Summary
School districts across the U.S. are reducing bus services due to driver shortages and shifting transportation responsibilities to families, disproportionately affecting low-income households.
In Chicago, where only 17,000 of 325,000 students are eligible for buses, parents are turning to alternatives like ride-hailing apps.
Startups such as Piggyback Network and HopSkipDrive provide school transportation by connecting parents or contracting directly with districts, offering safety measures like real-time tracking and driver vetting.
Critics warn these solutions don’t fully address systemic inequities, as many families still struggle to afford or access reliable school transportation.
I grew up in a rural area. I had to cycle to high school every day for 5 years. Regardless of weather. 12 kilometers each way. Not just me, everyone in my school and pretty much every other school in the country. Plenty of kids who had to cycle much farther than me as well.
I just looked it up. It would have been a 10-mile (16 kilometer) ride for me, starting at 7 am each morning. I just checked the route in Google maps and there is still no shoulder, street lights, or sidewalk for any of it.
Mind, students weren’t allowed to have backpacks on account of school shooting fears. So, carrying supplies home would also have been an issue.
Edit: I checked the state highway records. Every single road I’d have to bike down has a 55mph speed limit.
Plenty of kids in my high school class who rode 18-20 kilometers each way. We may not have any mountains but we have shitloads of rain and wind (the downside of a flat country is the wind has free reign).
Like any Dutch mom would say: “you aren’t made of sugar” (sugar melts when it gets wet).
No backpacks allowed here either. Books were leased from the school and backpacks were considered to not protect the school’s property enough. You had to use one of these. Thick leather books bags, that weighed a ton empty. They were actually so heavy that it was causing health problems (back issues) and they had to introduce a rule that the bag cannot weigh more than 10% of a student’s body weight. You’d bring this to school every day on the cargo rack of your bike
No school shootings though, because we have proper gun regulation.
We also weren’t allowed bookbags, or anything big enough to hide a gun in.
And you don’t have to jab in the lack of proper gun regulation to someone that had a school shooting at their high school.
I can’t even imagine what it must be like to not be safe at school. The whole obsession Americans have with guns is completely alien to me. I don’t even understand why anyone would want to own a gun.
I understand rifles: shooting things is fun, deer are plentiful pests made of meat you can eat, and sometimes you need to git varmints out of your crops. I don’t own a gun, but I get why someone in the country might own a rifle. I’ve had enough hunter safety and basic rifle training in summer camp that they’re not foreign or scary.
Handguns make me nervous. They’re only meant to hurt people. I didn’t trust anyone with a handgun. The shooting at my high school (for clarity: after I graduated) took place with as handgun.
I’m glad I now live in a state with stricter gun laws.
And, TBF, we also had plenty of bomb threats phoned in from payphones, at least once a year in high school. It’s not always guns.
How many traffic light-free four-lane highways did you have to cross? More or less than zero? How often did cars zip by you in the darkness going 150% the speed limit?
Because you ignored those things that I brought up and talked about distance, which I didn’t mention.
First you’re talking about living in a rural area, then you’re talking about 4 lane highways. Which one is it?
Both? Because that’s how it works in America?
Are you really unaware that four-lane highways criss-cross their way through the American countryside?
Here’s the state of Indiana, where I live, and all of the major highways and interstates. Obviously a lot of tiny towns with population 50 are left off, but I think you can figure out that “both” is how things work here:
And if that doesn’t help you, this is Indiana compared to Ireland:
Indiana, incidentally, is nowhere near the largest U.S. state.
Perhaps you should know how things work in a country before you start coming up with what you think are obvious solutions.
Sure, we also have highways that cross the countryside as well as E-roads (european international roads, which would be comparable to interstates). Not sure why that would be dangerous though, highways don’t have level crossings, ever. Doesn’t really matter if you go by car or bike, a level crossing on a highway would be suicidal.
I don’t know what a “level crossing” is, but you still have not justified a school child crossing a four-lane highway with no traffic lights in the dark on foot or a bicycle every day to get to school. I’m just astounded that you can’t seem to understand that’s a way to get children killed.
A place where roads cross at the same level, so a normal intersection. As apposed to a non-level crossing like a tunnel or bridge, where roads cross at different levels. Traffic on highways moves too fast and is too dense for level crossings so crossing a highway is one of the safest crossings you can ever make because you never have to actually cross traffic.
Highways don’t have intersections, it’s one of the defining features of a highway.
Once again, maybe learn a little about the place where you’re talking about before you think there are “obvious” solutions. There’s literally an intersection with no traffic lights where the rural road crosses the highway.
This isn’t the intersection I am talking about, but it’s a typical one:
And no, one road is not going underneath the other there. It is what you call a level crossing. No lights, no sidewalks, no stop signs, no reason for the cars to ever slow down or stop.
And no street lights.
You keep avoiding the fact that this would easily get a child killed and I’m starting to think it’s because you just don’t care if a child is killed as long as they are walking or biking.
That’s not a highway as I understand the term. When I read ‘highway’ I expect something like this. By definition they are conflict-free (no crossings, traffic lights, access only through on/off ramps that allow you to match speed, etc.
Do you not have safety/design standards for roads where you are? Because that definitely looks like a road that would be required to have traffic lights. What is the max allowed speed on that road?
It looks like what would be a 80 or 100 km/h road here. 80 km/h roads are fine to cross safely if they are single-lane, dual-lane (2+2) or 100km/h roads always have traffic lights. Highways are 130km/h and never have intersections.
That’s just insane. A road like that would be required to have street lights here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a road that size without lights. The only roads without street lights here are narrow, low-speed rural roads (the kind where you have to slow down and drive partially on the shoulder when you meet an oncoming car) and they usually still have a light at intersections.