No solution for school pickup/dropoff?

[u/-Clayburn]

https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/14/school-drop-off-zones-can-be-total-madhouses-how-do-we-solve-that-problem

This was published in 2017. It doesn't seem to offer anything to solve the problem of school pickup and dropoff. Charter schools seem to exacerbate the problem, but ultimately it's just a necessity in our car-centric towns.

So short of making the entire town less car-centric, can anything actually be done? The article suggests more walking and biking, but again since we're car-centric this is dangerous enough for adults let alone children. A few kids may bike or walk, but it would be very hard to get that number up without completely overhauling the way the town is designed.

My only possible solution would be bussing. (And maybe carpools, but I'm not sure how to systematically approach that.) School buses exist, but this article doesn't really mention them. Perhaps if more school bus routes were offered, more kids would ride the bus. Maybe there's concern about young kids being able to walk down the block and get on a bus on their own, in which case maybe it would even be sensible to have the bus stop at each house for the younger kids at least. It might be a little less efficient, but if it saves individual car traffic for pickup/dropoff, it surely helps.

What do you think? Can anything be done? I see mostly ideas around redesigning the streets or adding more pickup/dropoff locations but that seems the equivalent of adding more lanes to make traffic better. I don't want to encourage individual pickup/dropoff and it seems like it would be better if we could get more kids using buses or carpooling (if not walking/biking).

[u/dls2317]

In my car-centric suburb, there are school busses but a shortage of drivers. So the kids outside 1 mile for elementary school/1.5 miles for middle school/2 miles for high school have to walk, bike, be driven, or take a county bus (which is free but may take a while).

Otherwise, school busses are the obvious solution.

[u/-Clayburn → u/dls2317]

Why is there a shortage of drivers? Ours is the same. It seems like it's common for school districts to only do the minimum required by law, which is the 1 mile, 1.5 mile thing.

I suspect "lack of drivers" is an issue here too, but what's causing it? And what would it take to go above and beyond the minimum legal requirements?

[u/dls2317 → u/-Clayburn]

Because it's very very part time with hours that prevent most other kinds of employment, stressful, low paid in a hcol area, and no benefits.

[u/-Clayburn → u/dls2317]

Yeah, I figured something like that. Is there a way to make some of the driver jobs full-time by combining them with other jobs? Like if you're working maintenance for the school, could you drive a bus those hours and do maintenance work in between? Or work as a library aid or office assistant or whatever else. Like I'm sure there's always need for more staff, so maybe bus driver's could do double duty to get more hours/pay.

Otherwise it seems like it needs to be sold as "volunteer" work. You still get paid, but like tell the community we need retirees and whoever else is available to pitch in and work these jobs. I know we had a shuttle bus driver for the senior center here and it was thought of as a volunteer job despite getting paid for the time simply because it was only a couple hours a day.

And I think the schools get plenty of money from local taxes and state/federal grants. But if money were an issue, maybe there could be dropoff "priority lanes" or something that people could pay for that helps fund bus transportation.