FreeRide: Organize school transport
from A to Z

To eliminate the necessity of creating each application for free transportation to school manually, there is an interface for importing lists of schoolchildren.

The school authority selects what school year it wants to import data into and which import file column contains what information.

Within a few minutes, a list of its schoolchildren can be imported into FreeRide, where the data can be further processed.

FreeRide offers a convenient assessment function. This allows you not only to check the authorization for a free ride to school for each individual schoolchild application, but also to call up relevant fare information such as the number of zones required.

The authorization check can be performed with respect to various criteria such as distance to school combined with the grade of the schoolchild.

What connections with public means of transport are relevant for schoolchildren on their way to school? To answer this question, FreeRide incorporates up-to-date data from EFA electronic schedule information into its calculations. Parameters for queries and weighting can be defined individually. This gives you more route variants and more information about how likely those variants are to be used.

Tickets and notices to parents and guardians can be created directly from FreeRide. This is made possible by Word templates with merge fields.

FreeRide also has an interface which can be used to forward ticket orders to external service providers to perform such tasks as generating e-tickets. This interface can be individually expanded for such purposes as creating electronic tickets (TLV-EFS) according to the VDV-KA specifications.

Tickets for free rides for schoolchildren are normally paid for by the schools/school authorities in question. Nevertheless, you should check your ticket sales regularly (by school and public transport connection, for instance). The interface enables you to simply enter the number of tickets and amount of revenue if you want to forward this information to a revenue database, for instance. As necessary, invoices can be sent directly to school authorities.

Based on the probability of use, FreeRide suggests how revenue from ticket sales should be dispersed among the transportation companies involved..

These companies can then use the integrated negotiation platform to request a redistribution of these percentage shares and accept or reject the requests of others – until agreement is reached.

For schoolchild tickets for which the children’s families must pay a portion, FreeRide passes on these amounts to accounting. As soon as the payments are made, the data can be fed back into FreeRide. This comparison gives clerks a constantly updated overview of payments due.

FreeRide features extensive statistics and evaluation functions. This gives you quick access to all the numbers – when you want to know how many schoolchildren are currently using which connections, or a travelling to which school, thus giving rise to what costs, for instance.