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 hope they don’t just use Uber or Lyft. Otherwise we might see a sudden explosion of new driver accounts who happen to be online at 7 a.m. on school days only.
Oh you bet this is what will happen. I’ve been seeing schools with a car drive line purposely built for people to snake their cars around before dropping off a kid. Massive amount of asphalt and suspension destroying speed tables/bumps and incredulously slow. So kids need to wake up much earlier to just even enter the school instead of the incredibly faster school bus. Why is this becoming more preferable? Well people are dumb and rather not buy fancier school buses that help the community and rather go into massive amounts of debt to not help “freeloaders” and feel not poor from the status symbol a car seemingly has for some good forsaken reason…
Now they are just going to get an Uber or Lyft ride to not deal with the unbearable time it takes to drop off a kid. Used to be only rich kids doing “skipping the bus” , now it’s everyone, and now no one is “rich” . Just like that meme from the Incredibles movie, where syndrome said a similar phrase.