The School Bus Crisis Is a Symptom of Car-Centric Planning

Photo by Harrison Kugler on Unsplash

If you’re a parent, or know any parents, you’ve probably heard by now - we’re in the midst of nationwide school bus driver shortage, which last year resulted in Massachusetts calling in the National Guard.  And the saga continues, as Kingston City Schools just announced at the last minute that nine of their bus routes for high schoolers would not be running for the first day of school. 

Kingston High School serves students living in the city of Kingston, as well as the outlying, low density areas of Ulster, Esopus, Hurley, Rifton, and Port Ewen.  Presumably, these towns don’t have sufficient population to justify having their own schools, or perhaps they wanted to save money by combining their resources with Kingston.  Since each of these towns is car-centric by design, school buses were needed.  And in the days of cheap oil and adequate labor supply, that seemed to make sense.  

The cost of busing children to school in Kingston has risen precipitously in the past few years.  While hovering around 7 million from 2014-2019, the budgeted cost for student transportation is now 11 millions dollars - a 54% increase from 8 years ago.  And clearly, even this large increase is not enough to entice drivers to stay.  

Safety is also a concern for workers; transportation workers had the second-highest rate of COVID deaths.

So, Kingston may need to further increase wages, or cut routes out and rely on parents to carpool their children, which for many would be a hardship. 

We have chosen to live in a sprawled manner in which we are desperately dependent on cars to survive. Whether or not you are a fan of sprawl, you have to admit that it’s quite expensive to maintain that lifestyle.  And maybe that’s worth it to you.  But let’s also keep in mind that our children are unable to experience the independence and freedom of movement that children in past days experienced.  Not the mention the plight of the soccer parent, whose second job consists of driving their kids from one structured activity to the other.  This is one of many hidden tradeoffs of living in a secluded house with a big backyard.  And, I must mention here that while you might be happy to make these trade offs, most alternatives to this lifestyle have been legislated out of existence, through detached single household zoning laws.  The end result is that there are more people who want to live in walkable areas than there are places for them to live (places with jobs that is).

The population of the City of Kingston is roughly the same as it was in 1900, as is that of the village of Rosendale - both relatively dense places where you can feasibly bike to the grocery store.  Meanwhile, the populations of more sprawling Hurley and Ulster have tripled in the same timeframe, and the populations of Esopus and Ulster County as a whole have doubled.  Instead of filling in underutilized spaces in our cities, we’ve been expanding outwards for the past century.

You can see in Kingston’s current zoning map that, up until now, anything but detached single family homes has been prohibited throughout most of the city. That is about to change with the new form-based zoning plan, which is currently going through the community review process.  This plan will do away with exclusionary single family zoning, allowing people to add accessory dwellings in their backyards, and turn their house into several apartments if they so desire.  While this will enable more economic uses of space, it also will have the benefit of allowing more people to be in close proximity to school, workplaces, stores and other destinations, which opens up the possibility of using active transportation such as walking and biking, and public transit.  

Making our town a safe place for our children to move around independently will have huge benefits.  For one, children will be less needy of their parents to drive them everywhere.  They will also get more exercise and endorphins from using their bodies, not giant machines to get around.  And of course, we would save tons of money at the same time.  Imagine if we spent just half of that school transportation budget of 11 mill a year on creating safe bike routes to school.  Even at the high end of the cost estimation, we could build 11 miles of protected cycle lanes per year with that money.  Another, possibly cheaper, idea would be to simply block off streets with routes towards schools, which would decrease traffic thereby making streets safer for all.  About 30% of traffic during school travel hours is due to parents dropping their children off, and parents end up driving their kids to school to keep them safe from the threat of the other people who are driving their own kids to school.

Just in case you were wondering, the answer to the problem is not teen drivers - they cause more than half of deaths of school-age children during normal school travel hours.  We need to find other ways to safely grant teens the independence and autonomy that they crave. (Hint-protected bike lanes and functional transit will help).

Check out these kids who are cycling from one town to another in the Netherlands for school.  (Why do I keep bringing up the Netherlands?  You’ll see in an upcoming post.)  

The distance between these two Dutch towns is 7 miles.  The distance from Port Ewen to Kingston High School is 2 miles (yes, I know the bridge needs to be fixed); Forsyth Park is also 2 miles away; Hurley is 5 miles away.  Most high school students are more than capable of riding a bike that distance most days. And yes, children do cycle during the winter, although having a back up plan for the occasional hard day is a good idea, whether that is public transit, carpools, or school buses.

A few years ago, Henry Street in Kingston received funding from the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) for what was called the “Henry Street Safe Routes to School” project.  The project initially proposed a shared-use path on one side of the street, which was received favorably during public information meetings.  However, citing lack of space for trees and frequent ramps up and down at driveways, as well as lack of space for snow removal, this idea was scrapped.  For my vantage point, I see a clear compromise that could have been made: turn Henry Street into a one-way street, and/or eliminate parking, and make the shared-use path continuous instead of prioritizing driveway continuity. It’s unclear if this sort of alternative was ever officially proposed as an option, although I see community comments on the website with specific suggestions that would have made the street much safer.  The final “safe route” design has no bike lane at all, and keeps the two-way structure with parking on both sides of the street.  That’s four lanes designated for cars, and zero designated for bikes.  On a street with an official speed limit of 30, car speeds will be unacceptably fast for biking in-lane (a safer speed would be 10-20 mph).  Cars win, kids lose.  (I will do more investigation into the Henry Street situation and keep you posted on what I learn.) 

As we can see, there are a few stumbling blocks (to put it mildly) to revamping school transportation for the 21st century, including the lack of safe biking infrastructure, general cultural attitudes, and the prevailing priorities of those in power.  We must acknowledge that the sprawling nature of our towns and absolute priority to car travel pose a challenge and increases the cost of living for us all, while also impacting quality of life for our children.