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May 2020 - Mar 2021

ABOUT BUSRIGHT

BusRight provides real-time GPS information on school buses to parents, students, and school administrators. So far, they have raised $5 million in funding from Underscore VC, Long Journey Ventures, and prominent angel investors.

Keith Corso, founder and CEO of BusRight remembers cold mornings waiting for a late school bus in New York. School buses are critical to transporting millions of students safely and punctually. Yet, no one would know where the buses were.

Drivers, transportation directors, and school district staff had to work with pen and paper to plan routes, with buses going off-grid the moment they left. Also, school district bus routes are usually planned once a year, a complex process that usually takes several weeks of tedious manual work but does not allow for optimization.

After graduating from Northeastern University in Boston, Keith founded BusRight to help school districts manage their fleet and get their students to school safely and efficiently. With BusRight’s software, routes can be planned and optimized easily, and attendance and driver location can be tracked real-time.

WHY AFI LABS FOR A MULTI-VIEW ROUTING PROTOTYPE

With a clear product-market fit behind their mission, BusRight needed additional engineering capacity to build more features requested by customers.

Keith and Phil Dunn, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of BusRight, chose Afi Labs because of our experience in building performant, map-based front ends and user interfaces, particularly for transportation and logistics applications.

“It was a pleasure to work with Afi Labs. The process was very smooth as the engineers complemented our needs well,” Keith said.

“Furthermore, there was a high level of urgency as we required the new feature to be released fast, in time for the new school year. Our teams worked efficiently: BusRight’s team worked on the backend APIs, design and workflow while Afi Labs built the frontend user interface.”

Initially, BusRight was a route planning tool that could only be used to plan a single bus route at a time. Recognizing this limitation, Keith reached out to Afi Labs to help develop a new feature called multi-view routing. The goal of this feature is to provide route planners with the ability to see how multiple routes work together to serve different neighborhoods.

The feature automates many of these paper-based processes and gives planners a bird's eye view of how their entire fleet works across neighborhoods.

RESULTS

Afi Labs developed a prototype of the feature set that BusRight needed. Based on the initial prototype, BusRight could refine and release a version that worked scalably within their environment and existing architecture. This was achieved by refactoring at least 80% of the multi-view code before deploying it into production.

“BusRight’s work with Afi Labs will help student transportation leaders across the country feel more confident that they are safely and efficiently transporting students to and from school every day.”

Keith Corso

CEO of BusRight

BusRight
The newly-launched multi-view feature helps BusRight in three key ways.

1. Saves time: Planning routes for a school district no longer takes weeks.

Now, with Afi Labs’ multiple views, planners can effectively simulate how all routes will look in minutes and adjust the number of student passengers and the route the bus takes so that it will arrive on time.

Student home addresses are automatically imported from the school’s database. Users can then create virtual bus stops where drivers can wait to pick up students. These virtual bus stops could be at the front of a house or more commonly, at a convenient side street near a group of houses.

To customize routes, users can drag bus stops onto a route, move them between routes or even rearrange the order on the same route. Users can also use a lasso tool to select multiple students at a time and assign them to a bus stop.

BusRight

2. Reduces mistakes: No students will be left behind.

Routers can assign/unassign students to bus stops, and see how many students are scheduled to be picked up at each bus stop per neighborhood.

Furthermore, users can filter students by grade, school or name. Student names, addresses, and more details are searchable.

Students not assigned to a bus stop yet are marked in red. Assigned students are marked in yellow.

Thus, all students will be accounted for in multi-view route planning. The feature reduces the possibility that students would be left out by mistake.

BusRight

3. Increases transparency: School bus timings will be clear.

Finally, ETAs at each stop are calculated by working backward from the school’s start time (“bell times”). With this data on hand, school districts can ensure everyone knows where their buses are, and even explain to parents why school buses might need to pick up some students earlier. Overall, with routes optimized, all students would still experience a more efficient ride to school. Students stay safe, punctual for school, and all accounted for.

BusRight

By delivering these features and tools to serve students, parents, and schools, we’re proud to be part of BusRight’s mission to modernize the school bus system.

GET STARTED

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Vancouver

ADDRESS

595 Burrard Street
Vancouver,
BC V7X1L4
Canada

MAIL

[email protected]

PHONE

+1 415-802-2286

Singapore

ADDRESS

12 Marina Boulevard
Marina Bay Financial Center Tower 3,
Level 17-01
Singapore 018982

MAIL

[email protected]

PHONE

+65 6241-3013

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