My Ride K-12

I am updating my prior review, and increasing the stars from 2 to 4. I find this app to be a very helpful tool. This app is no substitute for being prepared for the bus around its usual time. Don’t look at time estimates in the app. The app needs to be used as additional resource in preparing for bus arrival. It’s not to be used as sole determination of where the bus is. There will be days it shows incorrect info due to any number of factors. But, more often than not, it has been excellent for gauging the time needed to get out the door. ——————————- Initial review: Using the app has created more STRESS in the morning routine. Time estimates adjust dramatically making them useless. (It says 10 minutes late then suddenly it’s supposed to arrive at this exact minute. Then it switches to 10 min late again) The map updates in a choppy way. Son has missed the bus 3 times, thinking the route map was accurate or that the bus was where it shows. If district drivers change routine, they should update the route! We are better off doing the old fashioned thing of waiting outside for 10 minutes to eliminate this headache.

This app was advertised as realtime updates and notifications with the very useful ability of tracking the progress of my kids’ school bus. It failed miserably at each of those tasks. For instance, the app did not adjust the bus’s drop off time to reflect their school’s half day on their first day of school. Students were released from school at 10:30am, yet the app kept the time listed as a 3:00pm release. That seems like a simple (and crucial) “realtime update” to make. I also received zero notifications. Nothing when the bus left the school or got near us. (And again, nothing about the half day.) Finally, there’s the ability to track the progress of the bus — a remarkably useful tool — that, you guessed it, didn’t work. Instead of receiving the bus’s location when I selected “bus location” I was treated to a static map of my house and the school, which never once featured anything even resembling a bus let alone a moving location marker that could, I don’t know, tell me my kids’ “bus location.” This app is a total failure. In its present (useless) form I don’t see the point of it. It is simply a collection of erroneous, static times with no actual communication, no notifications, and no “bus location.” It’s an app that could of (should of) been an email — instead of wasting space on my phone.

I hate to be so critical, but I’ve done some light app development and while the transition from the former app to this went smoothly, the functionality of the map view is poor. Yes, the bus location updates periodically (likely based on the signal availability for the bus to local cell sites). As the bus appears to approach my child’s bus stop/pickup location like any other user, I will zoom in to more precisely examine the location. The zoom in view will hold for ONLY until another update is received of the bus location. Once the bus location is received, the view zooms out to a bus icon the size of approximately over 3,500 ft. Keep in mind, a mile is just over 5,200 feet. To give you a sense of scale, I’ve checked on both an iPhone and an iPad, the view will zoom out after every location update to fit in approximately 5 miles of visible map from north to south. Oh, and the bus icon i mentioned? It’s 2/3 of a mile long. The icon of my house appears to be just over a half mile in size as well. Trust me, I’ve checked this based on intersections and landmarks visible on the app. I’m sorry, but when the map view every update is reset to a zoom of the bus taking up what is the equivalent of 9 to 10 city blocks, what’s the point? Great, you go to the trouble of calculating estimated arrival time. There is almost NO algorithm or formula, or any potential machine learning that is going to accurately predict the nuances of getting a child out the door. Some kids make the bus wait, some kids are waiting as the bus arrives. Some bus drivers let every single car waiting at an intersection pass before they ever attempt to take the right of way. Trying to predict the arrival time while appreciated, is less important than being able to accurately visualize the distance as represented on a map. Stop resetting the zoom view after every location update.