The 2009 Student Transportation Benchmarking survey has been released. The report details nine key performance metrics and summarizes results by region, ridership levels, and fleet size. Districts of all types responded to the survey, including rural, urban, large, small, district owned, and contracted operations. A total of 114 districts responded, representing 30 percent of all buses across the state and 31 percent of the students transported. While large to very large fleets are underrepresented in the response, school districts should generally have little difficulty finding reasonable comparison groups to benchmark against.
The “average” district responding to the survey used 33 buses in a single bell system to transport slightly more than 2,000 students. One noteworthy finding is that average cost per rider has increased 15 percent and average per bus costs are up 24 percent over the 2007 survey. The comparative costs of regular and special needs transportation indicates that per rider costs for special needs students are nearly 10 times greater than regular education students.
Operations performance indicators provide some insight into the service costs and the relative differences in regions across the State. Of particular note is that more rural districts using single tier systems have relatively higher costs. While this result is not unexpected, it does challenge policy makers and administrators to develop service delivery options that can mitigate these issues.
Fleet maintenance indicators demonstrated that districts in the Upper Peninsula were using the largest percentage of buses over 13 years old, while districts in the thumb and surrounding areas were using the largest percentage of buses with more than 150,000 accumulated miles. These measures would seem to indicate that smaller, more rural districts will be increasingly challenged to find ways to fund the purchase of needed replacement vehicles. Funding replacement vehicles will be increasingly important as the number of buses and other vehicles supported by each technician continues to escalate. Survey results indicate that the average full time fleet maintenance technician is serving one more bus than in the 2007 survey. While this may not appear to be significant, it represents approximately 60 to 80 hours of additional maintenance time per year.
Two key transportation policy related issues emerged from the survey. The first was the lack of ride time guidelines that had been established in the survey group. Only 41 percent of respondents indicated that they had established a policy or operating procedure related to student ride times. Given the importance of time as both a cost control measure and a service indicator, this result was surprising. The second issue was the influence that the availability of routing software had on per rider costs. The results showed that districts using routing software transported more students on fewer buses at lower per rider costs.
As efforts are made to minimize the impact that budget cuts will have on classroom activities, transportation will remain a key area of concern. Evaluating alternative routing strategies, shared service initiatives, and other efficiency opportunities are likely to be of paramount concern. The 2009 Student Transportation Benchmarking Survey offers administrators, managers, and policy makers a significant source of data and insight into options to control or reduce costs.