School bus safety week: The top solutions for safer student journeys

School bus safety takes center stage every October during National School Bus Safety Week, but it’s a daily priority for districts. This program raises public awareness and encourages communities to partner with school districts to help make students’ journeys safer.

While student safety requires teamwork between citizens, bus drivers and administrators, technology is the critical link that connects each’s efforts. By enhancing visibility into school bus operations, modern tools make student transportation safer and more transparent than ever before.

If you’re wondering where to find these tools, look no further than the Geotab Marketplace. This library of solutions helps you solve specific challenges by allowing you to add extra functionalities to your fleet management toolkit. Join us as we highlight the key Marketplace technologies you can use to protect your riders, throughout School Bus Safety Week and beyond.

Keep parents informed about school bus operations with Treker

How do you typically address parent questions about school bus operations? Without a way to track student ridership and communicate with parents, it’s tough to provide quick, definitive answers. But with Treker, it’s easy to keep everyone on the same page. Available on the Geotab Marketplace, Treker is a communication platform that helps you:

• Account for every student - Check students in whenever they board or exit a school bus with tablet-based facial recognition.
• Reduce parent concerns about child locations  -  Allow parents to monitor their kids’ bus routes, check-ins and estimated arrival times using a dedicated app.
• Keep everyone informed -  From routine updates to critical emergencies, rely on instant messaging for communication between bus drivers, directors and parents.
• Make your drivers’ jobs easier - Support drivers with tablet software that shows them real-time route and stop insights, traffic information and passenger details.
• Streamline back-office tasks - Toss out tedious paperwork by digitizing bus attendance reporting.

Through these capabilities, Treker makes it easy to keep parents in the loop. The best part is, it integrates with the Geotab platform, so you don’t have to constantly open different apps! Study fleet insights, check student ridership and communicate with stakeholders through Treker’s single portal. In turn, you’ll stay prepared and create safer, more stress-free student journeys.

Enhance visibility with AI school bus cameras

From keeping drivers alert to preventing collisions, AI school bus cameras can be the answer. But it’s crucial to understand that they aren’t one-size-fits-all. No matter your district’s needs, there are a variety of camera options to meet each challenge. Learn about the top three AI cameras for student transportation below:

VisionTrack VT3600AI + rear license plate cam

Top benefits and capabilities

• Protect school buses from all angles: Capture 360-degree footage for unparalleled visibility of your school buses and their environments.
• Decrease collision risks: Reduce incident chances with AI-enabled alerts that recognize and warn your drivers of students, pedestrians, cyclists, objects and other vehicles.
• Enhance student safety: Flag risky or distracted driving behaviors like tailgating, drinking and eye deviations through real-time alerts.

• Reduce liability: Reconstruct collisions with multi-angle camera footage that helps identify their causes and can prove driver innocence.

   

Geotab GO Focus Plus AI dash cam

Top benefits and capabilities

• Stop dangerous habits: Keep students safer with a camera that uses AI to detect distracted or risky driving events and provide drivers with instant in-cab alerts.
• Help protect students: Monitor everything from driver tailgating to cell phone use to promote safer student journeys.
• Uncover safety insights, fast: Quickly surface the most urgent alerts and easily spot correctable patterns with AI-generated insights.
• Enhance coaching workflows: Assign bus drivers feedback based on alerts, track progress and highlight improvement in a single platform.
• Get tools that sharpen themselves: Sit back and watch as your school bus drivers develop better habits. Geotab’s AI models are constantly fed new data and video over time, automatically improving their precision. As a result, your team gets consistent, top-tier support behind the wheel.

Did you know? In a pilot study, GO Focus Plus’s in-cab verbal alerts helped decrease driver phone usage by 95% and tailgating by 90%.

Geotab GO Focus AI dash cam

Top benefits and capabilities

• Limit risk and liability: If a collision occurs, review the footage to guide new coaching policies, protect drivers and avoid future incidents.
• Maximize driver safety: Coach school bus drivers on safer driving habits by using GO Focus to detect and record forward-facing footage of key events. These include major and minor collisions, tailgating and any other events that drivers choose to record by pressing the “event capture” button.
• Protect driver privacy: Comply with driver privacy concerns by only recording footage of specific road-facing events.

No matter which camera model you choose, you can study key video insights alongside fleet data in MyGeotab for a full view of school bus operations.

Reward safe driving with Geotab Vitality

At every bus stop and across every mile, your school bus drivers work hard to keep students safe. Recognizing their efforts can go a long way in helping you not just keep top performers, but develop a safety program that everyone wants to stay engaged in. Give your team extra motivation to strive for excellence with Geotab Vitality.

This all-in-one driver coaching and rewards platform promotes lasting behavior change by allowing you to tangibly recognize improvement. Bus drivers can earn rewards for reaching their weekly performance goals and progressing to new Driver Status levels, creating a safety program that sustains itself.

The image above shows the Geotab Vitality mobile app, which allows drivers to check their Status level and progress toward their Weekly Drive Goal. 

Weekly Drive Goals are individualized, and your drivers can reach them by accruing enough Daily Points. Drivers earn points based on their performance in these four categories:

• Acceleration
• Speeding
• Cornering
• Braking

Through coaching that nudges drivers to consistently improve, Geotab Vitality helps you:

• Uplift drivers: Boost driver happiness by rewarding safe driving. Bus drivers can earn and redeem points for rewards from a variety of well-known retailers, directly in the app.
• Create safer student journeys: Incentivize risk reduction, from pickup to drop-off. No matter a bus driver’s starting level, rewarding them for improvement promotes lasting positive change.
• Avoid administrative headaches: Ditch having to manually manage driver rewards. From goal-setting to dispensing rewards, Geotab Vitality covers it all for you.
• Enhance driver retention: Keep top drivers for the long haul. Geotab Vitality helps your team feel advocated for and valued, so they’re more likely to stay with your district long-term.

Student safety starts and ends with bus drivers. Motivate your team to go above and beyond in protecting riders through Geotab Vitality. By rewarding great driving, risk goes down while your team gets tangible credit for their efforts.

How Geotab connects all aspects of school bus safety

Along your district’s fleet safety journey, don’t feel lost. Geotab unifies all of your critical school bus applications within a single solution, making it simple to manage them, find key insights and take proper action. Our platform is also easy to integrate, so there’s no need to rip out your existing technology. We’ll work with you to connect your systems, add new solutions and keep students safer in buses, wherever possible. Partner with us today to start taking school bus safety to the next level.

Visit our webpage to learn more about Geotab’s solutions for student transportation.