HopSkipDrive, provider of supplemental school transportation solutions, has released its fourth annual safety report, offering data about its 2022 safety metrics and platform investments.

Based on data collected last year, the report indicates that the company’s CareDrivers completed more than 770,000 rides across 16.5 million miles – all of them without a critical safety incident.

HopSkipDrive Fleet Developments from the Report

The report also showed:

• 99.7% of rides scheduled through the HopSkipDrive platform ended without a safety-related concern of any kind. For the small percentage that did experience a safety-related concern, most were minor traffic collisions.

• The company continues to invest in safety policies and features, including through mobile-phone based telematics technology.

• Telematics technology appears to promote safe driving behavior by detecting risky driving behaviors. According to a news release, research indicates that telematics solutions can be up to 98.83% accurate in detecting drunk driving behavior.

The platform uses real-time ride tracking, two-factor authentication, Safe Ride Support System, multi-step dropoff process, and safe-driving monitoring.

School Transportation Takeaways from the 2022 Safety Report

The executive summary of the report stated that 88% of school districts across the United States are “operating in crisis mode” due to the nationwide school bus driver shortage.

“These shortages have greatly impacted student safety by causing districts to expand walk boundaries along dangerous and busy streets, eliminate bus routes, or leave kids stranded entirely when buses don’t show up,” the report stated. “School transportation has always been integral to education, designed to ensure equitable access to education for every child, but the reality is that the system as it exists today still has room for improvement.”

HopSkipDrive aims to supplement student transportation options, enable equity, eliminate inefficiencies, and improve safety.

“I’m continually thinking of ways we can raise the bar across the industry, working together to improve the twin priorities of safety and expanding transportation access for students,” wrote CEO and co-founder Joanna McFarland in the report. “Maybe historically drug and alcohol testing was the best thing available to test potential impairment, but now we have technology to measure many forms of impairment.”

Mike Martin, HopSkipDrive’s senior strategic advisor and former executive director and CEO of the National Association for Pupil Transportation, wrote in his statement in the report:

“The traditional transportation benchmark for ‘safety’ uses a fatality rate per million miles traveled. This is a retroactive measure of the absence of harmful acts, which enables us to talk about things like ‘the number of days without an accident’ as key performance indicators of success. Is it helpful? In a general sense, yes, as it enables comparison to the other ways people could die when ambulatory (e.g. walking, bicycling, riding a scooter, and driving or riding in a motor vehicle). But is it the best way to analyze safety in our industry, or even discuss it?”

HopSkipDrive currently operates in 22 major markets across 11 states and Washington, D.C., and has contracts with more than 400 school districts and local education agencies.