Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

I would bet the government did not want to pay for enough bus drivers and the outside firm gave them plausible deniability for reducing quantity of buses/increasing length of bus routes.

There are probably fewer and fewer kids per any given distance, so transportation cost per student keep going up, but for a number of reasons, the funding is not maintained (unless a sufficiently big disaster like this occurs).

Funding for schools is also based on number of students, so funding is being reduced at the same time that transportation cost per student is increasing.

View on HN

>I would bet the government did not want to pay for enough bus drivers and the outside firm

There's a nationwide shortage of bus drivers. Many retired during covid for good. It is shitty pay and often part-time hours. It really isn't attractive for many people these days, even for retirees.

> ...nationwide shortage...isn't attractive...

All too true. OTOH, "we are X drivers short of the number that our new schedule says we gotta have!" would have been known well in advance. And, post-COVID, any competent engineering firm would have determined various driver staffing level cut-offs, below which the school district would have to operate on a reduced basis. (Closing all the elementary schools, or all schools in the east half of the district, or whatever.)

This experience is at this point decades out of date, but when I was attending middle & high school in a moderately rural area, a fair amount of our bus drivers were teachers & janitorial staff.

(The former came in very handy when doing extra-curriculars - our debate coach could drive us to meets without incurring the cost of an extra adult to drive the bus. Of course, given that debate meets start early and finish late, and we still had to do the drive, in practice it meant that a very sleep-deprived and stressed out person driving somewhat erratically.)

Increase their pay until there is no longer a "shortage" of drivers.

Why in the world was this downvoted?

Fucking America: The only country in the world that can't afford public transportation because "It's too spread out" while they supposedly CAN afford to send out school buses in every direction every day on property taxes alone, even in the most rural of areas.

> buses in every direction every day on property taxes alone

i.e., public transportation.

Living in a bit of America with a mostly-decent public bus system - no reasonable adult would consider "the bus stops here twice a day, and only on school days" to constitute a viable level of service. Even 10X that number of stops, averaged over a year, would be really marginal.

Yeah...though my bet would not be on "plausible deniability", but on "government was a bunch of suckers for the fancy language and dog/pony/smoke/mirrors shows which the engineering firm used to land the deal".

Why that, and not good ole fashioned nepotism and corruption?

Least Hypothesis.

(And, if you are actually interacting with government officials or workers in the wake of a screw-up like this, and favor a more-positive outcome...then you'll get a lot further with "looks like you were suckered by smooth-talking outsiders" than with "looks like you are a bunch of crooks". Best that the latter hypothesis be very quietly investigated until and unless serious evidence is found.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com