Drones have found a home in monitoring construction and public works sites.  They give teams a birds eye view of the tasks at hand so that proper plans of action can be executed.  Drones have made the inspection of roads, bridges, and buildings safer and more efficient.  They can access areas that are difficult and dangerous for people to reach.  They are able to provide detailed data in a fraction of the time it would take for a human to collect manually.  Drones are able to do all of this while also saving companies huge amounts of money without sacrificing job safety.  One community in Arizona took all of this knowledge into account and decided to see if they could use drones to help improve safety conditions for students coming and going to school.

Getting kids to school in the mornings and home in the afternoons is often a logistical nightmare.  Even in small towns, the process can create major traffic jams.  These traffic jams lead to reckless drivers who are often in a rush to get to work in the mornings, posing a risk to student pedestrians.  My children go to a Pre K-5th grade school with less than 500 students and staff members.  The morning drop off process takes about 20 minutes on a good day, while the afternoon pickup can take up to 45 minutes, and the school isn’t on a main road.  I can only imagine how much more of an issue this becomes in larger school districts like those in Queen Creek, Arizona.

Queen Creek is about 40 minutes northwest of Phoenix with a population of a little under 40,000.  The town has 6 public school districts along with several public charter and private schools.  The Queen Creek High School is the home to over 2,000 students.  To meet the demands of the school’s growing population, the high school moved to a new location in the early 2000s just off of a busy roadway.  Getting kids in and out of Queen Creek High School, as well as the other schools in the town and throughout Arizona, has become increasingly chaotic.  As these communities continue to grow in size, this chaos will also grow.  So as to not only lessen the tensions this traffic congestion is putting on drivers, but to also ensure the safety of the students, the Queen Creek Department of Public Works stepped in to see what could be done.

Troy White, the Public Works Director said, “Everywhere in Arizona, we’ve heard these school issues with the circulation pattern and how traffic in and around the schools is really bad.”  As stated on the Queen Creek’s official website the purpose of the Department of Public works is, “To efficiently plan for, contract, operate and maintain all infrastructure, traffic control systems, town buildings, and equipment to provide excellent service, and to enhance the quality of life to the community in a cost-effective manner.”  One of the ways Troy has set out to do this is with the use of drones.  Troy explained, “We use the drone technology mainly to document our existing conditions for construction.”  Their familiarity with how drones can assist them in planning led them to the idea to use a drone to solve the traffic flow problem around the school.

The first step was to get FAA clearance to fly a drone over the school during high traffic times.  Once permission was granted, Troy’s team sent up a DJI Mavic to get a birds eye view of the daily proceedings for students getting in and out of school.  “We could see the entire circulation plan,” White explained. “So we could see where all the tiny little issues were or areas where we could make improvements that would greatly increase the amount of people that we could get through in a shorter amount of time for the afternoon and morning release times.”  A problem that had been growing for years was now given a plan of action with just a short drone flight.

Some of the measures taken to ease the situation were to limit intersections leading to the school where students and pedestrians were crossing the street.  By streamlining where people are crossing the roads allows for a smoother flow of traffic as drivers can make less stops.  They also altered the timing of traffic signals to make for smoother transitions.  But perhaps one of the biggest changes was when they moved speed bumps.  The speed bumps were initially laid out to purposefully slow down traffic and alert drivers of pedestrians.  When Troy reviewed the footage captured by the drone he saw that not only were these speed bumps unnecessary, but they were the cause of the biggest traffic delays.

The results have been dramatic.  Queen Creek Assistant Superintendent of Support Services Dr. Cort Monroe was skeptical of what information the drone would give them at first.  But he quickly changed his mind.  “We’ve been able to see our students able to get safely off campus in about 18 minutes,” said Dr. Monroe “And when you’re a high school of 2,800 – that’s been really impressive.”  There are still more measures that need to be met and the Department of Public Works has reached out to other schools to see if they would be interested in a similar project.  As Dr. Cort said, “The community knows that it’s something that we’re not done with… that we’re actively looking at and so, I think that gives people confidence that their concerns are being heard and we know our students are safer.”