School districts are turning to artificial intelligence-enabled route-planning tools to optimize routes across a range of criteria, sharpen their efficiencies and reduce the time students spend on buses.
“The school transportation space hasn’t really changed a lot in the last 50 years,” Corey McMahon, chief product and technology officer at HopSkipDrive, said. The company makes school transportation planning and routing technology. “And unfortunately, as those school district transportation offices have evolved, they’re facing really different challenges. School choice and individualized education plans, and things like that, have made it so that those existing tools don’t work anymore.”
The Denver Public Schools district has more than 90,000 students, 30,000 of whom are considered “transportation eligible.” The district transports roughly 5,000 students to school and bus stops every day, on about 200 buses. In partnership with HopSkipDrive, officials developed a new route-planning tool known as RouteWise AI, which optimizes routes with the district’s priorities.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) first began partnering with HopSkipDrive about five years ago to provide transportation for some students needing more personalized service, such as students experiencing homelessness and students with disabilities. Out of that relationship — and building on route-planning analysis the district had already started with a researcher from the Georgia Institute of Technology — DPS and HopSkipDrive created the RouteWise AI tool. The district used it to plan routes in the 2024-25 school year.
“I would argue that we’re probably one of the most complicated, complex student transportation systems in the country,” Tyler Maybee, the district’s director of transportation operations, said.
The district had several goals in mind when it began the partnership with HopSkipDrive, Maybee said, and safety and efficiency were at the top of the list.
“We have to make sure that our fleet requirements don’t go up. The biggest thing for us is not increasing the number of drivers,” he said, a reference to widespread bus driver shortages. Finding efficiencies in the system is essential, he said, because simply adding more drivers and buses doesn’t necessarily lead to on-time bus stop arrivals and departures.
“Adding more drivers into an inefficient routing system may help with late buses to a certain extent, but it is not solving the root of the problem: inefficient routes,” Maybee said. “If you are not being efficient in your routing principles you will be creating an environment that may result in late performances too, even if you feel like you have the proper number of drivers on staff.”
Working as efficiently as possible for the district, with a fleet of 200 buses and 200 drivers serving 207 schools, means having a deep understanding of school schedules — when classes begin and when they are dismissed — and of some of the newer features of modern K-12 education, like school choice.
“So, we need a way to evaluate bell-time requests that come in,” Maybee said, adding that the AI in the RouteWise system can evaluate how even five-minute changes in bell times can impact the overall transportation network. “You wouldn’t think five minutes makes a big difference. But it does impact us, large scale.”
DPS has numerous campuses like magnet schools that can pull students from many parts of Denver. The district also promotes a “school choice” ethos, where parents can choose a school within what the district calls “enrollment zones” — a collection of about five schools.
“So if I live in that enrollment zone I can go to any of those five schools, and get transportation,” the district transportation leader said. “But obviously, with those combinations, it really increases transportation. Because you have a large geographical space, and lots of kids can go to different schools within that boundary.”
Earlier this school year, 10 schools were impacted by consolidations or closures, reshuffling student transportation.
“When we went through a round of 10 school closures in the fall of this year, we needed a way to study the impact of that on our larger transportation system,” Maybee said. RouteWise AI, he noted, was used to “mitigate some of that increased transportation demand that comes with school closures.”
RouteWise allows school districts to input their priorities, like reducing time in transit, reducing the likelihood of lateness, solving for the bus driver shortage, solving for budget cuts, reducing emissions to meet climate goals and others. Districts also can input their needs, student information, and assets at their disposal.
“And then we build a custom AI model, and run millions of simulations to produce optimal, multimodal transportation plans, so that they can choose the best,” McMahon said. “So we look at ways that we can optimize routes, so the school bus drivers that they do have are running really efficient routes.”
A district in Colorado Springs, Colo., has increased its percent of “highly utilized bus routes” by 46 percent using the technology, “by just optimizing the bus routes that they have,” McMahon said.
This, in turn, shifted the district from being understaffed with bus drivers — to eliminating its driver shortage.
“They could cover their entire routing plan with the drivers they have on staff and didn’t have to hire any additional ones,” he said.
