The Reign of the Yellow School Bus Is Over
The reign of the yellow school bus is officially over. According to data from the National Household Travel Survey, more American students aged 5-17 arrived at and departed from school by private vehicle than all other means combined.
(Source: The Washington Post.)
The findings are likely no surprise to those subject to ever-ballooning school pickup lines. Children are left in limbo for upwards of 30 minutes as they wait for their guardians to pull up, parents are stuck fuming in traffic, and teachers are made to deal with the emotional fallout. Countless online forums advise parents to arrive as much as three hours early to avoid the fuss; those who try it warn that there’s no escaping the lines, no matter how early or late you show up.
It’s not just the stress of idling on school grounds that makes this situation untenable. Parents are also commiserating over lost time. They are finding it impossible to fit in a workout, grocery trip or doctor’s appointment between drop-off and pickup. Even if embellished — and many of them are to garner laughs — these anecdotes speak to how much time and autonomy is lost to the daily ritual. Much has been said about how car-centric planning robs children of autonomy when it comes to mobility, but in recent years, it appears that parents-turned-chauffeurs suffer just as much.
I'm all about kindness for and acceptance of other women.
— Walking Outside in Slippers (@WalkingOutside) June 21, 2021
Except at school drop off and pick up. Then I'm only like: "Move, bitch. Get out the way!"
I’ve been sitting in this school pick up line so long, I have vultures circling
— Robert Knop (@FatherWithTwins) September 1, 2021
As complaints about pickup and drop-off grow louder, it’s worth asking why parents seem committed to the misery. Why aren’t they opting for the school bus?
Where Did the School Bus Come From?
The yellow school bus dates back nearly a century. By many accounts, it was the successor to the horse-drawn “kid hack” of the late 1800s, which shuttled a minority of children to school, mostly those who lived beyond a practical walking distance. Everyone else walked.
By the 1930s, motorized school buses could be seen on the streets, but they still served a minority of children, predominantly those in rural areas. It wasn’t until after World War II that demand for them grew beyond rural America and into the newly constructed suburbs. And it grew exponentially. These new suburbs accompanied a development pattern that situated schools farther away from the communities they ostensibly served. Walking was now unfeasible for a larger share of the student body than ever before, so busing was critical.
The introduction of the school bus appeared to resolve a burgeoning problem. Yet, its rise coincided with a steep decline in walking, biking and taking public transit to school. That’s not to say that the relationship is causal. The school bus didn’t whisk away prospective walkers, bikers and straphangers. Instead, these alternatives became less practical and even increasingly dangerous, leaving the school bus as the only option.
However, the school bus wasn’t without a competitor. As the U.S. doubled down on the suburban development pattern in the ensuing decades, car ownership grew. The residential subdivisions and cul-de-sacs that families were buying into could only be accessed by car. The nearest stores, schools and attractions were all a drive away. More and more of the built environment became oriented around the car, its movement and its storage.
As car ownership became the norm, chauffeuring kids to school did too. School buses were still popular, but in 1969, a larger share of students were already being driven to school by their guardians than by the bus driver. Between 1969 and 2009, that share only increased. In 2022, it passed the 50% mark. It was as if the development pattern that gave rise to the yellow school bus also spelled out its decline.
For many families today, driving one’s kid to school feels like a personal choice. But it’s worth considering at what point the design of our places complicates the notion that this can all be boiled down to prerogative. Certainly, the thousands of parents complaining about pickup and drop-off every September would rather be doing anything else. Why don’t they?
When the School Bus Isn’t an Option
As a crisis response to the school bus driver shortage in 2022, the Fox school district in St. Louis, Missouri, eliminated bus service for students residing within 1 mile of their elementary school and 2 miles of their secondary school. In theory, the “no-transportation zone” policy made sense. It’s fair to assume that those most in need of bus service would live farther away from the school and that those within 1 or 2 miles could walk or bike.
In practice, however, geographical proximity is hardly an advantage when the environment isn’t built to be traversed by foot. “Antonia Middle School faces Hwy. M (state Route M), and that is not a road I want my son crossing every day,” a mother of two told the local news. Under the district’s new rules, her 13-year-old son is one of 2,150 students who no longer qualify for bus transportation.
Farther north, the Fox Elementary, Middle and High School are part of a sprawling campus likewise situated right off a highway. U.S. 61 stretches five lanes and has a posted speed limit of 40 mph. If hit at that speed, the chances of surviving are slim. The chances of sustaining life-threatening injuries are nearly 90%. Walking beside cars traveling at lethal speeds is hardly pleasant and, for most parents, would feel borderline negligent.
Views of the school from the surrounding highways.
You should read: Our Kids Shouldn’t Solve the School Bus Driver Shortage by Walking Through “Death Valley”
Worse yet, there are no crosswalks. Families located in the residential pockets barely a 10-minute walk from campus have no way to access school grounds without jaywalking. The segments of the walk that aren’t straight-up illegal are broadly unpleasant. Students have to snake through back alleys, parking lots and drive-thrus before reaching the highway. The situation hardly improves on school grounds, where ample parking and runways built to streamline pickup and dropoff create another barrier.
Potential routes for students walking to school.
This is the reality for students who live closest to the campus entrance, less than half a mile away. It only gets worse the farther out you go. When he reported on this new policy, Strong Towns contributor Jay Stange illustrated just how impossible walking to school could be in St. Louis. “This highway bridge looks like it has a skinny bit of sidewalk on either side of the bridge,” Stange remarked. “But it's interrupted by supports, which might make it impassable by bicycle or wheelchair.” He adds that “even if you did make it to the north end of the bridge, there's no place for you to walk or roll to, anyway.”
The white supports make this sidewalk inaccessible to anyone in a wheelchair or on a bike.
Under these conditions, the students excluded from bus service aren’t going to walk or bike to school. They will drive or be driven, contributing to the serpentine school pickup lines, rush hour congestion and the environment that makes walking so unsafe in the first place.
Deeper Problems With the School Bus
Restoring bus service to this populace may reduce traffic and reassure families that their children are safe, but it’s hardly a long-term solution. If we want to reduce congestion and shrink school pickup lines, the solution isn’t for every child getting to school by car to hop onto a bus instead.
The kids living a 10-minute walk from Fox Middle School should be able to safely walk to school. The kids a mile and a half away should be able to join an adult-pioneered 10-minute bike bus. Subsidizing bus service for this populace ignores the obvious problem, which is that these students are best positioned, geographically speaking, to not require bus service in the first place.
This doesn’t mean, however, that subsidizing bus service for students living as much as 10 miles away is a sensible policy either. Busing isn’t cheap. How well it’s funded deserves scrutiny, but the reality is that the more miles driven, routes added and personnel required, the more expensive operations will become. With bus drivers expected to pull into disconnected cul-de-sacs, it’s also incredibly inefficient, which only adds to the costs.
When he wrote about school transportation, Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn added that, in promising free busing for all students, regardless of how far they live, schools effectively subsidize unsustainable lifestyle choices. “By mandating that school districts provide free transport to all kids, regardless of any other circumstance, we have created a situation where parents do not have any incentive to consider the true cost of their choice when they decide where to live,” he wrote. “They can live 2 blocks from school or 20 miles from school, the cost to them is the same: nothing.”
To Marohn, this is unjust. Families living in affluent remote subdivisions are often guaranteed free transportation while those residing closer to school, and more likely to be poorer, are left out when budget cuts arise. In St. Louis, many of the homes in the “no-transportation zone” are income restricted and designated “affordable housing.” In terms of “desirability,” these neighborhoods score low on several indexes, including safety, attractiveness and household income. The kids therein don’t qualify for bus service and instead are made to cross a highway, while students farther out are covered.
Desirability index of the St. Louis area, showing that remote areas generally have a higher score than areas near schools, where students are more likely to be left without transportation.
Of course, many parents aren’t actively choosing to live so far away from school. Much of that is the fault of decades of abandoning neighborhood schools — the educational institutions embedded in our communities that could be more easily accessed by foot, bike or public transit — in favor of remote suburban campuses that, like many schools in St. Louis, are fronted by a highway.
Worst of all, the more money spent on transportation, the less available for the classroom, generally speaking. In April 2024, the Fox school district announced plans to close one of its 11 elementary schools in order to “improve its financial situation.” The cost of transportation was cited as a major deciding factor. The more schools subsidize transportation, the less they have left for other operational costs. “Buildings that require a lot of transportation and are not very walkable, they move up (the list for potential closure),” The district superintendent said. “That is one of the most overriding criteria. We have to get kids safely to the building.”
If we want to save the yellow school bus, we cannot keep developing land in a way that makes its operation inefficient and impractical. And in the end, perhaps it’s not the death of the school bus we should be mourning in the first place, but the loss of a safe and affordable way of getting to school.
Learn more about getting kids safely to school in the October 3 Local-Motive session: “Getting Kids to School More Safely and Actively.”
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.