Bus Buddy: Route Optimizer

Students should have equal opportunity to get to school. BusBuddy is pulling the curtains back on school buses through real-time updates, an intuitive interface, and fair bus stops from the get-go.

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Saturday 11AM: Starting Out

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

BusBuddy is pulling the curtain back on school buses. Students and parents should have equal access to information to know when and where their buses are arriving, how long it will take to get to school, and be up-to-date on any changes in routes. When we came onboard the project, our highest priorities were efficiency, access, and sustainability.

With our modern version of a solution to the traveling salesman problem, we hope to give students and parents some peace of mind when it comes to school transportation. Not only will BusBuddy make the experience more comfortable, but having reliable information means more parents will opt to save on gas and send their kids by bus.

Saturday 3PM: Roadblocks, Missteps, Obstacles

I would walk a thousand miles just to fall down at your door

No road is without its potholes; our road was no exception to this. Alongside learning curves and getting to know each other, we faced issues with finicky APIs that disagreed with our input data, temperamental CSS margins that refused to anchor where we wanted them, and missing lines of code that we swear we put in. With enough time and bubble tea, we found our critical errors and began to build our vision.

Saturday 9PM: Finding Our Way

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…

We conceptualized in Figma with asset libraries; we built our front-end in VS Code with HTML, CSS, and Jinja2; we used Flask, Python, SQL databases, and a Google Maps API, alongside the Affinity Propagation Clustering algorithm, to cluster home addresses; and finally, we ran a recursive DFS on a directed weighted graph to optimize a route for bus pickup of all students.

Sunday 7AM: Summiting the Peak

Planting a flag at the top

We achieved our minimum viable product! Given that our expectations were not low, it was no easy feat to climb this mountain.

Sunday 11AM: Journey’s End

The journey matters more than the destination

With a team composed of an 11th grader, a 12th grader, a UWaterloo first year, and a Mac second year, we certainly did not lack in range of experiences to bring to the table. Our biggest asset was having each other as sounding boards to bounce ideas off of. Getting to collaborate with each other certainly broadened our worldviews, especially with each others’ anecdotes about school pre-, during, and post-COVID.

Sunday Onward

New Horizons

So what’s next for us? And what’s next for BusBuddy?

Well, we’ll be doing some sleeping. As for BusBuddy, we hope to scale up and turn our application into something that BusBuddy’s students can use for years to come.

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