1. Map every child's pickup point
Start with a list of every child who will ride: their school, their class, their address and the days they travel. Put each one on a map. A street address is not enough in much of Lagos; ask parents for a landmark or a pin they drop on their phone, and check the odd ones yourself.
Mark each school on the same map, with its bell time for each class. A school with kindergarten finishing at 12:30 and secondary at 15:30 is three afternoon plans, not one.
2. Group nearby homes into stops
Children who live close together can walk to one shared stop, a hub. Fewer stops mean a shorter route and an earlier finish. Decide which families are collected from home instead, because collection from home takes longer and fits fewer children on a route.
Keep each hub somewhere a bus can stop safely and a parent can wait with their child, not on the bend of a busy road.
3. Fit each group to a vehicle's seats
Add up the children for each group of stops and match them to a bus that can seat them all, with a seat of their own each. Leave a few seats free for new pupils during the term. A bus that is full on the first day will be over capacity by the third week.
4. Order the stops against the bell time
Work backwards from the school gate. Take the time the children must arrive, subtract the drive from the last stop, then from the stop before it, adding a few minutes at each stop for children to board. The first pickup time falls out at the end.
If that first pickup is earlier than a parent will accept, the route is too long: split it, or move a stop to another route.
5. Leave time for the Lagos rush hour
A route that runs freely before dawn can take far longer an hour later. Plan with the journey times you see at the hour the bus will run, not on a quiet Sunday, and add time where a route crosses a bridge or joins an expressway. Note which routes run late in the first weeks and adjust those first.
6. Test the route on a dry run
Before the first day, drive each route at the real time with the driver who will run it. Check that each stop is where the plan says, that the bus can turn where it needs to and that the times hold. Fix the plan, not the driver's memory.
7. Re-plan when a family moves
Routes do not stay planned. A new pupil, a family that moves house or a school that changes its bell time can unsettle several routes at once, and each change means going back to step 1 for the routes it touches.
This is where planning school bus routes by hand turns into days of work every time something changes. School bus routing software does steps 2 to 4 for you, overnight and by itself on Growth and Scale, and someone on your team approves the plan each morning.
When to plan school bus routes by hand
With one or two buses and children who rarely move, a map, a spreadsheet and a dry run will do. School bus route planning by hand stops paying once you run more than a few buses or more than one school, because every change ripples through routes you have already settled.