Our Kids Shouldn’t Solve the School Bus Driver Shortage by Walking Through “Death Valley”
(Source: Unsplash.)
Just like last year at this time, school district staff, families, and rideshare drivers are anxiously prepping for an agonizing shortage of bus drivers.
School district administrators are proposing to welcome parents and students back to school in Delaware with $700 stipends to drive their kids to school in the face of an ongoing bus driver shortage. Rideshare operators are probably circling like hungry sharks.
Principals are getting Commercial Drivers Licenses (CDLs) in Illinois so they can pitch in to make the wheels on the bus go round and round.
Human resource managers are literally on the street with bullhorns trying to snag new hires to get behind the wheel, pitching signing bonuses and allowing drivers to go 90 days without a CDL.
In Anchorage, Alaska, school district officials broke the news to parents: there will be bus service three weeks on—and six weeks off. A photo from the Anchorage Daily News didn’t make it seem like a back-to-school joy to give this press conference, despite the cheerful tie.
(Source: Alaska Public Media.)
The stories in the national media keep coming: we’re all struggling to find ways to get children to school amidst a continuing national shortage of bus drivers. It’s not easy finding the right staff willing to work two hours in the morning and two more in the afternoon. The pandemic restructured labor markets and supply chains, and inflation is changing the way working-class Americans think about their paychecks.
So, the real question is why can’t kids just walk, take public transportation, or ride their bikes to school?
Many of our cities’ transportation systems and land-use frameworks are fragile: auto centric and spread out. If you want to know how car dependent our places are, just imagine—as Josh McCarty of Urban3 once suggested to me—what would happen if tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. all the gasoline in the world disappeared.
For now, these school bus shortages are a real-world, non-hypothetical example of the problem we face in North America. In a second year of these bus driver shortages, the tone is getting shriller. The answers are not easy and expose the fragility of our post-WWII Suburban Experiment, which relies on cheap oil and massive spending on infrastructure in a Growth Ponzi Scheme that just keeps making it all worse.
Strong Towns member Matthew Solyntjes, who had the idea for this post, ran across this news clip of a St Louis-area school district that's stopping some of their student busing because of staff shortages. The superintendent sent parents a letter this month saying they will not provide busing for elementary students within a one-mile radius of elementary schools and within two miles for secondary students.
Matthew said his first reaction was that one or two miles didn’t seem so far to walk or bike, but then a parent comment made him realize what sort of neighborhoods must be around these schools.
Matthew looked up the school (Fox High School) on Google Maps. Unfortunately, it’s surrounded by typical design choices that make going to school any other way besides in a motor vehicle extremely difficult and dangerous.
Fox High School and an elementary school are right next to each other. Look carefully at this perspective on Google Street View.
It neatly shows the five-lane US-61 stroad with a lumpy sidewalk right against the curb juxtaposed with the school crossing sign and the elementary school itself—fenced safely far away in the background.
A north–south interstate isn't much farther down that stroad, Matthew wrote, cutting off walking and biking west of the schools. There's a river immediately to the north with, once again, no bridges for people outside of cars. This highway bridge looks like it has a skinny bit of sidewalk on either side of the bridge, but it's interrupted by supports, which might make it impassible by bicycle or wheelchair.
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.
No wonder parents worry about their kids not having a bus. Safety and travel time are cited as problems for distances that otherwise could be easily traveled without a car, if not for the hostile built environment. Unfortunately, this reality isn’t always apparent to those who aren’t dealing with it, firsthand. One YouTube commenter talking about the St. Louis shortage says the problem is our families are too lazy to walk one or two miles, and that could be easily solved:
“Has anyone thought about quadrupling the property taxes and paying the bus drivers $120,000 per year?” they ask. “It may turn … 2 miles into an easy walk.”
It's not lazy Americans making excuses: it's that we have a de facto single option of transportation because it's the least risky among really bad alternatives.
My colleague, Strong Towns Senior Editor Daniel Herriges, wrote a post about bus driver shortages last year called, “The School Bus Driver Shortage is a Problem We Didn't Have to Have.” In that post, Daniel does a great job explaining the ongoing reasons for the shortage of drivers, including disputes over wages and working conditions that long predate the pandemic. He references a Streetsblog article by Kea Wilson as a great rundown of the broader issues.
What interests me as the shortage is ongoing, is to recognize, as Daniel writes, that “we didn't have to be here. We've spent decades closing neighborhood schools, consolidating schools in unwalkable locations, and making our communities more dangerous places for kids to walk and bike, all while public transportation became less frequent and less available.”
A news article on the driver shortage in Florida is centered on schools in Pasco County, which I wrote about recently because it’s the home of “death valley,” the most dangerous stroad in America. Forty-eight people have died in the past five years on one stretch of US-19 and people think our kids should walk to school there?
We have a lot of structural and safety problems we need to start talking about in North America before we can begin accusing families and their children of being “lazy” for not being able to walk a couple of miles. This is the place to be if you want to start working on the real issues in earnest. Share this article with a friend or a family affected by the bus driver shortage, or give Norm Van Eeden Petersman, our Member Advocate, a call to find out how to build a stronger, safer, more walkable community in your place.
On this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck discusses safe streets advocacy with Amy Cohen, the co-founder and president of Families for Safe Streets.