School Day Bus Services

School buses

In some areas school services are a vital part of the public transport network, in other areas the school buses are extra, to prevent the public buses becoming overloaded. traveline leaves it to individual regions to decide whether to include school buses in the traveline information service.

There is sometimes the desire to include journeys that are not available to the general public in a journey planner that is available only to Scholars. A journey planner geared to the needs of scholars travelling under the 2 and 3 mile entitlement limits, presents a particular challenge. With so many scholars wanting to travel to the same place at the same time, the capacity of the vehicle becomes the important issue. The journey planner may need to include unregistered scholars services but then you need to arrange ways for non entitled scholars to be allocated places.

There are a number of systems that help plan efficient bus routes for scholars. Reduction in the peak vehicle requirement is usually the objective. The systems may plan journeys for all the pupils and be run interratively to arrive at an optimum pattern of services and pupils are then allocated to particular vehicles at the start of term. These journey planning excercises differ from the normal public facing journey planning systems.

Entering school bus timetables

All pick up and set down points are potentially bus stops that can be added to NaPTAN. There is not a special school bus stop category. It is left to all stops timetable data to make clear where services stop. This may cause issues for routes registered at timing point only that 'observe all bus stops'. One problem is that Education departments sometimes express stops as a list of addresses or farms, without reference to the public transport bus stops. This can lead to confusion.

TransXchange is a suitable data format to transfer timetable data for school services. The term dates of individual schools can be declared and each journey marked as school day or school holiday.

TransXchange data can be compatible with eTendering of bus routes by local authorities. If the route is specified in the tender in TransXchange format then the operators will be encouraged or even required by the local authority to submit their registration data electronically. This will help accurately specify the journeys to be operated and ensure that any information given to the public is accurate.

School services are one of the category of services that can be excluded from the completeness and timeliness stats. The data still needs to be complete and timely for information to the public but this is a local matter that the national monitoring does not cover.