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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

Most US cities and towns have minimal public transit that wouldn't be anywhere near sufficient for getting kids to and from school, so they run school buses instead. In some places with good public transit, like Somerville MA where I live, the city doesn't run school buses and people walk or take general purpose public transit, but that's very unusual here.

It's the same deal as the tech shuttles: in places where public transit is good (NYC, Chicago, Boston) the tech companies don't run shuttles because there's no need.

> What do the US school buses and their drivers do for the rest of the day and on weekends? Just sit idle?

Yes. The drivers typically work a "split shift" with time off in the middle of the day, and the buses sit empty both then and on weekends.

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My father was a school bus driver. The pickup and drop off routes were often 3 hours each, as they were mandated by local law to provide service to the whole country.

Kindergarten is just half a day in many places, so the middle of the day would be another 3 hours to shift those around.

There were also many field trips, sporting events, and other miscellaneous calls for transport throughout the day and into the evenings, as well as some weekends.

Much of all of this would vary quite a bit depending on a particular town’s location, population needs, layout, etc. but I just wanted to say that although it’s a relatively chill job and there is indeed often a lot of downtime, it’s not like bus drivers universally work 1 hr in the morning, 1 hr in the afternoon, and then just bum around all day.

All the districts in my area are begging for school bus drivers. The pay is going up and some are offering full time benefits for driving part time. I've also seen them offering to split the morning / afternoon shift and paying teachers extra to drive buses instead of coach after school sports.

Another model is combination bus driver / school custodian jobs.

Good article on long school bus rides: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2010/10/04/long-bus-ride-cook-...

In Somerville, it's hard to be more than a mile from the school. Cambridge, on the other hand, does run busses. It is true that the tech companies for the most part don't run private shuttles, MIT and Harvard do, though less for commuting than just connecting separated parts of their campuses.

> in places where public transit is good (NYC, Chicago, Boston)

The Boston one is a real giggle. At best, public transit in Boston is no better than the Bay Area, and on average is much worse.

The real reason for not running shuttles in these locations is office size. The Bay Area offices where shuttles are run have 10-100x the employees these other locations have.

I work at Google in Cambridge, in Kendall sq. Most of my coworkers take public transit, most commonly the Red Line. If you look at https://www.mapnificent.net/boston/#11/42.3729/-71.0760/2700... you can see there's a large area within reasonable public transit commuting distance.

The tech company shuttles in the Bay Area mostly run to the South Bay, where Google etc are, and the public transit options there are minimal.

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