Ride the big yellow bus

By Jim and Sarah Minick

04/28/2009

Drive by any school in America around 3:00 p.m. and you'll witness a line of cars snaking through the parking lot. Most will have a single woman, someone's mom, waiting inside, and most will have arrived 30 minutes beforehand just to be at the head of the line. Nearby, in a separate lane, a string of yellow buses also idles. Why the two lines, why the two modes of pupil transportation?

To help answer this we interviewed one of those moms, our sister-in-law, Michelle, who regularly drives to three different schools to deliver and pick up her children. Michelle understands that putting her kids on the bus would "save time and gas money and it is hassle free." So why not let the kids ride the bus more often?

"A mother's guilt," Michelle replies. She sees these trips in the car as "good quality time and a good start to my children's day." In other words, driving her kids to school shows how much this mom cares.

We love Michelle, our niece and nephews, and we understand her desire to spend time with them, to make sure they start every day well. But we also understand the larger ramifications of these daily trips in single vehicles made by millions of parents across the country. Buses are safer than cars, far more efficient, and by far the most responsible way to transport children to and from school.

Just how much more efficient? We asked Jim Phipps, the Director of Transportation for Wythe County (Virginia) Public Schools. He's overseen pupil transportation in the county for ten years, and also wonders why more children don't ride the bus.

According to Phipps, the average bus gets 8 to 10 mpg, depending on the load, and that load at full capacity is 64 to 77 kids, depending on size of the child. He guesses that a child rides on average about 15 miles.

So let's say the bus runs a country route and carries 60 children. The bus needs a little less than 2 gallons of fuel to travel 15 miles and deliver 60 kids to school. If on the other hand Mom transports that child, then the figures are quite different. Say she drives a fairly efficient car, something that gets 30 mpg, far above the national average. Then her kid travels those 15 miles on a half- gallon of gas. But to deliver 60 children, with each mom driving a car getting 30 mpg, would require 30 gallons of fuel -- fifteen times more fuel than the bus needs!

The money figures are even more drastic. Say gas costs $2 per gallon. That means that mom pays $1 to make that 15 mile trip. It takes the bus $4 to travel those same miles, but divide those $4 by 60 children, and you come up with 7 cents per child per trip. Or if the bus gets 10 mpg, that comes down to 5 cents. One nickel versus one dollar to move one child.

At a national level, according to the American School Bus Council, transporting children by bus saves 2.3 billion gallons of fuel annually, keeps an estimated 17.3 million cars from making the trip to school, and saves an estimated $8 billion in annual gas costs.

And none of this accounts for all of the other problems avoided by taking all of those cars off the road if the child just rides the bus. One bus replacing 60 cars can drastically reduce traffic congestion, stress on families, and tons of CO, CO2 and NOX delivered into the atmosphere. We all would definitely breathe much better.

A bus is definitely safer as well. The big yellow machine is built to compartmentalize any accident, to limit the damage, and padded seats aide in protecting each child. As Phipps says, "It is absolutely safer to ride bus; they're built like tanks."

But some moms fear the danger caused by other kids on the bus. As our niece says, "Some of the people who ride the bus are 'deliquentish.'" Her mom agrees, saying, "You worry about what they are exposed to." Phipps addresses this concern by emphasizing the role of the drivers. They're trained to drive safely, but also greet children and enforce discipline. In addition, many buses have cameras to catch any problems. As he explains, "If we have a discipline problem, we deal with it. We want to insure the safety of all pupils."

We all need to insure the safety of all pupils far into the future. We need to insure that they'll have plenty of clean air, a secure economy, a livable planet. We need those car lines to disappear and that "mother's guilt" to grow large enough to include a healthy and safe earth for each child.