Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata to present plan to "transform" school transportation

LOL So you blast me and Jeffrey for not reading something you read once but now you can't find it. Nice.

So Charlotte, after its conversion to choice with everyone having a base to fall back on (so basically neighborhood schools) buses 43 thousand more students than Wake!  And its county size is 1/3 smaller!  How come so many get to go to school so close to home, and still need a bus?

A little common sense goes a long way in answering the question. What you should be asking is "Why do only half of all students in Wake take a bus to school?" It's because 1) bus stops are too early in the morning, 2) and bus routes are too long, and 3) demographics -- middle class parents, especially stay at home moms, prefer carpools (although there seems to e very little "pooling" going on).

We drove my daughter to a nearby school because she could get an extra hour of sleep in the morning by doing so. So many kids carpool that many schools need traffic cops during arrival and dismissal. Charlotte, though, has an F&R rate above 50%, and those kids generally ride a bus. Also, with the optimized bus routes, and shorter ride times, parents that might normally carpool to save time are instead putting their kids on the bus.

Could it be that Charlotte has fewer buses because bus routes are shorter, therefore one bus can do more than three routes in a day, as the Wake buses do? 

No. Read the CMS transportation documents. They do not run more than three routes a day. Hell, there's a lot of buses in Wake that don't do three routes a day, because of the length of some routes.

Wake has 300 more square miles to cover (somebody fact check me there, I'm going by memory).   You can't say Charlotte spends X to move X and Wake spends X to move X.  It would work only if Charlotte and Wake had the same square miles, for starters.

No. That would only make sense if both Charlotte and Wake had similar, uniform densities, which they do not.  The NW, SW, and SE corners of Wake County are very low density areas that can be easily served by a handful of buses. And the NE corner (Wendell, Zebulong) only has a handful of schools. Those 4 corners of Wake County probably make up about 300 square miles (the difference between Wake and Charlotte), and the relatively small number of bus routes that serve that area are not significant enough to be responsible for Wake's inefficiencies.

Look, a few years ago Charlotte used to spend approximately $100 more per student for transportation than Wake. They underwent a huge initiative (on the same order of scale as changing the assignment system in Wake). It was a year long effort. They installed GPS devices on every bus, and measured bus routes down to the second. They looked at things like the average length of time spent at a stop light. In the end, they completely redesigned their transportation system. They saved $6 million the first year, despite increased ridership, and increased fuel costs. Why is it so hard for you to believe such a big effort resulted in a system that is more efficient than the one we have in Wake?

And yes, parents WILL scream about a 20 minute difference in bell schedules. That should have been up front info for parents before making a choice.

I respectfully disagree. Start and end times change drastically from ES to HS, and parents have to adapt along the way. I've never heard a parent complain of a start time that is more than one hour earlier when their child moves from ES to MS.