Denver Public Schools Uses RouteWise AI™ to Optimize Their Multimodal Transportation System

Overview

Denver Public Schools (DPS) is the largest school district in Colorado with 90,000 students, 30,000 of whom are transportation-eligible. The Denver Public Schools transportation team has proactively taken on strategies to address the ongoing bus driver shortage. However, budget constraints and fluctuating enrollment patterns led the district to seek out a tool to help them efficiently respond to new changes in real time. 

The Situation

DPS has adopted a multimodal transportation system to pair each student with the best-fit route. This includes a network of district drivers with commercial driver licenses (CDL) driving larger buses, non-CDL drivers driving smaller vehicles, and leveraging the support provided by partners like HopSkipDrive, as well as public transportation.

Going into the 2023–2024 school year, DPS anticipated several challenges, including forecasted growth of students in foster care or experiencing homelessness (students designated under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act). There are individualized transportation requirements to ensure these students can continue accessing school, which presents challenges for school transportation teams as students are often identified after the start of school when bus routes have already been planned. During the 2022–2023 school year, DPS observed a 124% increase in students identified as McKinney-Vento-eligible supported by HopSkipDrive — and that increase was a trend DPS expects to continue. These students were supported by HopSkipDrive given our unparalleled ability to arrange transportation in six hours or less.

The DPS transportation team wanted a tool that would help them evaluate and optimize their transportation system in real time, responding to changes in student demand.

How We Approached the Problem(s)

The first thing HopSkipDrive did in working with Denver Public Schools was to use RouteWise AI™ to develop a personalized routing model that takes into account all of the district’s routing parameters and constraints (e.g., generally don’t transport students on highways for home-to-school routes). Then RouteWise AI seamlessly loaded DPS’s current route plans as a baseline for optimization analysis, including bus routes and HopSkipDrive small vehicle routes. 

With this model and baseline data in place, Denver Public Schools was ready to take advantage of the power of AI. 

Multimodal Optimization

RouteWise AI gave DPS the power to optimize all of their routes for buses and small vehicles. This ability allows DPS to match each student with the best-fit vehicle for annual planning purposes, and respond to new student identification during the school year. Optimization for a new student can now happen with the click of a button rather than an hour or more of manual work.

With the support of RouteWise AI, DPS increased small vehicle efficiency by assigning new riders to existing small vehicle routes. This efficiency saved DPS over $500K in 2023–2024.