School bus transport service strategies’ policy-making mechanism – An evolutionary game approach

School transport services are essential to the society. As more families drive their children to school, stakeholders such as the school operators and policy-makers should work together to provide child-friendly and sustainable services like school bus transport. Given that this is a multi-stakeholder problem, it is complex to balance the objectives, for example when it comes to deciding the operators and the school bus service strategies. Currently, there is rather limited knowledge on the relevant policy-making mechanism, and the impact of public transport services used as school transport. To address this, this paper proposes a novel evolutionary game-based approach to reflect the “game” nature of this school transport operation problem and simulate the policy-making procedure, where positive external benefits, as well as intangible school benefits from green and child friendly transport are included. Essentially, the proposed approach should lead to an “equilibrium point” in term of cost-benefits and decision-makings for the involved operators. In this paper, two game players, i.e. schools and governments, are considered. It is found that (1) if both players offer services, i.e. competing, the schools tend to be conservative and stop offering services; (2) if some critical decision-making parameters such as the profit thresholds can be altered, the schools and the government can jointly operate services at “equilibrium” and maintain it sustainably. “Altering” such profit thresholds are possible via policy interventions or service designs, such as service advertisement and quality supervision.