Planning school transport: design of routes with flexible school opening times

Abstract

This paper puts forward a methodology for designing a system for school transport which, apart from designing routes, specifies school opening times. Traditionally school opening times have always been identical in the same area meaning many buses have to be used at the same time. This paper suggests the staggering of school opening times in order to minimise the number of buses and thereby reduce the enormous costs involved in running them. The methodology is based on: a first phase which addresses the classic routing problem by using mixed integer lineal programming and a second phase which uses bi-level programming to find the vector for school opening times, which, when staying within the constraints of the problem, minimises the direct costs of the system. The upper level represents the evaluation of the system costs and the lower level finds the best combination of optimum routes for the same bus.     

Shared school transportation: determinants of carpooling as children’s school travel mode in California

Transportation - Carpooling has potential as an alternative mode of school transportation along with other viable options, especially at a time when technology continues to increase our reliance...     

Bus ride times of exceptional school children

This paper examines bus ride times of exceptional school children in North Carolina. It uses levels of service data, which show excessive ride times for exceptional school children, to form clusters of local education agencies. From these clusters short term objectives or standards for maximum ride times are determined for each cluster. Among the findings are three distinct clusters of local education agencies (clusters 1, 2 and 3) whose maximum ride times are respectively 170 minutes, 105 minutes and 62 minutes.

The maximum ride times show that only one cluster (cluster 3) provides a service whose maximum ride time is comparable to the ideal maximum ride time (long term objective) of one hour revealed by the literature and also by responses of school superintendents and transportation directors. Methods of achieving these standards are examined. A comparison of the levels of service of regular and exceptional children transportation is also provided.

     

Correction to: Shared school transportation: determinants of carpooling as children’s school travel mode in California

Transportation - In the online published article, in figure 2 a value is missing in column 4. The correct figure is given in this correction. The original article has been corrected.     

How to obtain a healthy journey to school

Danish children walk and cycle a lot and at the same time have one of the best child road safety records in the western part of world. Based on several studies, the paper describes how Denmark has obtained a good child road safety and why Danish children choose to walk and cycle. Child road safety has predominantly been improved due to higher seat belt use and many implemented local safety measures such as campaigns and physical safe routes to school projects. It is mostly safe routes to school projects that include speed reducing measures and signalisation of junctions that are successful. The distance from home to school is an important factor in children’s transport mode choice. Since about half of Danish children have less than 1.5 km to school the decentralised school structure with many fairly small schools is an important reason to the many walking and bicycle journeys. Road design and motorised traffic volumes do influence children’s mode choice, but to a rather limited extent.     

Quantifying the transport-related impacts of parental school choice in England

School travel is becoming increasingly car-based and this is leading to many environmental and health implications for children all over the world. One of several reasons for this is that journey to school distances have increased over time. This is a trend that has been reinforced in some countries by the adoption of so-called ‘school choice’ policies, whereby parents can apply on behalf of their child(ren) to attend any school, and not only the school they live closest to. This paper examines the traffic and environmental impacts of the school choice policy in England. It achieves this by analysing School Census data from 2009 from the Department for Education. Multinomial logit modelling and mixed multinomial logit modelling are used to illustrate the current travel behaviour of English children in their journey to school and examine how there can be a significant reduction in vehicle miles travelled, CO₂ emissions and fuel consumption if the ‘school choice’ policy is removed. The model shows that when school choice was replaced by a policy where each child only travelled to their ‘nearest school’ several changes occurred in English school travel. Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) by motorised transport fell by 1 % for car travel and 10 % for bus travel per day. The reduction in vehicle miles travelled could lead to less congestion on the roads during the morning rush hour and less cars driving near school gates. Mode choice changed in the modelled scenario. Car use fell from 32 to 22 %. Bus use fell from 12 to 7 %, whilst NMT saw a rise of 17 %. With more children travelling to school by walking or cycling the current epidemic of childhood obesity could also be reduced through active travel.     

Continuous approximation models for mixed load school bus routing

School bus routing is a complex and expensive transportation problem for many public school districts. Typical school bus routes serve a single school, but mixed load school bus routes carry students for more than one school at the same time. A mixed load policy reduces the number of stops and distance to pick up and drop off children, but it can increase travel distance by visiting multiple schools. This paper provides a general strategic analysis using continuous approximation models to assess the conditions under which mixed loading is likely to be beneficial. We also present a case study for a semi-rural Missouri school district to illustrate the application of the models in practice. Results show that mixed load routing is more beneficial for larger districts, when a large percentage of bus stops are shared by students of different schools, and when schools are closer together.     

Validation of an agent-based building evacuation model with a school drill

An effective evacuation of buildings is critical to minimize casualties due to natural or anthropogenic hazards. Building evacuation models help in preparing for future events and shed light on possible shortcomings of current evacuation designs. However, such models are seldom compared or validated with real evacuations, which is a critical step in assessing their predictive capacities. This research focuses on the evacuation of a K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) school located within the tsunami inundation zone of Iquique, Chile. An agent-based evacuation model was developed to simulate the evacuation of approximately 1500 children and staff from the school during a global evacuation drill carried out for the entire city. The model simulates the motions of heterogeneous human agents, and the simulations were validated using video analysis of the real event. Resulting error estimations between predicted versus measured flow rates and evacuation times are 13.5% and 5.9%, respectively. The good agreement between the simulated and measured values can be attributed to the known distribution of students and staff at the start of the drill, and their known exposure to emergency preparedness protocols. However, the results presented herein show that this mathematical evacuation model can be used for logistical changes in the emergency planning.     

The implications of school choice on travel behavior and environmental emissions

We examine the implications of school choice on walkability, school travel mode and overall environmental emissions. In developing this proof-of-concept model we show—and quantify—differences between city-wide schools and their neighborhood school counterpart. Our analysis demonstrates how children attending city-wide schools may have heightened travel distance, greenhouse gas emissions, and exposure to bus fumes. Using available data along with a series of informed assumptions we figure the city-wide school had six times fewer children walking, 4.5 times as many miles traveled, 4.5 times the system cost, and 3–4.5 times the amount of criteria air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions. By providing bus service, the overall miles traveled (and resulting emissions) decreased 30–40% compared to the scenario without bus service, however system costs were higher for both the neighborhood and city-wide school (no pollution externality costs were factored in).     

Mode choice and travel distance joint models in school trips

We test a copula-based joint discrete–continuous model to unravel mode choice and travel distance decisions in a joint framework for school trips. This framework explicitly accounts for common unobserved factors that may affect both the mode choice and travel distance. Joint estimation of the models makes a significant difference in the effect of travel distance on willingness to walk to school. The absolute value of the travel distance coefficient in the mode choice model increases by 22% when a joint formulation is adopted instead of the conventional single estimations. We find a significant decrease of 19% in the coefficient of travel safety perception in the joint mode choice model compared to the single model. This underscores the impact of model specification, in terms of the variable effect interpretation and policy assessments. The effect magnitude of several policy-sensitive variables is discussed and compared with previous studies. Particularly, we indicate that the probability of walking is reduced by 0.85% due to a 1% increase in travel distance; accordingly, it propels parents to select non-active modes, particularly school bus. This study also demonstrates how addressing parental concerns about travel safety could double the propensity to walk to school.     

Intra-household bargaining for school trip accompaniment of children: A group decision approach

This paper tests a group decision-making model to examine the school travel behavior of students 6–18 years old in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan area. The school trip information of 1737 two-parent families with a student is extracted from Travel Behavior Inventory data collected by the Metropolitan Council between the Fall 2010 and Spring 2012. The model has four distinct characteristics including: (1) considering the student explicitly in the model, (2) allowing for bargaining or negotiation within households, (3) quantifying the intra-household interaction among family members, and (4) determining the decision weight function for household members. This framework also covers a household with three members, namely, a father, a mother, and a student, and unlike other studies it is not limited to dual-worker families. To test the hypotheses we build two models, each with and without the group-decision approach. The models are separately built for different age groups, namely students 6–12 and 12–18 years old. This study considers a wide range of variables such as work status of parents, age and gender of students, mode of travel, and distance to school. The findings of this study demonstrate that the elasticities of the two modeling approaches differ not only in the value, but in the sign in some cases. In 63% of the cases the unitary household model underestimates the results. More precisely, the elasticities of the unitary household model are as much as 2 times more than that of the group-decision model in 20% of cases. This is a direct consequence of model misspecification that misleads both long- and short-term policies where the intra-household bargaining and interaction is overlooked in travel behavior models.     

Active school travel: homogeneity or heterogeneity? That is the question

ABSTRACT

To explain and predict active school travel (AST), most studies have not investigated to what extent considering taste heterogeneity is an important influence on AST share. The main aim of the present study was to evaluate whether considering unobserved taste heterogeneity through mixed logit models – including random coefficient and random coefficient analysis (RCA) – materially improves/influences the AST prediction compared to a simpler model – the multinomial logit (MNL) model. The database comprises 735 valid observations. The results show that, with a 10% increase in perceived walking time to school, the MNL model predicts that the AST share would decrease by 7.8% (from 18.9% to 17.4%) while the RCA model predicts that it would decrease by 8.5% (from 18.9% to 17.3%). Thus, the expected share of AST is overestimated by MNL by one-tenth of a percentage point. Although there might be random taste variations around perceived distance to school, it seems the other important policy-sensitive variables, such as safety perception, homogeneously impacts on the AST share across households with different socioeconomic and built environment characteristics. Our empirical assessment suggests that considering taste heterogeneity does not necessarily improve the accuracy of analysis for the aggregate share of the AST concerning policy-sensitive variables.     

The significant impacts on traffic and emissions of ferrying children to school in Beijing

After having implemented numerous regulations, e.g., coercive policies on vehicle use and purchase, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find further potential to control vehicle emissions in Beijing, as the air quality is still poor. This research provides a different approach for policy-makers to reduce vehicle emissions by managing demand. We found that parents ferrying their children to and from school is an important but long-neglected contributor to traffic congestion and vehicle emissions. This phenomenon is very common in China because of the social culture. In this research, parallel tests during both the school season and the non-school season were adopted, and emissions in both seasons were calculated based on travel demand and emission models. The results revealed that emissions factors (in g/km) for criteria pollutants and CO₂ increased by over 10% during rush hours during the school season due to traffic condition deterioration compared with non-school season. Daily HC, CO, NO_x, PM and CO₂ emissions from the passenger car fleet were 8.3%, 7.8%, 6.4%, 6.3% and 6.5% higher compared with those during the non-school season, respectively. These differences are greater than the total vehicular emission reduction by other control measures in 2014 in Beijing. For policy makers, providing safe and efficient ways to ferry children would be a useful and harmonious strategy for future vehicle emission control.     

Reduction of capacity and projected costs associated with seat belt installation on school buses

This study examines the potential effects the installation of seat belts on school buses would have on the fleet capacity in Alabama and the resulting cost implications. The study also documents the myriad research studies and professional opinions offered on the potential safety effects of equipping school buses with safety restraints/seat belts. Four seat configurations for the school buses were analyzed. The first configuration represents the most common current bus seating configuration without seat belts, 3 seats on each side of the aisle and 12 rows (3/3-12). The physical space required for seat belt hardware may result in a loss of a row of seats and may reduce the number of students seated per row. Thus, three more configurations were studied: loss of a row of seats (3/3-11), loss of one seat per row (3/2-12), and loss of both a row of seats and a seat per row (3/2-11). The capacity for each configuration for each bus using current pupil loads was determined. The costs associated with installation of seat belts, and purchase and operation of new buses were obtained. Should school bus seat belts become mandatory in Alabama, the results obtained in this study can be used by any school system to determine the optimum configuration for their pupils, which will identify the number of additional buses that must be purchased by the school system. This study found that many of the buses that would become overloaded due to seat belt installation and the resultant loss of seating will be carrying only a few excess pupils. Transportation supervisors may be able to handle such overloads by transferring these pupils to other buses or by adjusting their bus routes to minimize purchase of new buses. Additional suggestions for handling bus overloads were offered in the body of this report.     

驾培教材八年谋变

缘起 "我国的道路交通事故死伤人数高居世界第一.2004年因驾驶员因素导致的交通事故占总数的89.8%,造成的死亡人数、受伤人数分别占到87.4%和90.6%."交通部公路司车辆处王水平处长说起这些数据时,眉头紧锁.     

School choice: understanding the trade-off between travel distance and school quality

Children are traveling longer distances to school, and the share traveling by car is increasing. This paper examines the effects of school attributes on school choice, which in turn gives rise to travel distance and mode choice. It is well known that school quality is capitalized into residential land values. Households willing and able to pay price premiums may choose to live closer to good-quality schools. In contrast, households with less ability to pay are likely to live in places with schools of lower quality. The California public school system has an open enrollment policy, which allows students to transfer out of their neighbourhood school when places are available. When this option is exercised, students may travel longer distances to school compared with students who attend their neighbourhood schools. We used travel diary data from the 2001 Post Census Regional Household Travel Survey to model school destination choices for K-12 students in the Los Angeles region, California. Parents may choose to send their children to neighbourhood schools, other schools within their home district, or out-of-district schools. We find that location, school quality, and other school features influence the probability of a school being chosen, and the extent to which these factors influence choice varies depending on the characteristics of the residential district and the attributes of the household.     

An assessment of the benefits of the walking school bus in Christchurch,New Zealand

A Walking School Bus involves parents or other adults escorting a group of children on a set route to school. The first one was established in 1996 in Canada. They can now be found in a variety of countries, including New Zealand. Many of the benefits associated with them are based on the general benefits of affecting a modal shift away from cars in favour of walking. However, there is still relatively little known about the less quantifiable benefits of them, and there has been some suggestion that they can adversely affect children’s independent mobility. This research examined the perceived benefits of Walking School Buses by interviewing people involved in the day to running of the scheme in Christchurch, New Zealand. The results suggest that walking school buses have many social benefits and that if anything; they encourage children’s independent mobility.     

The relationship between transportation vulnerability,school attendance,and free transportation to an afterschool program for youth

Transportation - Transportation vulnerability, defined as lack of access to transportation resulting in financial, social, or health consequences, reduces quality of life. While research has...     

Incorporating the extended theory of planned behavior in a school travel mode choice model: a case study of Shaoxing,China

Travel to and from school can have social, economic, and environmental implications for students and their parents. Therefore, understanding school travel mode choice behavior is essential to find policy-oriented approaches to optimizing school travel mode share. Recent research suggests that psychological factors of parents play a significant role in school travel mode choice behavior and the Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model has been used to test the effect of psychological constructs on mode choice behavior. However, little research has used a systematic framework of behavioral theory to organize these psychological factors and investigate their internal relationships. This paper proposes an extended theory of planned behavior (ETPB) to delve into the psychological factors caused by the effects of adults’ cognition and behavioral habits and explores the factors’ relationship paradigm. A theoretical framework of travel mode choice behavior for students in China is constructed. We established the MIMIC model that accommodates latent variables from ETPB. We found that not all the psychological latent variables have significant effects on school travel mode choice behavior, but habit can play an essential role. The results provide theoretical support for demand policies for school travel.