By Pekka Möttö, Kyyti Group CEO
Schools are reopening and safety of the school transportation is becoming an issue for a good reason.
During the school day children can be distanced quite easily. They can be divided into groups and different groups can be kept away from each other. What’s the point of this, if everybody is mixed into the same vehicles in the school transportation? Different age groups and even children from different schools travelling happily together to and from school. You don’t need to be a virologist to see the problem here.
How can this be solved? Keeping the two meter distance in the buses? Standard size city bus could take six children, not a viable solution. Using the face masks? Better than nothing, but still not really what is needed. Cleaning the buses intensively? Important, but not enough. Hoping for the best? This seems to be the option most commonly used.
What if the same principle that is used to distance the children during the school day would be applied to school transportation? Obviously it would solve the problem, but is it doable in a way that does not require a huge fleet of vehicles? To an extent it is.
What is needed is technology to optimize the fleet usage and routing with a capability of dividing people into the groups that are or are not allowed to travel together. This technology should handle both pre-planning of the routes and real time changes during the school day. This technology does exist and it could also be used to track who has been in which vehicle at what time, if there would be a need to track the exposures to an infection.
Reaching 100% security would in most cases be undoable due to the cost of the fleet needed. Having this said, would it not be great to have 70% security rather than 0, which is the starting point? Please contact me, if you are interested in the solution.