Project Summary
Smart Move 2010


For our project we chose Alamance County as our community and the school bus as our form of transportation.  We discovered the following problem:     

The middle school bus route 105 takes on average 12 minutes to bring the children home and stops about 23 times.  We wanted to get home faster and also wanted the bus to use less gas. 

Our innovative solution was to have just one centralized bus stop = hub.  The children could all walk home from this one hub.  The good news for one hub is that the bus uses almost no gas because it only stops at one hub and the average time to get home would be reduced by three minutes.  BUT, the children would have to walk a lot, on average nine minutes, and some children have to walk along busy State Roads or cross State Roads which is dangerous.  Because of that we had to come up with a different solution.

Our improved innovative solution was to reduce the number of bus stops from 23 to four hubs.  With four hubs, it would take the children on average seven minutes to get home which is an improvement of five minutes to the current situation.  The last kid on the bus would get home almost 13 minutes earlier than with 23 bus stops.  The gas usage drops to about half, the distance is cut from 3.4 miles to 1.8 miles and the bus has less stops.  With four hubs, no child would have to walk along busy State Roads nor would they have to cross one.   

We shared our findings with Mr. Poston, the Assistant Principal at Elon Elementary.  We also shared with the Elon Elementary After School Program, and with family and friends.  We are also going to participate in several upcoming events.