Supporting walking school buses

Winstanley, Christopher and Davies, Nigel and Harding, Michael and Norgate, Sarah (2014) Supporting walking school buses. In: UbiComp '14 Adjunct Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct Publication :. ACM, GBR, pp. 291-294. ISBN 9781450330473

Abstract

Walking School Buses (WSBs) are becoming an increasingly popular way of reducing school gate congestion. They typically feature a coordinator who is assigned to walk a designated route, calling at several pick-up points that parents can use to join their children to the "bus". However, parents often feel limited by the rigidity of the scheduled walking bus arrival and departure times making it difficult to coordinate the delivery of children onto the bus with conflicting morning activities. As a result, most parents choose instead to rely on car journeys to the school. In this work we demonstrate a mobile system that allows parents to visualise real-time predictions of walking bus arrival times and thus supports more flexible travel coordination behaviours, providing greater opportunities for parents to utilise walking bus services and reduce car usage.