SEATTLE — A new app from Zonar provides school bus ridership tracking and other data in real time.

Zonar Count is designed for Zonar tablets to accurately count passengers who get on and off a vehicle while tracking average travel time, average passenger trip length, and operating costs per passenger trip. According to Zonar, these data enable fleet managers to ensure safer vehicle operations, balance ridership, and streamline federal reporting — including Medicaid reimbursement.

“We built Zonar Count to help managers better understand how their fleets perform so they could make their vehicles safer and routes more efficient for drivers and passengers,” said H. Kevin Mest, senior vice president and general manager of passenger services at Zonar. “Operations managers would know how many students were actually riding a route in comparison to how many were assigned, providing a key productivity metric to right-size fleets to actual load counts and accurately capturing state ridership information for state reporting.”

To prevent distracted driving, Zonar Count can only be used when the vehicle is not in motion and the driver “wakes up” the tablet. With a touch of the screen, drivers can conduct a rider count and transmit the data to a secure database for immediate access through Zonar's Ground Traffic Control. When combined with Zonar’s Z Pass, students carry a passive RFID card to scan with the Z Pass RFID reader, which logs entry and exit from the bus.

Zonar Count's data collection also facilitates the tracking and submitting of ridership information for special-need students. School administrators can submit a digitally recorded count of these students to receive Medicaid reimbursements.

For more information on Zonar Count, go here.