ANSWER:

While there is no way to know the exact breakdown of costs or even the exact total cost until the procurement process has been completed, an approximate breakdown of the $750,000 included the MCPS Department of Transportation (DOT) budget for the bus tracking application follows:

• $248,000 ($15/bus/month) for cellular communication service. All of the data is real time and requires each bus to be connected by cellular service.  One important feature of this connectivity is turn-by-turn directions for any MCPS bus route, even dispatched once
  the bus has left the depot. This feature has bus driver retention benefits since one of the reasons drivers resign is the very uncomfortable situation of not knowing the route, despite having a paper route sheet and paper turn-by-turn written directions. Real time turn-by-turn directions, given according to the planned route so students are not required to cross streets they should not cross, will eliminate this very uncomfortable situation for bus drivers.

• $380,000 ($23/bus/month) for software licensing and ongoing support for tablet units on each bus, school view, parent app, and DOT staff access; data hosting; daily automatic health check of each bus tablet; continual planned versus actual route analysis; and many real-time and historical operational reports to DOT management, schools, and parents (due to roles and password protections, each group will only see information to which they should have access).

• $122,000 ($7.50/bus/month) for hardware acquisition, repair, and replacement.