Proposal - Idea Launchpad NP Shuttle Bus Service

Purpose
Ngee Ann has provided the shuttle bus service to students for a long time now and we have to agree its working. However, as students, we feel that we might be able to help out with the system, to be able to make some tweaks so the system would be more efcient and also bring to light some situations there might have been during the service so as to improve it for the future batches of Ngee Ann students. As we have done some research on the service, including surveying students who take the buses, observing the service in terms of frequency, timings of several factors, no. of passengers and so on... There have been several situations we have observed. We wish to address these situations and have come up with some solutions for them in hope that we can aid the school to better serve our juniors in future. We would love to share them with you and our ideas and we hope that you might share information with us so we might understand the actual situation and available resources that we may make tweaks to our ideas if needed and send it in as both a feedback and a suggestion. As an introduction, our project started of as a problem solution brainstorming, in the module Idea Blueprint, where we identify a problem, study the problem and its root causes and nd a proper solution or maybe, in our best ability, help to improve the said subject. Our group decided to look into a shuttle bus service and thought to improve our schools own shuttle bus service as a starter. We have done some primary research, collecting raw data based on observation as stated above and trends and tried to draw up a link from a root cause leading up all the way a problem, the shuttle buses being late sometimes and also infrequent. We hope that when we manage to improve the situation of the shuttle buses, more students will want to patronise the service, recognising its efciency and effort put into designing the service and last but not least, working with and for the school. Problem Identication -Students are really messy and unorganised while boarding the buses. Due to crowds at certain stops, this messiness causes lots of constant delays and displeasure. -Some buses arent full as there are hardly any students at that particular point of time. Wastes of petrol and the bus services, being really inefcient at times -Buses are usually random, we suspect it has got to do with the trafc but still, it causes a reluctance to take the buses to school. Passengers see the shuttle bus as a give-take.

-People who really need the buses might not get to go on the bus as others who might not really need the service squeeze on for a free ride. -There are actually peaks in certain timings & days, sometimes based on situations too. This causes a massive spike in the number of students at the bus stop and also students who wants to take the shuttle bus. This also relates to the empty bus problem above. Although these information were observed and noted when we were taking the service to nd out if there were any more improvements to be made to the system, we believe with your support, we can see the root of these problems and maybe identify root causes if possible. This is one of the primary results we have pulled while observing the service over a span of about 2 weeks.

Infograph of people at different times on the span of 12 results sheets averaged out. This graph shows how the number of people suddenly peaks at 0745 when class is about to start and then drops back down to around 10 or more people boarding the bus at other consecutive timings, then it starts to rise as the next timetable period is approaching at 0825.

Specic Solutions
1) We suggest increase the number of buses at the stops per round while making the boarding time xed at periods before the timetable period.
Meaning, at 0745, for example, 2 buses instead of one will be there to receive the passengers and then head for NP. There will be no more buses till at least 0845, when its approaching the next timetable period. Why? Because, rstly it will help to cope with both the too much students too small bus problem and also the empty bus! problem as the time a bus is present at the bus stop gets shorter or overlaps, the concentration of students at the bus stop is bound to rise in proportion as people are surely going to use the same route to get to school everyday. Secondly, this means there will need to be a very strict timetable to govern the laps of the buses. (However we suspect this might also be a problem due to trafc conditions at Clementi Road and PIE. Has to be further studied as of now.) With a predictable timing, similar to an airport check in, people tend to anticipate for the arrival of the bus and are more prepared as compared to the give and take attitude about random timings as per possible currently. Finally, this will also help with preventing late buses that are causing students to be also late if the buses are scheduled in an appropriate time before the classes timetables.

2) Also, Parking the buses up front from away from public crowd locations, such as extreme sides of bus stops so as to encourage students to pull out from the public crowd.
Why? This idea came from the computer term defragmentation. The idea of lining up useful things so that its more accessible and faster. In this case, we cant line up humans but they can move, so we make them move. How? Park the bus up front! People will naturally move to the front of the bus stop/station next time out of the public crowd. You might doubt this would even have an impact. Some people did a little test, they did something to public toilets that helped clear up toilet crowds and shorten the average time of a person in the toilet drastically. What did they do? They removed the mirrors. This shows us how little ideas that might save time actually helps to solve certain problems.

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Finally, A system that caters to serious students who require the bus services due to inconvenience and then releasing left over bus spaces to students who happen to pass by so as to make full use of the current service.

This system will be further elaborated later into the project as there are many unknown circumstances that we dont really know yet and are require to construct the bare backbone of the system. As it requires several more planning, the current sketch is still really brief as we dont know what to expect but the idea is similar to how a primary school bus service would have worked and its rather self-explanatory.

The identication method for the system may also be used as a passenger amount limiter to ensure safety during the journey. It can also help with the NP and non-NP student identication problems. (Currently lecturers are the checkers) Although this solution might be redundant when applied with the others, we feel it is also worth giving a look into or maybe even tested individually in hope that the students who really need these services gets all the chance they have to receive this little gift of transport from Ngee Ann. At the end of the day, these observations may be awed without the operators point of view and we cannot conrm its effectiveness at this point as well as there are many unpredictable and unknown conditions out there, thus we seek to cooperate with the Student Services to improve the service, instead of just our preliminary results and data. We hope to work with NP and also come up with a more accurate data sheet, thus identifying our real root problem.

Epilogue
All in all, these are some ideas we have generated and we hope some of our ideas have caught your attention. As we believe most of these ideas are cost efcient and only requires some planning changes, the risks are low and that we have the potential to improve these solutions further with an insight of the actual operation planning and resources available, thus ne tuning the system specially and improving the results further. We hope that this proposal will be put into consideration and nally, it will be our pleasure to plan with the committee in charge. Zhi Qiang, Year 2 - EE Lester, Year 2 - AVT Samuel, Year 2 - AVT