Getting Smart About School Transport: Three Ways to Transform the Yellow School Bus Model
It’s that time of year again — school children across the country are waking up to fall schedules and making their way into classrooms everywhere. Parents and caregivers are digging through countless email updates, websites, social media posts, and newsletters to figure out how the new year will work while teachers and administrators are hoping that summer preparations will result in a glitch-free start to another academic year. This time is always a bit hectic and the evidence is apparent as our city streets see a bump in congestion with back to school fever. Personally, I’m thrilled that my own children look forward to the school start as much as I did at their age.
Remarkably, in an era that has witnessed so much mobility innovation, the transportation model has not changed much since I was a public school student myself. Sure, the industry sector has introduced some new technologies such as on-board security cameras, geolocation apps, and bus routing solutions but many of these innovations have not been scaled fleet-wide or woefully linger in “pilot” mode. None of them have fully solved the friction of transporting hundreds of minors to schools in districts across the country. This is a big problem as school attendance is closely linked to school funding and student outcomes and not having reliable transport makes it harder for students to get to class. Meanwhile, the sector struggles to attract and retain the talent needed to operate busses and work as monitors to help manage safety and behavior. Unfortunately, the lack of innovation in this space has come at the expense of school children everywhere. It’s time to get smart about school transport.
Earlier this year, I began working with LeanLab, an education accelerator in Kansas City, Missouri, to address the highly-fractured and challenging school transportation services available to charter schools in the urban core. The work, which is ongoing, has revealed three ways to address school transportation that could help improve these services not only here but nationwide.
Let’s start with some quick context on what is happening in the school transportation space in Kansas City today. The Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) is the largest school district in the city, serving roughly 14,000 students. Earlier this year, KCPS switched transportation providers which are launching operations in this market for the first time. Meanwhile, there are many charter schools within the KCPS district boundaries that independently contract for their own transportation services, if they elect to provide them at all. Since charter students can live anywhere within the KCPS boundaries, all of these schools and KCPS are providing separate services across the city, often transporting students who live on the same block, in the same neighborhood, on busses headed to different schools. That means there are highly duplicative services on our streets. Additionally, there are only a few yellow school bus companies in this market serving over 90 schools and they are chronically constrained by labor shortages, high cost of operation, and a sprawling service area. School administrators must jockey for school start times and inconsistent service which comes at the expense of students who simply need a ride to school.
The lack of innovation in this space is somewhat disheartening. After all, in some ways this is a relatively easy transportation problem to solve: there are regular schedules, known origins and destinations, and a relatively fixed number of students requiring transport. Sure, schools need a variety of solutions to improve transportation — there is no one-size-fits-all business model — but generally this is achievable through a combination of three reforms that would create a model similar to the holy grail of new mobility in a digital age: school mobility-as-a-service.
- Introduce more community-based solutions. Today, the majority of students rely on district-provided or caregiver-provided transportation as less than 15% of students walk or bike to school today (as compared to 50% in 1969). The current model is binary: school administrators or student households must solve for transportation. There is no community-based or shared alternatives readily available for students and informal networks are difficult to create in an inefficient, balkanized school system. Meanwhile, private shared mobility services have demonstrated the potential for aggregating resources more efficiently through route optimization, utilizing empty seats, and connecting riders with drivers in real-time. Google Waze Carpool even allows for reimbursing for miles traveled in-app. Communities need to leverage carpooling and other shared mobility technologies to provide alternatives to each household addressing individual needs. Sure, there are logistics that need to be considered (e.g. carseats) but, if it were possible to incorporate community-based, shared transportation into the overall school/district transportation plan, it could help alleviate some of the demands of addressing geographical outliers and other exceptions to efficient school bus routing. Services such as Hop Skip Drive are already serving some markets with flexible, on-demand professional services that can be more affordable and reliable than a big yellow bus — this is particularly important in urban districts where there is high student mobility (students changing addresses throughout the school year). Plus, providing platforms for parents and caregivers to connect in providing transportation can help foster a stronger sense of community and engagement which has multiple benefits beyond just getting students to school.
- Public transit as an alternative to the yellow school bus. We need to consider public transit as part of the toolkit, even if only for middle and high school students that live and attend school along major transit lines. In Kansas City, the KCATA has been leading a successful pilot to extend free transit passes to high school students across several of the school districts with great numbers to start (16,700 rides in the first three months of the program). However, state legislation prohibits the use of school transportation dollars for public transit: these bus passes can only be used for other travel by students (which is still great for job access and general mobility). Allowing schools to provide transit passes and hire monitors for public transit routes, in lieu of contracting for yellow bus services, would make it possible to leverage a well-paid, unionized workforce and safer services that ALREADY exist. There’s the added benefit of system redundancy which could help school attendance. I distinctly remember that sinking feeling when I missed the bus in the morning — and it was too far to walk to school unless I wanted to arrive halfway through second period. If I had a public transit option, I could have just waited for the next bus to pick me up instead of figuring out how to get to school on my own. Plus, imagine the improved long-term transit ridership in cities if we made it easier for students to ride the bus sooner.
- Leverage shared services through a system of systems approach. Integrating transportation services is a relatively low hanging fruit in optimizing resources across fractured urban school districts. Yes, I recognize that there are school culture differences and even long-standing rivalries between schools. But, if students can grow up on the same block but attend different schools, why can’t we have them share a bus?Technology offers a lot of ways to make it easier for different charters and districts to collaborate on transportation service delivery: the advent of mobility data standards and APIs such as MDS to improve real-time awareness and management of the landscape for all sorts of mobility services are just the beginning. Why can’t we demand the same thing for school transportation? Governance of these shared services can be tricky (read: political) but we can no longer put greater value in the battle for funding over the interests of our students. Money is being wasted on inefficient student transportation when it should be spent in the classroom. School transportation can be vastly improved if we leverage streamlined governance, data sharing and technology to improve the real-time allocation and sharing of resources, dynamic routing, communication to school administrators and families, and the ongoing evaluation of the service model for even further improvement.
It is time to innovate school transportation everywhere. If we cannot get more students walking and biking to school (which is great for our overall public health), we must implement more community-based solutions, public transit options, and an integrated approach to managing bus services across districts now. As adults, we need to recognize that the next generation is relying on us to look beyond labor interests, traditional sector influence, and politics to provide seamless, reliable and efficient access to public education. Let’s get serious about solving for school transportation.
