It would dramatically raise the cost of school buses. School buses, as they are, are not acceptably accessible for the general public. They have only 1 door on the side and the passenger seating requiring climbing a couple of steep steps. They also don't have a bike rack on the front, and they usually don't have route displays on the front/side, either.

Also, school buses within a district are shared between elementary, middle and high schools, which is the reasons these schools have staggered starts. When California passed a law a couple of years ago that required high schools to start no earlier than 8:30am, that in turn forced elementary and many middle schools to start earlier.

Buses are used for field trips, for athletic teams (and any other school group needing to travel for an event/competition in normal cases. Some schools get charters if distance >x, but most public schools don't.), and more. There's not really a huge amount of downtime for a lot of the fleet, except in the evenings.

Finally, the reliance on bussing has been decreasing in many parts of the country over the past couple of decades. When I grew up (elementary & middle school in the 80s), everyone rode the bus unless they were close enough to walk or bike. Now, in many communities, the default is a parent/friend carpool. In denser cities, buses are barely required. The neighborhood elementary where my youngest attends in San Jose only has 2 short buses serving a school of >500 pupils because almost everyone lives within about a 1.5mi radius.

In my school district, and I suspect many across the country, the same school buses are used for high school (pick up around 7am), middle school (7:45) and elementary (8:30). The drop off times are similarly staggered. Many buses also do two runs for a single school for dense communities, or do “late bus” runs for dropping off kids after sports or clubs. Point being, the buses get plenty of use even with 3-4 hours of downtime in the middle of the day.

This is probably non-obvious if you've never interacted with the system, but school buses are not public transit buses and would be ill-suited

- They're much less accessible, as typically there's a separate route with a specifically accessible bus.

- they need to be immediately available and in the right spot the instant school lets out, which means the downtime is typically a little bit shorter than you would even expect so they can all be in place.

- they likely have MUCH lower milage-per-day specs, including things like general wear and tear and number of hours of continuous use.

In reality, You would likely have to rebuild from the ground up and go the other way around, starting with a mass transit system and then dedicating certain buses and routes to pick up and drop off

It's at least less wear on the buses. The school buses seems to be one of the last things mostly working in America. (Don't tell doge and rfk.)

Because people wouldn't dare let their kids go on public transport.

School buses are operated by schools solely for students. There is no requirement nor motivation to allow anyone else to ride. Doing so would mean making students would wait longer as resources are deployed to the wider public. Or at the same service level another part of their budget would have to be cut to fund busing for the general public. There's already a shortage of bus drivers caused by school districts offering notoriously low pay, split shifts, and no benefits.

City public transportation is operated by transit agencies who conversely do not have a mandate nor motivation to handle the morning rush to schools or the afternoon demand spike of schools letting out. US transit agencies have even tighter budgets compared with schools. Hence why riding a city bus could take you an hour to make a trip that takes 15 min by private car. That awful service level would never be accepted for student transportation.

> isn’t used for anything else during the day.

That is not true at all. Most school bus companies also provide charter services allowing anyone to book a bus for transportation, e.g. https://www.loganbus.com/book-a-bus

Feels like it would be a hard optimization problem. Not sure what else they would be doing either?

My dad used to be a school bus driver (among many other things, typical immigrant story).

One of the benefits of the down time is that since the hours are weird (2-3 hours in the morning, and then 2-3 hours again, 7-8 hours later in the day), means that if you didn't have downtime, you'd have to have two shifts of drivers, further increasing costs.

Having this downtime also allows for the drivers to get breaks (my dad would just come home and nap since otherwise he'd be up at 5:30am to get ready for the high schools) and return, and do a full day in one shift.

Just food for thought since this angle wasn't mentioned.

But I absolutely LOVE the idea of buying electric buses and using them as battery storage.

Is there anything else busses can be used for during the day, which is off-peak?

I'm amused that all of the responses focus on the differences; but none seem to cover why they have to be that way.

In general, I don't think there is a hard reason for it? My argument would include many of the cities that have public transit will happily utilize the transit busses and trains for some of the same reasons.

I think some of the more rural routes for schools will be a bit more than some transit authorities would want to cover? Though, that is probably a bit self fulfilling?

Where I am in Canada, school buses are driven by people in the community. During the day, buses stay with them and are on standby in case there is a need for an evacuation.

School buses are used in areas with no good public transit options (most of suburban and rural US). In cities with transit, kids take buses and trains to school.

Because many adults are terrified enough of the poors/minorities that they won't ride a convenient bus themselves. They are not (generally) going to put their children into an unsupervised mass transit system.

Until the 80's it was common to see young children in public in rural, suburban, and urban environments (in three quite distinct modalities), but a cultural shift precipitated by our media environment has made even the "safe" suburban exploration into a rarity. Occasionally, even parents of 10-year-olds are literally being arrested for leaving them at home unattended, much less riding their bike around the neighborhood (as was common in the 90's suburbs).

Even running normal mass transit systems in "Children/chaperone only mode" would be a litigation risk because of the seating format.