Case Studies

Challenge Prior to the fall of 2014, the SSRSB's transportation department was inundated with phone calls about school catchment areas. At its peak, the SSRSB's four-person transportation department staff fielded up to 200 calls per month from school administrators and the public regarding catchment areas and bus stop issues. School administrators needed to confirm which school catchment students lived in, parents wanted to know which schools their children would attend, and real estate agents enquired about catchment areas on behalf of homebuyers. When responding to each request personally over the phone, transportation department staff used ArcGIS for Desktop to locate an address, confirm the associated school district and then relay the information to the caller. This method impacted the transportation department's productivity, precipitating the need for an improved way to communicate school catchment information. Each year, the SSRSB needed to re-evaluate the 300-plus routes that its 86 school buses use to transport approximately 6,200 students to and from school. The SSRSB relied on paper maps and manual calculations to devise proposed routes. A SSRSB transportation analyst would travel along each proposed route, record driving times and then compare the results to determine the best routes. To assess new bus stops, an analyst would visit a proposed stop, record observations on paper forms and take pictures. Information would be brought back to the office, manually transferred into a database and assessed to ensure proposed bus stops complied with provincial safety standards. ArcGIS helps transportation department dramatically reduce in-bound call volumes and expedite school bus route planning Located in Nova Scotia, the South Shore Regional School Board (SSRSB) services Lunenburg and Queens Counties, with 24 schools dispersed over an area covering more than 5,200 square kilometres. In 2014, the SSRSB used ArcGIS to make school district information more accessible to school administrators and the public through an online school catchment map. The SSRSB adopted ArcGIS to optimize the routes of its school bus fleet, improving route accuracy and reducing the amount of time required to plan routes. The SSRSB has also expedited the assessment and approval of new bus stops by using Collector for ArcGIS and ArcGIS Online. 1 Esri Canada | School board achieves greater productivity and improves bus route planning with ArcGIS

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