As schools continue to search for new ways to cut transportation costs and maintain a bus fleet, a shift to shared
In the right cases, this can result in improved transportation services - but it will also bring its own issues, and requires a lot of oversight. Let's take a quick look at the pros and cons.
1 - Cutting costs
The big obvious benefit is cutting costs involved with owning and maintaining a vehicle fleet. When the ownership and maintenance costs are shared across multiple schools, everyone pays less.
2 - Access to buses
Many schools are genuinely struggling to keep enough buses on the road to meet the needs of their students. Sharing transportation services helps ensure you have access to the vehicles you need.
3 - More local control than outsourcing
Outsourcing bus services to a third party is another option, but involves giving up a lot of control over how the buses are run. Sharing services gives you more power in the relationship.
1 - Oversight and coordination
You'll be spending a lot of time coordinating with other districts to ensure you can get bus use scheduled appropriately. This could end up taking up a lot of time, which you may need for other things.
2 - Conflicts over vehicles
The occasional conflict in vehicle use, field trip dates, etc, is basically inevitable. There's a certain amount of give-and-take, so you could end up haggling over who gets to use a bus on a given day - particularly specialty buses, such as those for special-needs students.
3 - Who's actually responsible?
The 'tragedy of the commons' is a threat here. Every district will have to be committed to sharing responsibility, rather than trying to pass the buck to avoid maintenance costs or other responsibilities.
Implementing shared transportation services in your district is a complicated proposition - but BusBoss can help make it easier. Our DISTRICTpatrol software is a robust accounting product designed for tracking costs and reporting on shared services. It's easy to use, and can significantly cut down on the bureaucratic overhead of transportation sharing.
Contact us to learn more about DISTRICTpatrol or any of our other products and services.
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PRESIDENT
Sonia has been involved with BusBoss since the late 1990’s, and has personally overseen many projects for various customers ranging from large urban and suburban districts to smaller rural school districts from all over the country.