School Bus Transportation: Safety Through Telematics
Summary
The blog discusses the benefits of using telematics technology, such as GPS tracking and video telematics, in school buses to improve safety, efficiency, and accountability. Telematics can help strengthen student safety by ensuring adherence to safety standards and providing real-time tracking.
It can also be cost-effective by reducing fuel consumption and minimizing wear and tear. Telematics can enhance accountability by automating data collection and record-keeping, targeting greener goals, and enabling data-driven decision-making.
To choose a smarter school bus management system, one should look for features like virtual access, coaching modules, easy-to-use dashboards, and detailed maps.
School buses have always been the transport medium retained, contracted to, leased, or managed by schools to transport the students to and from the school or other allied events.
The parental community hugely relies on them for picking their children up and dropping them off at school.
Hence, it is necessary that school bus safety measures are more stringent than those of regular route buses.
The school buses are specially sculptured so that they are distinguishable and it incorporates the driver safety elements such as cross-view mirrors, flashing red lights, bus safety, and stop-sign arms.
Onboard GPS tracking systems and video telematics have taken the multi-role of driver safety, real-time location tracking, and fleet management system.
Telematics is a technology that incorporates information technology devices to send, acquire, and store the real-time reports of remote vehicles.
The video telematics industry began with dashcams and GPS tracking systems that helped determine the location of the vehicle.
To improve the vehicle’s safety and efficiency, the school transportation department increasingly espouses fleet management systems and telematics technology.
Benefits of telematics in School Buses
The Nation’s largest transport system – School Buses are one of the primary transportation means for children.
Innovative technology like video telematics, GPS tracking systems, and dashcams make school buses safer and manage unwanted costs at the same time.
Increasing pressure on the school transit managers on safety and efficiency leads to embracing telematics technologies. Telematics systems help the education fleet managers to meet these challenges vitally as follows.
1.Strengthening Student’s Safety
Transporting students’ safety requires strict adherence to diligent safety standards for vehicle operating conditions and bus driver’s comportment to avoid accidents.
Accidents create stress on everyone who is involved, even if there is no fatality. There are certain protocols school bus drivers should follow, such as adhering to speed limits, inspecting seats regularly, and ensuring students wear seat belts while they are human and prone to mistakes.
Collaborating with telematics can ensure that all driver requirements are completed and followed perfectly. The fleet management systems provide transit directors with insight so that they can be aware of unsafe behaviors and incorporate safety-related best practices.
There are many other ways that telematics helps to guarantee student’s safety including:
- Establish the safest pick-up and drop-off points for school students.
- Implementing real-time school bus tracking through GPS systems.
- Bus location and arrival times are updated to the parents.
- React to weather conditions and traffic to ensure students’ safety.
- Make sure all school bus drivers follow traffic rules, speed limits, avoid harsh driving, and stick to the approved school bus routes.
2.Real-time tracking
Fleet management platforms that integrate front-end applications for smartphones include GPS tracking devices, video telematics, dash cams, etc.
Real-time tracking employs vehicle monitoring, the exact route to be taken, and the conditions to be obeyed to reach the destination safely. Telematics also provides vehicle maintenance, driver’s behavior, ride history and get trips in a single platform.
Real-time reports on fleet health maintenance and fleet efficiency can be tracked and incorporate effective practices.
3.Cost-effective
School fleet directors are under pressure to make full use of every penny they have available for transit services due to tighter budgets.
With the right telematics platforms, they can reduce operational cost and boost efficiency in various means,
- Cutting idling time, speeding and inefficient bus routes can cut down fuel consumption.
- Program preventive maintenance on prompt time to maintain the buses in healthy conditions. It helps to eschew the pricey unplanned repairs, breakdowns, and downtime.
- Minimizes wear and tear by efficiently routing buses and ensuring to allocate properly trained drivers.
- Helps with regular maintenance and device monitoring leads to better bus performance that cuts off the awful expenses.
- As a part of overall vehicle safety programs, it bestows low premium insurance.
School bus telematics technology brings noticeable changes to the bottom line of the business by reducing fuel cost, cutting down the driven miles, increasing fleet utilization, and lowering fleet idle times.
4.Enhancing accountability
The fleet director’s wheelhouse is concerned not only with safety and efficiency, but telematics also helps to examine other aspects such as these.
- Retain compliance: Automating data collection and record-keeping helps vehicle directors encounter all the needed and rigorous safety features which includes state and federal requirements.
- Targeting greener goals: Telematics installed school bus vehicle management helps to reduce environmental impact and increases the air quality by eliminating concentrated diesel exhaust near schools. Fleet directors proudly present their greener fleet management system to organizations and parents to make their fleet services a choice of vendor.
Establish data-driven decision-making: During emergencies, vehicle directors have to be flexible enough to quickly change and schedule routes of the buses. Telematics helps to organize the required data front and perform better and smarter decision-making that enhances the overall management of the fleet.
Tips to choose smarter school bus management systems
Ensure the telematics systems like GPS tracking systems, video telematics, dashcam, etc you choose meets your vehicle requirement and is standard enough to assist you in handling future risks and challenges.
The main key features to look into before installing telematics are as follows,
- Virtual access from anywhere: transparency in viewing data and maps anywhere, anytime at any device.
- Coaching modules: assisting fleet directors to underscore safe driving skills
- Easy-to-use dashboards: Real-time data update
- Detailed maps: Transparency in viewing real-time activities of the fleet and employers.
Analyzing these features and choosing the wiser telematics technology leads to a higher efficiency rate and improves your bottom line of the business.
Final thoughts
Investing in smarter school bus GPS tracking systems with high-end telematics technology helps transport providers and educational institutions reap the advantages of safer and cost-effective operations with higher efficiency.
Improved telematics technology helps to improve the vehicle health and driver’s safety that protects the business and reduces the vehicle risks.
Assure that the school bus telematics technology meets the needs of the fleet director and the safety of the school children.
Team VAMOSYS
Team VAMOSYS have been into GPS business since 2014 and have good experience on GPS Vehicle Tracking, Fuel Monitoring, Fleet Management and GPS Tracker Devices. Writes article on various topics to share the industry experiences and knowledge.