Zerin Dube was on his way home from work the other day when he saw something so ridiculous he had to pull out his phone and start recording.

The line of cars to pick up kids from the local middle school, in Cypress, Texas, northwest of Houston, was more than a mile long. “It has never been that bad in all the years living by that school,” Dube told me.”Not even remotely close.”

There’s a reason he hasn’t seen this before. This past June, in an attempt to respond to a massive budget gap, the Cypress-Fairbanks school district voted to tighten its rules on which of its more than 115,000 students are eligible for the school bus. They cut 79 bus routes, saved $4 million, and created a traffic nightmare every single day at pickup and drop-off.

Dread of the school drop-off line has been percolating for years. “For parents across America,” writer and pickup line abstainer Angie Schmitt wrote last year, “the school car line is a daily punishment.” “My deeply personal hell,” is how parent and picker-upper Misty Heggeness put it in 2022. It’s the fruit of a long-term shift away from walking and biking to school, which about half of U.S. kids did in 1969, but fewer than 1 in 10 do today. The lines add hundreds of trips to the roads each year for every student and waste parents’ time—especially moms’. They leave a wreath of pollution around school sites.

Now, the collapse of the school bus is exacerbating the problem, and not just in Texas. School bus systems nationwide are suffering from funding cuts and driver shortages. It’s gotten so bad that public schools in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia are paying parents to drive their kids to school, with families in Philly eligible to net $300 a month. Declining bus ridership led to a milestone in 2022: For the first time ever, the majority of U.S. kids got to school in a private vehicle.

“School bus drivers have not been at the top of the payscale, and the work has traditionally attracted a lot of older folks,” said Ryan Gray, the chief content officer at School Transportation News, an industry publication. Those features set the industry up for trouble during the pandemic, when the extended schooling pause drove older drivers from the workforce and pushed the younger ones with commercial drivers licenses toward better opportunities, such as driving a truck.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of U.S. school bus drivers fell by 15 percent. Those who remain still don’t make much money: an average of $20 an hour, with just 32 hours of work a week, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

In many cities, the school bus network constitutes the largest mass transit system by far, and it is experiencing some similar problems. Like many transit agencies, the yellow bus serves suburban sprawl where school sites have been selected for cheap land, big parking lots, and wide roads, rather than nestled within neighborhoods.

Like every other element of the public sphere, the school bus’ reputation has suffered from the arrival of ubiquitous filming and the ensuing slew of viral videos, transforming outbursts and scuffles that might once have been local gossip into segments on the evening news. Ms. Frizzle this is not.

More substantively, school buses have entered a phase known in mass transit circles as a “death spiral,” in which declining service quality leads to declining ridership, which justifies further service cuts.

School buses are trying to do more with less. That means long, circuitous routes that require students to be outside at the crack of dawn for an hourlong ride that could be done in 15 minutes in a parent’s air-conditioned car. One company, AlphaRoute, set Louisville up with routes derived by “artificial intelligence” that had some students waiting on the sidewalk at 6 a.m. for 100-minute bus rides. The fiasco forced Kentucky’s largest city to cancel the entire first week of school last fall.

Finally, some students have been cut out of service altogether, often via “walk boundaries” that determine who is eligible for the bus. In Cypress, Texas, most middle school students aren’t permitted to take the bus if they live within a two-mile radius of the school. But that could be a walk of 40 minutes or more, on sun-soaked streets with fast traffic and no sidewalks—a trip of last resort. Not every district has a Sam Balto, the Portland, Oregon, teacher who leads 100 kids to school on a “bike bus” every morning.

This broken system does not affect all students equally. Those who still take the school bus tend to be overwhelmingly from low-income families (as well as homeless students or students with disabilities, who must be offered school transportation by law). In Chicago, elementary school students at far-flung magnet schools are no longer entitled to bus transportation and must weigh admission offers against the challenge of getting to class. Bus advocates say that undermines the very social mobility those schools are supposed to provide.

“It’s putting a huge burden on families to try and get kids to school in a way there hasn’t been before, and that’s leading to stress, really long and congested car pickup lines, economic issues for families who quit jobs, and chronic absenteeism,” said Joanna McFarland, a founder of HopSkipDrive. McFarland’s company offers districts new routing technology in concert with a fleet of “care” drivers that do school transportation from their cars to supplement the bus network. “We’re bringing new drivers into a market that has been very supply constrained,” she noted. Reaching a few far-flung kids with car trips can make a bus route much more efficient.

In Los Angeles, advocates with the nonprofit Move LA have tried something different: Get kids onto the grown-up bus. In 2021, the county transit agency established a two-year pilot to give free transit passes to area students, from kindergarten to community college. (Will an 8-year-old ride the bus alone down Hollywood Boulevard? No—but parents don’t have to pay their kids’ fares anymore.) Students took more than 1 million transit trips a month, on average, and helped lead the transit system’s recovery from the pandemic. Earlier this year, L.A. made the program permanent. 

“The diversion of these folks away from getting a license and driving a car everywhere will have long-term benefits for the region for decades to come,” says Eli Lipmen, the director of Move LA.

Students in the nation’s second-largest school district still face the same transportation challenges as elsewhere: hostile streets, early start times, huge distances to travel to magnet schools. But the free bus passes aren’t just for getting to class, Lipmen says. “We launched this program not just for home to school. It’s also about freedom—freedom for a kid to be able to go to work, to a medical appointment, or just go to the beach.”

Try doing that on the school bus.