To think maybe an American style school bus could be best solution?

[whensitmyturn]

Just the every day drop off for primary schools seems to be getting worse, as intakes are increasing and barely any schools with parking available. Drop offs and pick ups just feel like they are getting more and more dangerous.
Just on an average day I see so many near misses with children and between cars.

Yes in a perfect world everyone would walk but so many drop and go straight to jobs etc

I just think it would be so much better if a school bus picked the children up from their roads, the actual catchment areas for primary schools aren't generally very big so there aren't that many roads to travel down, surely it would take so much traffic off the road?
Do Americans pay extra for this? I would absolutely pay for this but no idea how much it would cost or if even feasible?
Aibu to think it would solve so many safety/ traffic issues in the morning especially?

Parents driving to and from school gives me the rage when they live really close by. At dds old school the catchment was tiny. Most parents that worked used the breakfast club. Yet it was still like chaos before and after school every day.

The worst culprits were usually the mothers (and it was usually mothers) who lived a 5 minute walk away but used to get there early every day to get the best parking spots.

And at another primary just up the road, again with a tiny catchment the rod is regularly snarled up to the point of complete standstill with cars double parked. It's on a bus route too so quite often the bus gets stuck. My nephew went there and apparently everyone needed to use the cars to get there as it was at the top of a steep hill and it was too steep for the poor, precious little dcs to possibly walk up.

More like the parents couldn't be arsed to walk up.

We live about 1.5 miles from the school ds will hopefully go to. We will be walking unless it's pissing it down.

We have school buses here (rural area of continental europe) which most students take if they are not within walking distance of school. We pay €70 a year for DD's bus pass. DS doesn't have one, but he attends our catchment middle school which is less than 2 mins walk from our house.

Some parents do still drive their kids to school but it's a minority based on the amount of traffic.

As someone said above, in systems where buses are the norm, it is usual for most kids to attend their catchment schools, which can be large. In DD's senior high school there were 19 classes just for the Y11s last year!

There are way too many roads around here where it wouldn't work and would cause traffic congestion. However our school bus is pretty good and does stop every few streets or so, so there is only a short walk back. We live in a small village and there are four stops in this village alone (the school is in a nearby city).

It does mean that the school bus gets the children back much later than the journey should actually take. If I picked them up and brought them home we would be back for about 4.35. The bus gets to the village at 5pm.

I don't know that it would work in urban areas. The US tends to have fewer larger schools and larger catchment areas. Most single form entry urban primaries would have very few children living outside the catchment area in the UK.

Even if you could make it financially viable you'd still end up with people close to the school driving. With the added complication of buses trying to drop off too.

The difference between one coach (though it wouldn't just be one per school, of course) versus cars is scale. You have massive coaches attempting to turn in narrow residential streets packed with parked cars, massive diesel coaches sitting with their engines running to keep the heat/air con going - yes, that's a big problem, bigger than cars would cause.

I agree that the school run packed with, in many cases, unnecessary vehicles, is a problem. But our streets and our schools are not like in America, built and designed around vehicles. Therefore it doesn't seem very sensible to import such an idea from a country with a very different infrastructure. There will be instances, as this thread shows, were school buses will and do work (rural areas in particular). But it would be a total mess in many suburban areas, for example.

Investing in public transport (and penalising those who have no need to drive, if it was up to me) would make more sense.

My high school had less than 400 students I think, and it was 7-12 grades.

Where I lived the temperature was below zero for months at a time so walking was not an option if you weren't very close. But otherwise lots of people do walk in the smaller towns. I was ten miles out so rode the bus. We live in a small town in the same state now and DS walks, as do a lot of kids. Older kids seems to ride bikes most of the time.

And yes we do buy our school supplies but not uniform so I suppose it evens out that way :)

A few notebooks and pens and pencils don't break the budget, but now from about fourth grade on, they all need tablets and/or laptops, but luckily schools in my district provide them for children who can't afford them.

Oh really? Yeah that would get expensive! Our school doesn't do that yet, just the regular pencils etc.

We are asked to provide pencils for the classroom and some individual stationery - all cheap enough at Staples, but there are funds to support students who would struggle to provide everything. IPads are a requirement for high school, but again there are funds to provide where necessary. I guess over time it will be a requirement for kindergarten onwards...

Cheerful I live in a county with a lot of very expensive waterfront real estate so we all get the benefit of a rich tax base for schools.

Maybe instead of there being buses that go to one school there should be buses that pick up in a certain area then drop at a number of schools? And small or minibus sized rather than huge coaches.

The buses here are used by students at several secondary schools. DD shares the school bus with students who attend a vocational training centre and an agricultural college. There is one service in the morning and two in the evening, due to extended opening hours at some of the schools.

There are two drop off points, which are a short walk from the schools concerned, and a connecting shuttle bus (mini bus) service for the agricultural college students who are further out of town.

It's a mediaeval town with narrow streets and a lot of students, but the system works because it keeps a lot of cars out of the town centre. The buses drop off and pick up on the edge of the old town centre rather than right outside DD's school.

Yes but American schools don't buy uniform for their pupils! But the cost of uniform is a whole other thread, I suppose

"I live in a county with a lot of very expensive waterfront real estate so we all get the benefit of a rich tax base for schools."
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I used to live in a very poor area where the assumption seemed to be that some students wouldn't have anything the school didn't provide - they got some sort of outside help, either state or federal (I'm guessing state) and some private - Microsoft donated all the computer equipment, for example - and everything was paid for, from pencils to tablets to 2 free meals a day, regardless of ability to pay.
It took me a while to get used to.

For all the people saying they live in the US and the bus is free. No, it's not! It's paid with property taxes. If you only rented, you may not be aware of that, but you're still paying for it. If there was no bus, your rent would be lower.

Make - I think most of us said "free at the point of use"

sassh - absolutely! Yellow school buses here aren't that big (bigger than a mini bus, but certainly smaller than a coach), and there are various other vehicles (people carriers, regular cars) that act as school buses with the same lights and legal protections re stopping distances / not passing as yellow buses, where there are a small number of children from a particular location (we have children with SEN and G&T bussed in from neighbouring towns, for example)