Yellow to Green: Low-Touch Route Optimizations to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of School Buses

Overview

The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, making up 29% of US emissions with school buses as a significant contributor. While switching to electric buses may be on the horizon, the transition is expensive and not currently feasible for most public school districts. This study proposes a zero- cost solution to reduce the environmental impact of the Monongalia County Schools’ bus system through route optimization. The study focused on one particular high school (Morgantown High) in Monongalia County since it encompassed the largest geographical area and over three times as many buses as other local high schools. Data was collected from the county website where official publications of bus stops, times, and routes were posted. The routes were optimized using the Google Maps API (Application Programming Interface), which calculated the most efficient routes from bus stop GPS coordinates among other variables. The optimization resulted in the saving of a total of 76.4 miles per day and 139.2 minutes for this singular school. Annually, these reductions would save $7,660 on fuel alone (based on current fuel prices) and prevent 20 metric tons of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere. A web-based platform was developed to make this process more accessible to other schools. Given any list of bus stop addresses, the site will automatically optimize and compare route distances and durations; it calculates the fuel and carbon emission savings from adopting the optimized route. The new stop (waypoint) ordering and route are also provided.

Competition history

• JSHS 2022 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.