School buses are critical, though underappreciated, components of our school infrastructure. Nationally, over half of the nation’s 49.5 million K-12 students use the school bus to get to school each day, at an average cost of about $1,000 per pupil. While people may think of school buses simply as a way to transport students to and from school, this understates their role in U.S. schools and society. School buses facilitate reforms, such as desegregation and district consolidation, and enable students to access better-matched schools than their neighborhood zoned school.

Yet there are also a broad range of concerns about school buses, including reliability, timing, and safety (i.e., no seat belts). One of the most common complaints is that bus rides are too long, with some news stories citing cases where students are on the bus for 4-5 hours each day. These long bus rides could equate to early morning pick-up times and less sleep, late afternoon drop-off times with less time for homework and other activities, or high absenteeism if students find long rides to be unpleasant. In other words, school buses do more than just help students get to school. They could affect academic outcomes like test scores and attendance, too.

Despite the ubiquity of the school bus, we know very little about the commutes of bus riders, the characteristics of students with long bus rides, or whether long bus rides are, in fact, harmful to student outcomes. In a recent study, we address these questions using data from New York City (NYC) to explore the morning commutes of over 120,000 bus riders in grades 3-6 over the period from 2011-2017. We use detailed data on pupil transportation including information on student school bus assignment and morning bus pick-up time.

Read the full article about school bus infrastructure by Sarah A. Cordes, Christopher Rick, and Amy Ellen Schwartz at Brookings.