In 2022, 53% of students were driven or drove to school themselves, according to a survey conducted by the Federal Highway Administration.

COVID-19 accelerated the shift to pickup lines, which already started when schools stopped being built in urban parts and became more suburban and rural.

Some school bus drivers found work somewhere, as COVID-19 accelerated the boom of transportation of online delivery services.

Schools across the US cut bus service due to lack of drivers, even paying parents to drive their kids to school, such as in Philadelphia.

Driving to school has become a necessity for many parents.

The idling of cars around schools pollute many schools. One study by Mendoza found that air pollution was found in classrooms within 35 - 73 minutes.

Pollution lowers the English and Math performance of students, as well as significantly contributing to "childhood obesity, asthma, depression and anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and myriad other conditions"

Many people are moving to states with poor bus coverage, as demonstrated by a statistic conducted by School Bus Fleet.

As more bus service was cut, much more students missed school and fail on their courses, tests, and their grades.

75% of parents driving their children less than 2 miles to school said they did this for convenience and to save time.

For example, some parents reported "we save 5-10 minutes driving" and "parents running late."

Others said the school was too far away, another way of indicating that the time costs of walking outweighed the costs of driving, and that walking was not in their choice set.

Many parents dropped off their children on their way to work, presumably saving time over walking their child to school, walking home, and then driving to work.

Of the group driving for convenience reasons, 46% did not allow their children to walk without adult supervision.

Just over 30% of parents living within 2 miles of school reported safety as a reason they drove their child to school.

These parents reported much greater concern about danger to their children from strangers than they did about traffic concerns, and 75% did not allow their children to walk to school without adult supervision.

In fact, many of these 10 to 14 year olds were not allowed to leave their homes without adult supervision.

Few Safe Routes to School programs effectively address issues of parental convenience and time constraints.

Safe Routes to School programs should take parental convenience and time constraints into account by providing ways children can walk to school supervised by someone other than the parent, such as by using walking school buses.

In 1969, 41% of all trips to school1 in the United States were made by walking or biking. By 2001, this had declined to 13%.

Over the same time period, the proportion of children being driven or driving themselves to school rose from less than 20% to 55% (Ham, Martin, & Kohl, 2008; McDonald, 2007).

The current reliance on motorized modes has raised concerns about air quality (Koushki, Al-Fadhala, Al-Saleh, & Aljassar, 2002; Wilson, Wilson, & Krizek, 2007), declining physical activity and rising obesity (Cooper, Page, Foster, & Qahwaji, 2003; Tudor-Locke, Ainsworth, & Popkin, 2001), congestion around schools (Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, 2008), and the developmental impacts of chauffeuring children (Davis & Jones, 1996; Mackett, Brown, Gong, Kitazawa, & Paskins, 2007; Rissotto & Tonucci, 2002).

Currently, pupil transportation departments provide state-mandated yellow school bus service, but are not involved with other modes of school access.

A walking school bus (WSB) is a group of children led to school by an adult. WSBs range from informal agreements among neighbors to formal programs sponsored by the school or local community groups in which trained adults called drivers follow an assigned route and make stops at specified times. The WSB assures parents that their children will arrive at school on time and be supervised by an adult for the entire trip. It is also convenient, since the parent need not escort the child.

This is a "bike bus": a convoy of parents and children who ride to school, picking up kids along the way.

While the concept has existed for years, a "bicibus" in Barcelona popularized the idea where it spread like wildfire through videos on social media in 2021.

During the 1960s, 42 percent of schoolchildren walked or biked to class. Today, the share has fallen to roughly 11 percent, only 1 percent of whom bike, according to Federal Highway Administration data.

More than half of kids now get to school by car, up from 16 percent in 1969.

Transportation researchers estimate more than 470 bike buses are active around the world along routes anywhere from three blocks to three miles, including several in San Francisco.

School districts, rather than renovate urban buildings or build close to students, relocated their schools to cheap land on the edges of communities, while cutting back on bus service.

At the same time, the United States doubled down on infrastructure for cars. Between 1970 and 1990, the federal government devoted roughly $20 billion per year for roads and highways in inflation-adjusted dollars while allocating just about $3 million annually to bicycle and pedestrian projects, roughly 10,000 times less.

Ten to 14 percent of all private vehicles during morning peak traffic are school trips, estimated the Department of Transportation in 2009, a figure that's only gotten worse as biking and walking have declined.

Vehicle pollution not only contributes to a hotter planet, it's damaging children's bodies: Studies show particulates from car exhaust seep into classrooms, lowering student math and English performance, and, over the long term, fuel childhood obesity, asthma, depression and anxiety, among other conditions.

Today, Montclair Bike Bus ranks among America's biggest bike bus communities, offering eight routes that ferry hundreds of kids to school.

A few parents can lay out a route with a mapping tool, like Felt or Google My Maps, and then recruit a few families to join. The time commitment can be as little as a few hours per week, time otherwise spent in a car.

Parents rightly worry if a bike bus, or any biking, is safe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 81 bike-related deaths, and many nonlethal injuries, among children aged 1 to 17 in the United States in 2021.

"Parents' concerns about safety are valid," she says. "However, a lot of that can be mitigated by choosing good routes, lower traffic roads and using bike lanes and trails when available."

Given that roughly twenty times more children are killed annually as passengers in cars than in bike crashes, according to CDC data, "in general, the benefit of cycling outweighs the risks," adds Hamann.

In spring 2009, when the weather was nice, Anderson conducted his first "Bike Train," a bike-to-school program for Wolftrap students in Vienna, VA.

"Those students who bike to school arrive energized and ready to start their school day. His program also decreases the amount of cars in our kiss-and-ride, and I often hear him congratulating the students who bike for helping the environment by lessening carbon emissions in Vienna."

As a spinoff to the Bike Train program, Vienna elementary schools have begun competing against one another in participation contests such as this year's fifth annual Bike/Walk Challenge from May 6 to 10.

All seven Vienna elementary schools will participate this year, for the first time: Wolftrap, Westbriar, Cunningham Park, Flint Hill, Louise Archer, Marshall Road and Vienna.

Vienna Elementary has a Walking Wednesdays program. About a third of the students walk or bike to school every Wednesday, often joined by parents, McCall said.

Children in Howard County waited for buses that sometimes arrived an hour late, or did not show up at all.

Chicago's public school system, with about half of the drivers it needed, said in July that it would have to limit its service to specific categories of children, including those with disabilities. For some others, it offered fare cards to use public transportation.

Louisville school officials said this week that they hired a company to redesign bus routes with fewer drivers, more bus runs and a greater spread of start and dismissal times. But that meant longer and less-familiar routes for drivers, and the school district did not build in time for extra stops.

Still, Hebert said the system's biggest issue is lack of bus drivers. It needs at least 100 more, he said. Some students are getting home as late as 6:30 or 7 p.m., when the last dismissal is at 4:20 p.m. The superintendent has said it will take major changes to get the system functioning well. One option on the table: cutting back on the number of students eligible for bus transportation.

"I suspect maybe school systems have been underpaying drivers for a very long time and maybe they need to look at that," she said. Perhaps, she added, "the chickens have come home to roost."

Schools in Charlottesville are steadily pulling students off wait lists for bus transportation, and they recently raised bus driver pay to about $21.50 an hour, the highest in the area, said Phil Giaramita, spokesman for Albemarle County Public Schools.

Other creative solutions are out there too, she said: searching for applicants in different populations, improving working conditions and benefits, finding other ways to distribute the work among employees.

In the United States, the percentage of students (5- to 18-year-olds) walking or biking to school declined dramatically, from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001, and this decline was greatest among minority and elementary school children (1).

The prevalence of overweight among 6- to 11-year-olds increased from 4.2% in 1963-1965 to 18.8% in 2003-2004, with even higher rates among minority children (2,3).

Walking to and from school can increase physical activity, and may help combat childhood obesity (4-6).

Walking is also an affordable and sustainable transportation mode that can improve environmental quality by reducing automobile traffic, fuel consumption, and air pollution (7).

Further, it is possible that children's mental and social health would be enhanced through exposure to nature and social interactions while walking (8).

Trends of school development show increases in building larger schools in remote areas near high-capacity roads; these roads facilitate automobile access at the expense of walking or biking (7). This trend is supported by public policies that encourage school consolidation to increase economic efficiency (25,26).

Previous efforts in New Zealand have shown that areas with higher rates of child pedestrian injury and lower SES were underrepresented in the "Walking School Bus" programs (36).

The total percentages of walking (alone, with friends, and with a parent or other adult) ranged from 8.7% to 46.8% for the morning trips and from 6.3% to 56.3% for the afternoon trips. The afternoon trips had a slightly higher rate of walking than the morning trips in both the pooled sample and the sub-samples of 15 individual schools. Biking and public transit were rarely used (mean <2.i%). School bus usage is largely determined by service availability and accounted for 0% to 44.2% (mean =15.7%) of the morning trips and 0% to 49.6% (mean = 18.0%) of the afternoon trips. The school district provides bus service for students who live more than two miles from school or who have to face hazardous conditions, such as crossing highways, to get to school. Private vehicles accounted for the largest mode share, with morning and afternoon mean values of 53.4% and 47.1%, respectively.

In 1968, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court order in Virginia that "required busing several thousand students to achieve "racial balance" in Charlotte, North Carolina

But the public reaction to busing quickly turned from denunciations in Congress to dynamiting school buses in Pontiac, Michigan.

The Court's rejection of this "inter-district" remedy in the Milliken case, by a five-to-four vote, turned big-city suburbs into safe havens from busing and increased the "white flight" that had already created black majorities in many urban school districts.