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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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I thought it was easy until my kids' school system tried to do it.
The bus drivers all quit. The only reason they took the job was because it was early and they could start a 9-5 job after their bus drive.
After delays and rescheduling, many schools in the district now start earlier than they did before they tried to make them later.
Don't they have to also pickup the students in the afternoon?
How the hell could they have time for a 9-5 in addition?
I didn't understand either but that's the reason that they gave for quitting. Maybe some schools had a different afternoon driver.
Also a tertiary function of schools is to act publically funded daycare. Moving the handoff later in the morning means that parents would also need to start work later, or take on fewer hours.
Not saying that wouldn't be a good thing, but there are knock-on effects that go beyond the clout of a school to tackle.
Or we could design our cities and towns to allow kids to commute to school on their own.
That's one great idea! But also not something public school boards have any control over
This is a good point but afaik most school boards are directly controlled/influenced by the municipality which does have control over that.
I'll have to take your word on it. Maybe I'll bring it up next time a canvasser comes around, if I think of it. So many causes to keep track of these days... 😞
Middle and high schoolers sure, but elementary schoolers, especially kindergarten and first grade? I know plenty of parents who wouldn't let their kid walk down the street to school at that age.
Still, if there's one thing America sucks at, it's having people do healthy things. I'm very grateful I WFH, for now, and don't have to wake up until 10AM.
So hire other bus drivers, or just have kids take the regular bus. Where I live there's no such thing as a school bus.
That’s impossible in almost all of the United States. There is no regular bus system in most of the country
Well there's your problem.
Lots of the United States is quite rural, so a bus service would never be able to pick up all of those kids. Only school buses can since the school bus routes are specifically designed to pick the kids up where they are.
90% of Americans live in cities or towns, the percentage that aren't driven to school is much much lower.
If they don't have a regular bus system that works then that's what they need to start working on first. I'm convinced that it can be made to work if they are solution oriented instead of only looking for reasons why it won't work and stopping there.
Where I live, buses have dynamic routes. You go on an app to book a journey, then you get a time and place to be where the bus will pick you up (plus a drop-off point). It works for school kids as well as anyone else.
Being solution-based still isn’t going to help kids who live miles from the nearest bus stop catch a regular bus. A complete reorganization of our towns and cities to have bus access for anyone might be nice, but then there’s the parents who really wouldn’t want their kids going on a public bus.
There are bus services in rural US where companies pick up people who've signed up. It's not even a market problem at this point.
People are just NIMBYs and averse to change, or at least the ones who show up to the local town council.
Hiring takes time. It also required a lot more money than was budgeted because you need people who don't have a 9-5. And lastly, not everyone lives in the city where there are buses.
Buses can function fine in towns as long as the town is designed well. Very few people live in areas too rural for public transportation to function.
Unfortunately I have to live in the real world where towns aren't designed well. Besides, the average yard in my neighborhood is 3.5 acres so general purpose public transportation wouldn't work either.
Change happens iteratively. The first step is to acknowledge the problem and adjust how future development is planned. Start with the town center and move outward from there. Giving up fixes nothing.
Yeah, in theory sure. We live in reality though
No in practice actually.
If only the world were so simple.
It actually really is that simple. Design cities and towns so that kids can safely commute to school on their own and you've solved the problem.
What if, like in much of the country, they don’t live in a city or town?
Go live in a civilized country, then.
Excuse me? My mother grew up in the countryside. Just because you’ve never seen a field before doesn’t mean you get to call other people uncivilized
100% agree please don't attribute this person's comments with the urbanist movement.
Urbanists want cities & towns to be better places to live for everyone, we want to improve the finances of towns and people, we want to improve the health & quality of life of the average person. Urbanists do not hate anyone's way of life or want to force them to live differently.
Must be nice to be able to just pack up your family and move to a better country
Except it's too late for that. The cities are already built. Fixing it would require tearing down entire cities and building new ones. Sure, you could do it one chunk of the city at a time, but doing just one city would take decades and exorbitant amounts of money.
The Netherlands did it in the 70s and plenty of cities are progressively doing it. All you're saying is, "we fucked our cities up, guess the only way forward is to double down."
A small town is 10,000-50,000 people. Average home price is $300k. There are around 2,000 towns of 10,000-50,000. That's $18,000,000,000,000 to build some of the small towns in the US to be public transportation friendly. Who gets dragged out of their homes to make room for rebuilding?
And you'll still have to problem that many people don't want to live in crowded towns. Most people that like crowded cities are already living there.
What regular bus system. You guys have buses that work?
We lived in a city where high schoolers take public transit and that worked well for them, but the district could never hire enough drivers for the elementary and middle schools. Even with the drivers they had, they had to stagger school start and end times so that buses could do multiple routes. Some schools started at 7 and others at 9. Then the problem you highlight comes up, that there are only a few hours between shifts, so it was harder for drivers to have a second job. Many drove Uber between.