTP, so it’s difficult to find benchmarks.
In Boston, our yellow buses are outfitted with GPS trackers. We track OTP as the percentage of buses that arrive at the school address at or before school start time, and we also measure the percentage of buses that arrive within 15 minutes after bell time, and within 30 minutes after. In June of 2022, a few months after becoming mayor and with no permanent BPS Superintendent in place yet, I had to sign a Systemic Improvement Plan with the then-Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education setting a number of commitments and metrics for BPS and DESE to collaborate on, in order to avert the threat of imminent state receivership that had built up over several years prior to our administration. Since then, BPS has completed all the required deliverables with deadlines outlined in the plan, and we continue to partner on the larger goals. The document outlined a goal of reaching a 95% monthly OTP (defined as arriving at or before school start time), which is a threshold higher than any other school district. We will always strive for 100% of students getting to school on time, but in the short term it’s important to set benchmarks grounded in real world data. Last year showed continuous improvement:
To get to this point, we have focused on addressing the fundamental underlying barriers to transportation reliability in the district. We negotiated new contracts with the bus drivers’ and bus monitors’ union that set more competitive salaries, as well as new requirements for accountability and performance. We also started a City training program to build a pipeline of bus drivers and monitors to get Boston residents into these good jobs and address staffing shortages facing school districts nationally. For the first time in many years, BPS was fully staffed with bus drivers by the start of last school year, and this school year we were fully staffed with bus drivers AND bus monitors for the first time, which makes a big difference for the reliability of door-to-door transportation for students with disabilities.
How are we doing so far this year?
This year, we’ve had a major dip in on-time yellow bus arrivals in the first week of school as we adjust to some major changes: implementing a first-ever real-time bus tracking app for families, and an unprecedented wave of new registrations right as school was starting. The first few days of school are always a big adjustment with yellow buses adding to fall traffic, bus drivers waiting at stops for students who may be getting dropped off by parents instead, and individual families needing adjustments for a change in address or pick up location. But this year, we had much more widespread delays; some schools waited for several hours after dismissal time for buses to pick up students for the ride home. The hardest hit schools were those in the last wave of start/dismissal times, as delays in the first and second bus runs spilled over throughout the day.
You can see the more significant delays this first week compared to previous years:
What caused these delays?
Two major changes combined for a rough transportation transition: 1) an expected adjustment period for the new Zum bus tracking app as drivers get used to the technology and the app adapts to traffic data; and 2) an unexpected surge in new student registrations in August and September. As mentioned above, it was a big deal that we started this school year with a full complement of drivers and bus monitors, so that special education students (whose IEPs often require bus monitors to ensure safety and well-being on the rides) could experience the same reliability. But to close the remaining gap in reliability and boost performance to that highest standard, we needed to implement fundamental changes that can make routes more efficient and help adapt to families’ daily needs and realities with real-time communication.
1) Zum app adjustment: for the first time ever, families can track exactly where their student’s bus is, and get live estimates for pick up and drop off times. Each bus driver has a tablet that provides navigation based on historic Google Maps traffic data and adapts to the actual daily traffic patterns collected from driving the routes over time. Drivers also use the app to mark which students are getting on and off at each stop, so we know for the first time which students are riding on which days and have accountability for the safety of each student. The app was piloted and adjusted over the summer, and drivers had ongoing training plus test runs using the new technology, but Zum has shared from other districts’ experiences that there is an adjustment period of a few weeks as drivers learn the names of each student to accurately check them off and the app loads in new navigation data from the runs.
Once everything settles, this new technology will help us deliver the best family experience with full transparency about bus operations, maximum safety for students, and the most efficient routes with better data than we’ve ever had on traffic patterns and individual students’ bus usage. So far, the feedback from families and bus drivers has been very positive about getting access to this level of transparency and communication; families of course want to see more efficient routes and drivers want the app to be more realistic with predicted drive times, which will naturally happen as the routes are updated each Wednesday with new data. The tablets also give us clear data for each route, even if the GPS hardware on any individual bus isn’t working that day. As of this past Thursday, more than 11,000 parents of more than 13,000 bus riders have logged into Zum at least once, and about 9,500 families have logged in every day this past week. School family liaisons will get trained on Zum this week to be able to help families even more.
2) Surge in recent registrations: Most families register for next fall’s school placements starting the winter several months before, and schools are assigned through the spring. BPS welcomes new registrations at any point after that, and we have families moving into the district at all times throughout the year. But we have never seen the registration centers so busy in August and September, with dozens of new student registrations happening each day before the start of school. Even as recently as on Wednesday of this past week, we had 80 new registrations. Some of these have been new immigrant families entering the district, and some have been families choosing BPS over other school options close to the start of the year. As it relates to busing, many of these new registrations are also new additions to the bus routes that were mapped out in early August. The district locked planned routes based on student registration as of August 9th, so that bus drivers could go through the process of bidding on routes and then doing test runs in our buses to get familiar with their assigned routes. There are always some adjustments based on families requesting a change of address or new registrations, but while last school year one-third of routes had some change between test runs and start of school, this year was double that: two-thirds of bus routes had changes before the first day of school, so drivers were driving different routes than they had practiced. We are looking into the reasons for this late surge and working on ways to better adjust.
What are we doing now to fix this?
1) We are improving bus routes. Traffic data is loaded into Zum weekly with new adjustments to navigation and scheduling. As new student registrations slow down, the routing can stabilize. This first route adjustment on Wednesday will include the first directly measured traffic data from the app and will be one of the bigger adjustments. Drivers also submit route adjustment forms to report issues they experience on the road that suggest a need for changes, and the 100 or so forms received over the last week will be incorporated into this week’s route updates.
2) We are working to minimize delays in buses heading out from the bus yard. GPS also helps us track what time each bus leaves the bus yard for their assigned route. Before heading out each day, drivers have to perform a “circle check” to ensure that a checklist of different systems or safety conditions are working properly. This usually takes about 15 minutes, but last week we saw greater delays than usual with technology-related issues such as signing into Zum or frozen screens on tablets, or bus maintenance issues that are getting addressed quickly.
3) We are preparing substitute drivers to deploy extra buses for the last wave of pickups and drop offs if earlier runs are looking delayed. Although each bus is assigned to three waves of school starts or dismissals, substitute drivers are deployed to supplement later runs when needed to stay on time. We should have more substitute drivers ready to go this week.
4) We are working to support school staff. As always, educators have been going above and beyond to make sure students are safe and connected to the right buses. Given the challenges this year, educators who have to stay late at school due to busing challenges will be supported with stipends through the end of the month. The Superintendent has also met with school leaders to get direct feedback.
5) We are incorporating families’ and schools’ feedback. In addition to general delays, one of the most frequent concerns we heard from families was that the app wouldn’t display any information if the bus driver was still completing a previous run. This week, families should be able to track where their assigned bus is even if it’s still completing an earlier route. We’re also working on requests from families with multiple students at the same school to allow siblings to ride together, even if one has been separately assigned due to an IEP; for older students to have access to the app too; and for schools to directly sort bus riders by student homeroom rather than just bus number. Families can continue to share feedback or get information from the BPS Transportation Help Line at 617-635-9520 or schoolbus@bostonpublicschools.org.
What comes next?
In the short term, our teams continue to work as hard as possible on managing this technology transition, and supporting families through this adjustment period over the next few weeks. We will keep sharing updates and stay in close communication with school communities to ensure that all our families can benefit from the new platform for direct engagement on transportation. BPS has trained our dedicated transportation hotline staff over the summer on how to provide Zum support, and I’m told by that team that most callers are needing help logging into Zum, but once they have access, families have been finding the platform fairly simple to navigate. Family liaisons will receive Zum training this week to help support at the school level. Routing will improve over the next weeks as well, and as drivers become comfortable with the platform, we will be able to use the new information on ridership to make bus routes as efficient as possible throughout the year.
Bigger picture, our driving goal is for every BPS student and family to have options for a high-quality student experience close to home. As we continue to implement a multi-year plan to revamp special education and deliver services to students wherever they enroll—rather than assigning students who need services only to specific schools—and to improve and adjust facilities to match the needs of students and families in every neighborhood, we know that families will choose schools they trust in the locations most convenient for them.
Thank you for this! Very informative on the formidable intricacies and logistics of the school bussing system. Fair to say that it's an ongoing WIP but it's definitely seeing improvement and trending in the right direction.