Schools: When Transportation Replaces Education

What transportation service is free but costs taxpayers $25 billion a year?

That is a great pop quiz question. It could be augmented with all kinds of other surprising numbers around transportation and education.

School buses: Dead capital sitting around most of the time

Yes, this is right. The topic is school transportation in the US. It has a hefty price tag: Try this: More than have of all students nationwide are shuttled to school on public expense every day at an average cost of somewhere around at least $700 bucks per year (costs vary widely by state), that is 6.5% of the total education cost per student. It is about 1/3 of what the average US household spends on car fuel per year and about 14 times what the average American spends on books.

In summer when the roads are much less clogged, we realize how much real estate all those school buses and all those helicopter parents driving their kids to school really occupy. With the kids on summer break, this is a great time to ask what has brought the country to the point where so much effort has to go into transportation of students. Resources that are lost for the primary purpose of schools: education.

I am not a big fan of the notion that everything used to be better in the past, far from it. But there is something to be said about one particular aspect of the past: Students walked to school! That was better for the student's health, better for the environment and better for the education budget. There are many reasons why walking to school has become the exception (with less 1/6th of students doing so): Perceptions and realities of safety, ever more packed schedules and sprawl.

• In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
• In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
• In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
• 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972).
• In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
• 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).

Whether it is walkability, or development patterns, incomplete streets without sidewalks, schools located way outside of communities, or the lack of transit, architects and planners should be alarmed by those physical conditions out there that foster statistics that show to which extent transportation expenses gobble up resources that should go into education.

Even when sidewalks are present, large lot developments making walking to
school often impossible

The growth management group 1000 Friends of Maryland took the topic up in 2007. Little has changed since then, I am afraid, in spite of various initiatives around the country aiming to get more students to walk again.

From 1992 to 2006 the total miles traveled by all Maryland
county school buses increased by 25%. Maryland
school buses now travel over 117.2 million miles a year,
a 23 million mile increase!
• Statewide, school bus costs rose 104%. The combined
county budgets rose from $215 million spent in 1992 to
$438 million in 2006. In just under 15 years cost to bus
students more than doubled.
• 9 out of 23 Maryland counties saw their total expenditures
increase by more than 100%.

It is time to the wrongness busing so many students to school. Saving money or freeing it up for education is only one aspect. Health of our kids clearly is another. So is the fact that walking relaxes the mind and allows learning on the go. There is much to see and learn on a walk to school and so little in a school bus seat. Buses pollute the air, clog the streets and represent so much dead capital.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find data providing an international comparison of school transportation expenses but it is easy to imagine that the US is a leader in the concept of a dedicated school bus that is not used for public transit and sits around most of the time rusting away, mostly about the US preference for low density far flung development.

Schools should be part of the heart of our communities and most of all, all communities need to have a heart again. We have too many developments without a beginning, an end or a middle that don't deserve the name community. Schools need to be open to parents and even community members without kids. A good community school is a resource center for all and it has good, easy and safe access for all. The same is true for a firehouse, a post office and a library. All of this social infrastructure has far to often been placed in the geometric middle between several communities in a mistaken understanding of efficiency.

Thousand Friends of Maryland report:
Gas instead of books

The yellow school bus blues of ever higher cost of bus transportation is just a symptom. The thinking that sits behind placing schools equidistant from all surrounding communities right into a cornfield is at the root.

All this has little to do with nostalgia. The reversal of sprawl towards a more compact development pattern is just the smart thing to do. It works better, is more efficient, healthier and provides a much better quality of life.

Summer is a good time to consider life how it should be and how our children deserve it.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Links:
Selected years expenditure table
Cost figures
The vanishing walk to school
Yellow School Bus Blues (1000 Friends of Maryland)
Scottish study: Why do parents drive their kids to school?
Canadian Report: Driving your kids to school puts other children at risk, new study finds

The expenditure for public school student transportation was $904 per student transported in 2011–12 (in unadjusted dollars), and 55 percent of students were transported at public expense in 2007–08.
National expenditure for student transportation (2013/14): 24,345,101,000
National Statistics on School Transportation School Transportation Costs
 In 2004-05, the most recent year for which statistics are compiled, 55.3% of the 45,625,458 children enrolled in public K-12 schools were bused to school at public expense.
 The United States spends $17.5 billion per year on school bus transportation at an average cost of $692 per student transported.1
 The percentage of children bused has been declining steadily since the mid-1980s, when slightly more than 60% of children were bused. At that time, the average expenditure per student transported was under $300.2
 In FY2009, approximately $180 million in federal Safe Routes to School funding will be made available to each state’s Department of Transportation to help school districts make it safer for children to walk and bicycle to school.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2016). Digest of Education Statistics, 2014 (NCES 2016-006), Chapter 2.

Yellow buses taking a summer break: Wasted funds, dead capital