My title might not be completely fair. The Columbus Public School District, just like all the suburban districts, also has to deal with higher gas prices. But there’s no doubt that communities designed for walking and biking won’t be impacted as much by the problems outlined in this article:
Costly bus fuel forces schools to travel less
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 3:11 AM
By Nicquel Terry
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCHIncreased gas prices could mean fewer field trips and bus stops for students in local school districts this year.
District officials say they must be more efficient because fuel prices are taking a larger bite out of their budgets.
Columbus schools are projecting a 40 percent increase in fuel costs for the 2008-09 fiscal year, said Robyn Essman, the district’s budget director. They plan to spend $5.6 million on fuel this year.
To offset the rising price of gas, options include cutting expenses in transportation as well as spending less on tutoring sessions and textbooks.
“Every department takes a bit of a cut,” Essman said. “Just because the price increases doesn’t mean you get extra money.”
Dublin schools took about 3,000 trips for school activities and sporting events last school year, but they will take fewer trips in the coming year, said Treasurer Steve Osborne. District officials will encourage schools to consider field trips with the most educational value and athletic games closer to Dublin.
“We are looking at ways to be efficient,” Osborne said. “It’s costly to transport.”
So this is another pain at the pump story. The pain is for the schools, and by association the students, who don’t get to go on as many field trips. I would like to focus on solutions – walking and biking. The problem is it’s not always easy to switch transportation modes in a place that was only built for cars. Over the last 50 years, lower density development and larger schools instead of neighborhood schools have put fewer children within walking distance of schools. Look at this graph from a CDC study comparing data from the National Household Travel Surveys in 1969 and 2001:
Fig. 1. Active Transport to School Among Youth 5 to 18 Years of Age
A national movement called Safe Routes to Schools (SRTS) is trying to reverse this trend. The SRTS program is funded by the federal transportation bill (SAFETEA-LU), including over $20.5 Million over five years for Ohio. The goal is to encourage more kids to walk school and to build the infrastructure necessary to make walking safer. You can see from the graph that there is plenty of room for improvement. Some minor infrastructure improvements, like sidewalks and traffic signals, along with encouragement from parents and schools, could help some of the 82% of kids within two miles of school walk or bike. A good SRTS program usually requires a local champion like a parent or principal. They can apply for funding and lead efforts like walking school buses or other special events. You can contact ODOT here to learn more.
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As a side tangent, I liked Pickerington’s solution:
Pickerington students might have to walk a little farther to their stops because the district intends to reduce the number of bus stops. Fuel is burned every time buses accelerate, so fewer stops will save money, said Dave Decsman, the district’s transportation consultant.
I’ve been arguing for years that COTA should do this. Maybe transit agencies will follow the lead of schools and also cut some stops to save money. Yes, some of you would have to walk a little farther to the bus stops, but in-vehicle travel time would be shorter, COTA would save money on labor, and there would be less bus bunching.
You’re fighting an uphill battle. I tried to encourage some of my students to walk/bike to school. I was quickly “encouraged” to stop because parents felt I was trying to make their children participate in a dangerous activity.
The perception of many people is that walking and biking is not safe for children. The reality, sadly, is that they can be correct.
The antidote to this, however, must not be more internal-combustion-engine-based transportation ‘solutions’. These lead us directly into childhood obesity and many other bad things.
Instead, folks working on SRTS have embraced models like the Walking School Bus, which directly counters the parental concerns by getting parents involved in the process. There *is* safety in numbers, and as parents become comfortable with the process, and see how much better their kids do when they actually get some exercise (!) you really can change the world.
On a practical level, you need a local champion *with some authority*. PTA groups, or school administration, seem to be the right direction. A single individual is going to have a hard time creating enough critical mass and being able to answer the FUD.
School Children Thrown Under the (Private) Bus
CAF STAFFBy Isaiah J. Poole
July 18th, 2008 – 9:57am ET
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It seems that whenever that old cliche applies, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the Bush administration finds new ways to respond, “We’re breaking it. The fix is in.”
One of the things that the Bush administration is breaking now is public transportation for school children. Why? So that private businesses like the owner of Greyhound Bus Lines can open up new lines of business offering more expensive private bus service to school districts.
The Federal Transit Administration last month closed its comment period on a new regulation that will cut off federal funding for bus routes that it believes primarily exist to get children to and from school. Under the new rules, a school system could subsidize a child’s bus ride on public transit, but a public bus system could not significantly order its routes or schedules for the convenience of these children.
The regulations are a response to a federal court ruling in January that allowed the regional transportation authority in Rochester, N.Y., to do just that. The authority, at the urging of the school board, had created a network of new bus routes after the board changed the class times for its high schools and after the private bus service that the board had contracted with said it could not provide service during the new times. The FTA’s regional administrator, Brigid Hynes-Cherin, said the authority’s actions violated regulations governing federal mass transit funding because even though the routes could be used by general public, they weren’t primarily for the general public. Plus, she added—and here is where we get to the real nub of the issue—public bus systems can’t use federal money to provide services that compete with, or crowd out, private sector bus companies.
The court ruled, however, that Rochester was fully operating within the rules as they had been interpreted over the years by the FTA. Defeated in the courts, the FTA’s administrator, James S. Simpson, ordered the rules rewritten.
The rewrite, according to administrators of several large school districts and educational organizations, needlessly disrupts well-functioning and cost-efficient arrangements for getting students to and from school using existing public transportation systems. The Council of the Great City Schools, representing some of the nation’s largest urban school districts, said in comments to the FTA that the regulations “would prevent public transit systems from … adapting transportation routings and timetables to reflect the dynamic changes required to meet the needs of urban demographics, urban education reform, and federal education mandates.”
Other serious concerns have been voiced by groups such as Public Advocates, a California-based nonprofit legal organization that works on civil rights issues, which wrote in its comments that the regulations would “eliminate the only transportation option available” to low-income students in districts where “yellow bus service” would not be viable. The Maryland Transit Administration’s statement raised concerns about creating a two-tier system in the Baltimore school district, where some students get to ride in private school buses while others don’t.
Of course, there are cost concerns. The Washington Examiner reported June 27 that the District of Columbia public school system pays the regional Metro system $5 million a year to give its public school children subsidized rides. Neighboring Arlington County, Va., pays a private company $12 million to ferry a school population half the size of the District’s.
One of the chief beneficiaries of the FTA ruling when it goes into effect would be FirstGroup America Inc., the American subsidiary of a British company that bills itself as “the world’s leading transport company, with annualised revenues of over £5 billion ($9.8 billion) a year.” The company’s portfolio includes Greyhound Bus Lines, which it absorbed last year when it purchased Laidlaw International. And indeed, Mike Murray, the CEO and President of Operations for FirstGroup America, suggested in the company’s statement to the FTA that the proposed regulations don’t go far enough “to protect private school bus operators from federally subsidized public transit operators.”
The statement includes disingenuous claims about the cost benefits of using private bus service rather than public transportation, based largely on the significantly cheaper price of a yellow school bus (from $48,000 to $68,000) as compared to a typical public transit bus (starting at $300,000). It is, of course, unfair to compare a school bus to a municipal bus, which are constructed to different standards for different purposes. The more fair comparison would be to compare the cost of utilizing an existing public transportation network and contracting with a private operator to create a parallel school bus network, with its own personnel, equipment and administrative costs. Do this comparison in most urban school districts, as cash-strapped districts would be happy to do, and the private operator would usually lose.
But this is of no import to ideologues who believe in the god of privatization and in bending to the wishes of a private transportation behemoth. The Bush appointees at the Department of Transportation have been obsessed with privatization—from breaking up Amtrak and selling off the lucrative Northeast Corridor to the highest bidder (assuming that a private bidder would want it) to advocating privately-built toll roads as an alternative to a modest increase in the federal gasoline tax to increase funding for publicly maintained highways. (An increase of a nickel a gallon, according to the department’s own research, in 2002 would have been sufficient to meet the nation’s major road and transit system maintenance needs without resorting to tolls and privatization schemes.)
This skirmish over school bus transportation is just that, a skirmish, in the scheme of things, but it is just another sad case of corporate interest trumping public interest, with children as the potential victims.
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/school-children-thrown-under-private-bus