You can consolidate routes easily in Travel Tracker Routing.  This can be especially helpful if you have a driver shortage.

Click on the Routes tab.

In this example, we will consolidate routes for Wheatland Middle School.   Let’s say that the driver for Bus 3 to Wheatland Middle school calls in sick and you don’t have a sub driver.  We can consolidate the routes and spread the stops and students from Bus 3 onto the other 2 (or more) routes.

To start the process, turn on the visibility for the routes that are affected – in this case the 3 routes to Wheatland Middle School.

Note that the interactive map will show the routes that you will be working with.  In this case we can see the 3 colors for the routes.

Then click on Operations on the sub-menu and select Consolidate Routes

First, select the route that you want to consolidate (i.e. the one that is missing a driver!).

Then select the trip or trips (i.e. AM, PM or both).     

Then indicate the date or date range for the consolidation.

**Note – the system will move the stops and students from bus 3 onto bus 1 and 2 in this case because these are the routes we had visible when we started this process)

Click on the Calculate button.

The results of the consolidation will show the effects of the merge on the other routes.  In this case we can see the duration, distance and number of students that will result for bus 01 and bus 02 routes.  Click on the close button.

In the bottom part of the screen, you can see detailed results of the stops.  Scroll down and you will see a “New” indicator for the merged stops.

Click on Save Changes

Now when I open the affected routes we can see the new consolidated routes when I edit the route.

We can see here that Bus 01 AM has a new route that is only for the date that we consolidated the route and that it has 27 students on this date (normally 20 students on other dates).

The easiest way to print the route sheet for this temporary consolidated route is to click on it to open and then click on the 3 dots for the trip and then select the printer icon.

You could also send an email to all of the students on the consolidated route to let them know that there stop times will be different this date.  To do this, click on the first stop in the new consolidated route.

Click on the Notification Icon.

Notice that the system automatically puts the 27 student contact info at the bottom.  

Use the Default Bus Schedule Template as a starting point for the email as it will include automatically the stop locations and times.

You could then edit the template to customize your message.  Click Send Email to send emails to the parents affected by this consolidation on Bus 1.     Then in this case, we would do the same for Bus 2 as well.