Over at Vox, Anna North has a piece about the disappearance of the school bus thanks to widespread budget cuts. However, it was all anecdotal and I got curious about whether the data backs up the story. For starters, it looks like the cost issue is very real:
The cost to transport a single student on a school bus has gone up 40% over the past couple of decades. Why? There are some obvious possibilities like improved safety or a growing preference for small buses, but neither of those seems like it can explain a 40% increase. Moving on:
Sales of new school buses seem basically healthy. We haven't yet made up for the pandemic slowdown, but we're pretty close. Here are school bus drivers:
Same thing here: generally a steady increase, but we haven't yet recovered fully from the pandemic. Some of that may be due to a reported shortage of school bus drivers. Finally, here's the actual number of students who ride school buses each day:
This figure does show a steady decrease since 2006, well before the pandemic. At the same time, it's pretty small: a decline of about 0.3% per year. It's affected fewer than a million kids over the past 20 years.
None of this is definitive; it's just a quick data dump. My insta-take is that the school bus infrastructure looks pretty healthy but fewer kids are using it. In other words, the buses are generally still there. Most of the kids who aren't taking the bus anymore are probably doing it by choice.
Just a guess, though.
Our bus service is so slow and erratic that we can’t use it in the AM. PM is better but we still do pickups about half the time due to extracurriculars.
School choice raises bus costs, because you now have to cover more miles for the same number of kids. Instead of packing a bus with kids in just a couple of miles, half-filled buses drive longer distances to pick up kids sprinkled around the city.
This means that more stops have just 1 or 2 kids, and kids are on buses for longer periods of time. Many parents dislike this. They view children alone at a stop as a safety risk, and resent the long rides/early bus stop times. So quite a few drive their kids instead. That just feeds the cycle of longer routes.
This 100%. I don't know what the classic ratio of public to private/parochial school student used to be. But with the rise of "public" charter schools, I am sure that instead of being something like 19:1, it probably shifted to 15:5 in Texas.
On a lighter note, the charter schools in Texas are now a big business and are actively fighting school voucher programs here!
Where I live, we have public school choice, but the schools only provide bus service to 1 or two schools. You go out of zone and you're on your own.
In Chicago, there's always a shortage of drivers when the year starts.
Most likely a combination of factors. Fuel costs are likely a large part of the cost increase, followed by, in no particular order: driver salary, insurance and bus cost.
There wasn't a bus when my kids were attending school. There was when I went to school (at least, before high school). Seems like fewer buses to me.
Meh. When I see large numbers of schools canceling "away" games because of rising transportation costs, then I might become concerned. And since all those miles taking kids back and forth to neighboring districts for sports are probably rolled into the total, I expect they make it seem that districts are spending more getting kids back and forth to school than they are. There don't appear to be any good numbers on this.
In our upstate NY district, Covid completely decimated the ranks of school bus drivers. Some were already older and nearing retirement age and just decided it was a good time to pack it in. Some didn't want to risk sitting for several hours each day in a yellow disease capsule -- in our winter weather, you can't just drive around with the windows open for ventilation. Others found higher paying work elsewhere. It was a mess. Schools had to dip into other resources to boost driver pay to attract people back, and in the meantime, parents found workarounds that left the current routes with fewer kids, meaning fewer busses. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Loser cruisers
I live on a long and busy street that has 4 schools loading and unloading onto it. The buses park on the street. The family do pick ups and also clog the street. Why can't they use the school parking lots? And why aren't these kids taking the bus? I never leave home after 1:30 pm until about 3pm as it is so slow, if I can get onto the street. Whine, whine.
I wonder whether the decline is the result of an increase in home-schooling.
Does anyone actually like riding on a school bus? I escaped mine the instant I was able to and never looked back.
"The cost to transport a single student on a school bus has gone up 40% over the past couple of decades."
Inflation adjustment assumed. What about wages for drivers?
It's obvious that the issue is that the bus drivers aren't (all) armed so riding the bus is unsafe. And what about the feral hogs?
Three reasons come to mind:
1. Our modern suburbs are farther apart and disjointed without a connecting grid so homes are farther apart than before and bus routes have to be much longer to serve the same number of houses.
2. The density of children is dropping across America, especially in urban areas but really everywhere. So buses also have to drive farther to reach the same number of kids.
3. More parents drive their kids to school so the remaining kids are even more spread out. This basically never ever happened in the 1970s when I was in in elementary and middle school. You walked or biked if you lived close. You rode the bus if you lived far. No parents drove their kids to school on a regular basis unless you had a school project to carry or some such.
Baumol's cost disease! The number of students that a given driver can transport in one bus has not increased, while wages have been forced up by an economy that is getting richer. I know that the tight labor market that we had post-pandemic forced a lot of school districts to raise driver pay by a lot in order to avoid losing everybody to businesses that were willing to pay more.
In Texas, many districts cut service to houses 1/2 mile (elementary) and 1 mile (secondary). By cutting service to cheap and easy students, the average cost will go up. If this trend has expanded could explain the “rise” in an average per student costs.
In Texas, many districts cut service to houses 1/2 mile (elementary) and 1 mile (secondary). By cutting service to cheap and easy students, the average cost will go up. If this trend has expanded could explain the “rise” in a rager per student costs.
In NJ since Covid, bus drivers have commanded significantly higher compensation. It is also clear that many parents are now working from home at least 2-3 days a week, which gives them the opportunity to drive kids to school.