Ride-sharing apps can replace the yellow school bus
Ismail Al-Amin was driving his daughter to school when a chance encounter gave him an idea for a new way of carpooling.
On the way through Chicago, Mr. Al-Amin’s daughter spotted a classmate riding with her father as they drove to their public school on the city’s north side. For 40 minutes, they rode on the same busy highway.
“They’re waving to each other in the back. I’m looking at the father. The father is looking at me. I believed that fathers could definitely be a resource for fathers,” said Mr. El-Amin, who founded the Piggyback Network, a service that fathers can use to book trips for their children.
Reliance on school buses has diminished for years as districts struggle to find drivers and more students attend schools outside their neighborhoods. As responsibility for transportation shifts to families, the question of how to replace the traditional yellow bus has become a pressing problem for some, and a spark for innovation.
State and local governments decide how widespread school bus service should be. Recently, more have been cut back. Only about 28% of American students ride a school bus, according to a survey conducted by the Federal Highway Administration early last year. This is down from about 36% in 2017.
Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s fourth-largest district, has significantly restricted bus service in recent years. It still offers rides for disabled and homeless students, in keeping with the federal mandate, but most families are self-reliant. Only 17,000 of the district’s 325,000 students are eligible to ride school buses.
Last week, the school system launched a pilot program that allows some students who attend out-of-neighborhood magnet schools or selective enrollment schools to catch the bus at a nearby school’s “home stop.” He aims to start horse riding for about 1,000 students by the end of the school year.
That’s not enough to make up for the lost service, said Erin Rose Schubert, a volunteer with the advocacy group Parents for Busing.
“People who had money and privilege were able to figure out other situations like rearranging their work schedules or public transportation,” she said. “People who didn’t do that, some had to pull their children out of school.”
On Piggyback Network, parents can book a trip for their student online with another parent traveling in the same direction. Trips cost about 80 cents per mile and drivers are compensated with credits to use on their children’s trips.
“It’s an opportunity for the kids not to be late for school,” said 15-year-old Takia Phillips during a recent PiggyBack ride with Mr. Al-Amin as the driver.
The company arranged a few hundred trips in its first year in Chicago, and Mr. El-Amin has been contacting drivers for possible expansion into Virginia, North Carolina and Texas. It’s one of many startups filling the void.
Unlike the Piggyback Network, which connects parents, HopSkipDrive contracts directly with school districts to help students who don’t have reliable transportation. The company launched a decade ago in Los Angeles with three moms trying to coordinate school carpools, and now supports about 600 school districts in 13 states.
Regulations prevent it from operating in some states, including Kentucky, where a group of Louisville students is lobbying on its behalf to change that.
After the district discontinued bus service to most traditional and charter schools, the student group known as The Real Young Prodigys wrote a hip-hop song called “Where My Bus At?” The song’s music video went viral on YouTube with lyrics like: “I’m a good kid. I stay in class too. Teachers want me to succeed, but I can’t go to school.”
“This bus driver shortage is never really going to go away,” said Joanna McFarland, CEO of HopSkipDrive. “This is a structural change in the industry that we need to take seriously.”
HopSkipDrive was a welcome option for Renea Gibson’s son, Jeren Samuel, who attends a small high school in Oakland, California. She said the school was interested in meeting his needs as an autistic student, but the district was lined up for transportation because there was no bus from their home in San Leandro.
“When I was growing up, people would talk about the kids on the short yellow buses. They were associated with a physical disability, and they would get teased or made fun of,” Ms Gibson said. “No one knows this is support for Gerin because he can’t use public transport.”
His mother’s encouragement helped Jerin overcome his fear of riding with a stranger to school.
“I felt real independent in that car,” he said.
Companies catering to children claim to screen drivers more extensively, checking their fingerprints and requiring them to have experience in childcare or parenting. Drivers and children are often given passwords that must match, and parents can track a child’s whereabouts in real time through apps.
Kango, a competitor to HopSkipDrive in California and Arizona, started as a free car-sharing app similar to the PiggyBack network and now contracts with school districts. Drivers typically get paid more than they would for Uber or Lyft, but there are often more requirements like driving some students with disabilities to school, said Kango CEO Sarah Shire.
“This is not just a three-minute curb-to-curb stop,” Ms. Shire said. “You are responsible for getting that child to and from school. This is not like transporting an adult or transporting someone’s lunch or dinner at DoorDashing.
In Chicago, some families who used Piggyback said they saw few alternatives.
Concerned by the city’s high crime rate, retired police officer Sabrina Beck never considered letting her son ride the subway to Whitney Young High School. Since she was leading him anyway, through PiggyBack she also volunteered to lead a new student who qualified for the selective magnet school but had no way to get there.
“Having the opportunity to go and then missing it due to lack of transportation is very detrimental,” Ms. Beck said. “Choices like this are very important.”
After the bus route that took her two children to elementary school was cancelled, Jazmine Dillard and other parents in Chicago thought they had convinced the school to move the opening bell from 8:45 a.m. to 8:15 a.m., a time more convenient for her. table. After that plan was scrapped due to the need for buses elsewhere at the time, Ms. Dillard turned to the PiggyBack Network.
“We had to kind of focus and find a way to get them to work on time and also get them to school on time,” she said.
This story was reported by the Associated Press.