School Pass - Eligibility Assessments
Across Queensland, the Department of Transport and Main Roads partners with bus and ferry companies to transport students from home to school and vice versa. Under the policy, known as STAS (the School Transport Assistance Scheme) students are eligible for subsidised travel under certain circumstances - the main criteria being that they live more than 3.2km from their closest primary school, or 4.8km from their closest secondary school.
There are two caveats that complicate this calculation:
The distance is measured by the shortest trafficable route
The distance for eligibility is calculated from the student’s home to the closest state school, and (if applicable) the closest private school of the same type as the one attended.
At Murphy Stone Analytics, we’ve created a handy tool to take the guess work out of the assessment process - no longer do you need to know each and every one of the surrounding schools intimately, or spend time wrangling multiple schools and routes on Google Maps. Using Open Street Map, Queensland’s Schools Directory and the Queensland Cadastre we can calculate 99% of applications automatically.
Each time you make a request, the tool:
Finds the student’s address in the Cadastre
Finds the point on the road network closest to the centre of their plot
Finds the closest school/s of interest and locates the point on the road network closest to the school’s lat/long (according to Education Queensland)
Calculates the shortest trafficable path to and from each school to the student’s address
The tool then returns to the user:
The shortest distance to the school attended
The shortest distance to the closest state school (or school of type)
The fare level (subsidy) paid to operators
The maximum top-up fare level permitted under the policy
This tool can further be enhanced & customised for your needs - including the ability to:
Read and process information from PDF STAS forms automatically
Pass information from the forms, as well as the assessment result directly into your bus pass software
Provide Route Info/Journey Plans for parents - even in areas not covered by Translink’s Journey Planner
If you’re sick of manually assessing students one-by-one - try out the tool today!
The tool is provided on an as-is basis for the use of bus operators. No warranty as to the tool’s accuracy is made (particularly as the department use their own proprietary road network to measure eligibility). It is in no way affiliated with the Department of Transport & Main Roads.