School district rolls out bus stop system

When the Lincoln Parish School District eyed a reconfiguration of Ruston schools this spring, both opponents and supporters of the idea often said students who ride buses to those schools have to wake up too early and stay on the bus too long.

As the new school year approaches, the district is hoping to tackle that problem by overhauling its bus routes, including the addition of “bus stops” to replace door-to-door pickup in most cases.

“Kids are having to get up too early to ride the bus, and the bus rides are too long,” Transportation Supervisor Doc Hoefler said. “That was the biggest concern when I talked to principals and parents when I got this job.”

Through a collaboration between Hoefler, industrial engineering students at Louisiana Tech University, and the Lincoln Parish Geographic Information System (GIS) District, the school board has rolled out interactive, color-coded maps that divide elementary and junior high/high school bus routes by geographic zone.

Sent out to enrolled families earlier this week, visitors to the online maps can put in their address and see their bus number, driver, and the driver’s phone number, as well as the location of the nearest bus stop.

Each bus stop is labeled with the time the bus will be there.

These changes are just for the schools in the city of Ruston: Glen View Elementary, Hillcrest Elementary, Cypress Springs Elementary, Ruston Elementary, I. A. Lewis, Ruston Junior High and Ruston High.

Bus stops are only being added within the city, while the new bus route zones extend through the entire attendance districts for these schools.

It’s the first time bus routes have been clearly divided into different zones for each driver.

“No more, ‘My neighbor’s on one bus and I’m on another,’” Hoefler said.

Each bus stop is, at maximum, two tenths of a mile from each student’s home. Hoefler said most are much less than that.

They also don’t require students to cross a street to reach the bus. A few high-traffic areas will continue to have door-to-door pickup.

“We definitely want to make sure safety is the first thing,” Hoefler said.

The payoff ? By making the bus stop fewer times, and head down fewer roads, routes are expected to be shaved down by 10- 15 minutes on average — leaving that much more time for students to sleep in and get ready for school.

“We’ll be starting pickup about 10 minutes later,” Hoefler said. “ I have a little more control now over when the drivers should leave (the bus barn). Our earliest inside the city are leaving around 6:10, 6:15 (a.m.) when before they were leaving right around 6.”

Even so, a few school board members have said their constituents are concerned about the safety of making their children walk to the bus.

Hoefler said the school board office has received plenty of concerns and questions from parents since the announcement, and he wants everyone to know the bus stop system is flexible and is constantly being reviewed and tweaked based on input from families.

A form to request a bus stop change or addition can be found online at lincolnschools.org/page/bus-stop-maps.

He also pointed out that students who live in apartment complexes, trailer parks or on private roads must already walk to reach buses that physically can’t or aren’t legally permitted to get any closer.

A group of industrial engineering students at Louisiana Tech were the ones who determined how much route time the bus stop system would save.

For their senior capstone design project, Kosi Anadi, Wes Brady and Hayden Scaff partnered with the school district to tackle the transportation problem.

After using simulations and comparisons to other districts around the nation to determine that bus stops might be the most effective solution, the students collaborated with GIS Manager Jackson Matthews and used map data to build an algorithm that would pick out where the best bus stops might go.

“We had neighborhoods where the bus would stop four or five times on one street,” Tech engineering lecturer Jason Howell said. “ This algorithm identified those places where they were in really close proximity and identified that as a potential site for a bus stop.”

Then Hoefler and Matthews took that list of potential stops and went through them on the GIS maps, making changes for safety and other concerns.

“Our software could calculate the amount of time it took for each part of the route, what time the bus would get to each stop,” Matthews said.

Not only was the project a successful senior design showcase for the Tech students, but they went on to sin an award for best student paper when they presented the Lincoln Parish bus stop system to an international engineering conference hosted in New Orleans.

Howell said the project also generated interest from the state to potentially apply to other school districts.

“It’s really important for our students to get out of the textbook situations and encounter a real- world problem with considerations beyond what we can teach them in class,” he said. “And it’s not often we get to have the feeling we’ve done something to directly benefit the community.”

Changes to the stops will continue to be made as the school year gets underway and both drivers and families get more familiar with the system.

Hoefler said families are encouraged to make sure their address is up to date with the central office so the bus stop maps can be as accurate as possible.