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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
90% of north Americans live in towns or cities. And no you don't need a large population to support public transportation, here are hundreds of examples in Europe.
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.
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.
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.
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.