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 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.