Philadelphia Schools Are Making Student Transportation Worse
(Source: Flickr/Carlos Ebert.)
To combat school bus driver shortages and scheduling hurdles, Philadelphia is offering $300 per month to families that drive their children to school.
This leaves out families that ride their bicycles or take transit, and reinforces the car-centric transportation design that is making it difficult for students to access education.
School bus driver shortages have been sweeping headlines in recent years and right alongside them, the ways cities have tried—and failed—to solve the problem. Earlier this year, Louisville, Kentucky, welcomed machine-learning software as a way of saving money and untangling complex bus routes. Instead, more than a week of classes were canceled and children were dumped in neighborhoods they didn’t recognize in what the county superintendent called a “transportation disaster.” Elsewhere, route mismanagement has resulted in children arriving home as late as 10 p.m. In Charlottesville, Virginia, school bus service was suspended with no recourse offered to students who were mandated to show up to class.
Philadelphia’s solution—a program hoping to “reduce the number of students who need buses”—is currently entering its third school year. The Parent Flat Rate Program is offering households $300 per month to opt out of school bus assignments and instead drive their kids to class, puzzling parents who can’t escape TikToks, memes, and laments about ever-growing school pick-up and drop-off lines. Furthermore, at a time when Philadelphia has doubled down on its commitment to Vision Zero, many find the program’s priorities misguided.
To be eligible, the students must generally reside 1.5 miles or more from their school and, most importantly, their parents must possess a car. In a city where over 30% of its residents don’t own a car, parents like Peter Kim are being left out.
Along with his son, Kim checks all the boxes for eligibility except one: he doesn’t own a car and therefore, for that reason alone, can’t receive the money. Kim bikes alongside his son to school every morning; he’s one of dozens of parents who do so. Unlike parents who choose to drive less than two miles, however, there aren’t any kindred incentives in place to encourage commuting to school on two wheels or by transit. “That option doesn’t exist,” he said. “Even if a parent wanted to do that.”
This year, his child qualifies for free transit fares, but nothing exists to subsidize the many younger students—nor their parents nor caregivers—who may want to escort children to school via transit. A parent who preferred to remain anonymous even calculated that subsidizing public transportation for a month “at $2 a ride for about 20 days out of the month” would cost remarkably less than the $300 currently offered to motorists.
The program’s origins actually stretch back to the pandemic, when in-person instruction was permitted. “The flat rate program was implemented when we realized that because of the virus that was the pandemic, some parents would not feel comfortable having their children be transported in buses or other transportation services," Monica Lewis, a Philadelphia School District spokesperson, told Action News in 2021.
In 2023, pandemic-oriented anxieties are absent from the program’s pitch as it has pivoted to “combating the bus driver shortage.” Nevertheless, its criteria doesn’t specify that only schools or routes acutely affected by the shortage apply. As a result, parents can choose to accept the money, even if their child’s bus trips haven’t been at all impacted. Several have admitted to doing so.
“It’s a self-reinforcing problem,” Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn commented after reading about the program. “The more they subsidize driving, the more people will drive. The more people drive, the more difficult it is for those who bike or walk and the harder it is to make the bus system viable.”
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A recent piece in The Atlantic shared that in 1969, “nearly one in two kids walked or biked to school. Now only about one in 10 kids gets to school those ways. And only about a third of children who live within just one mile of school walk or bike there.” According to the latest National Household Travel Survey, 54.2% of students are transported to school in a private vehicle, a figure experts are confident has grown since 2020.
Meanwhile, from Oregon to Massachusetts, grassroots bike pools (sometimes called bike buses) are taking over school commutes. Bike buses are typically volunteer-coordinated efforts, staffed by parents and teachers who want to ensure students not only get to and from school safely, but enjoy the benefits of active transportation while putting a little less strain on the environment.
For Strong Towns advocate Jonathan Duncan, who launched one in Springville, Utah, the benefits are multifold. “Kids love the idea of getting themselves places and not needing to rely on their parents and parents love the sudden freedom they find when they no longer have to fight the lines to drop their kids off in the car,” he shared. “The children are empowered; the parents are liberated.”
Better yet, bike pools tackle several issues at once. “At Cesar Chavez Elementary School in north Portland my ‘why’ was to build a strong community and revitalize a walking school bus program that had existed in the past,” Sam Balto, best recognized for his headline-sweeping bike bus in Oregon, wrote in Bike Portland last year. “At Alameda, my ‘why’ to start the bike bus was to reduce car trips at drop-off, which had gone way up during the pandemic because of canceled bus routes.”
Bike buses may not be feasible everywhere, but they demonstrate that safe, affordable, and enjoyable alternatives to car commuting exist with a bit of imagination. With Philadelphia investing tens of millions into safer streets and protected bike lanes, perhaps the city’s school district can envision parents as something other than motorists and reconsider subsidizing auto-oriented development while it figures out a long-term solution to the ongoing bus driver shortage.
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.