To constantly improve our products for school districts each quarter, the team at HopSkipDrive prioritizes features that are timely and impactful to make our ride-booking platform, RideIQ, more powerful than ever.
Before the start of the 2023–2024 school year, we concentrated on making a series of improvements that were specifically designed to meet the needs of school districts at this busy time of year. These features focused on making RideIQ more mobile-friendly to support car line staff, and updating our caregiver welcome experience to help caregivers, or parents and guardians, quickly onboard to HopSkipDrive.
Now, we turn towards the latest set of features designed to help you adjust as you settle in from the back-to-school rush. We’re excited to empower you and your team members, and help you refine your transportation operations even more with these new features.
It’s here! One of the most requested features from school staff is the need to have real-time visibility into ride data to manage rides more efficiently. Keeping this in mind, we’ve designed the Reports feature to enable school staff to dive into their data using multiple filters, so they can get the exact answers they need across all the departments in their district.
The Reports feature provides both high-level insights and a granular understanding of data so transportation staff can make even more informed decisions. With Reports, high-level information such as total miles driven in a date range is available, as well data on things like the exact number of rides and the total cost for each Rider within a specified time period. Reports can lead to actionable information, such as creating a Billed Cancels report, which can help school districts see who is missing rides on a recurring basis and reassess Rider transportation needs.
Read more about this exciting new feature here.
As new Riders are added to RideIQ throughout the school year, we’ve seen school districts create new rides for each individual Rider — even though there may be an existing ride that passes right by that newly added Rider’s home address. Searching for and finding suitable routes a new Rider can be added to takes additional time, which is something school transportation staff don’t often have.
SmartPooling solves this problem by searching through existing rides with the press of a button and generating a list of optimal rides to which a new Rider can be added. You’ll then receive a list of potential ride options to choose from. Each suggestion provides important information, such as the number of current Riders and the adjusted pickup and drop-off times, so you can understand the impact of selecting each ride pooling option.
SmartPooling is powered by HopSkipDrive’s new Student Centered Pricing option, in which clients pay a base fare per student, plus a per-mile fee. When three Riders or more are pooled in a ride, we apply a “full car discount,” reducing the overall cost as well as the emissions.
School districts that are interested in SmartPooling and Student-Centered Pricing can learn more here.
Since school districts manage transportation for thousands of students, we know keeping a clean Rider list is critical to avoiding confusion and issues later on. We’re now validating that each new Rider added to RideIQ is unique, helping to eliminate the likelihood of a ride being booked multiple times for a single Rider.
We do this by cross-checking a Rider’s name and date of birth in RideIQ to ensure there are no other Riders who share multiple, similar attributes in your RideIQ account. If there are, you’ll see a pop-up message letting you know that this Rider may already be in RideIQ, making this process easier for you.
As we turn towards the remainder of the year, we are committed to continuously enhancing our products and services for our clients. We are working on bringing you increased scalability through user management and streamlined billing between districts with Shared Billing — and we look forward to sharing more information about these new features with you soon.