Learning lessons from last September’s school bus bungle
Shortage of drivers left kids stranded, but the board doesn’t plan to let it happen again
Remember the bus chaos that kicked off the school year back in September? There was a somehow unanticipated shortage of drivers for the routes that serve Toronto public and Catholic schools, leaving kids standing at the side of the road waiting for hours for buses that sometimes didn’t come. I remember — my own children were among those whose buses either didn’t show or came late for the first few weeks of the school year. The worst part of it was the lack of information. As I wrote at the time, calling the school yielded no answers about whether or when a bus might come — apparently, at least at first, the schools didn’t even seem to know where buses were running, or where they weren’t. Like I said, chaos. The public and Catholic school boards, who contract bus service together, announced this week they’re rolling out some measures for the start of the next school year in September in an effort to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The first one, kicking off their announcement, is that parents can register at torontoschoolbus.org to access their children’s school bus route information online and to receive email alerts when their service is late or cancelled. This itself is a great leap forward for the bus services — a leap into 1990s communications technology.
The next leap after that, into the appenabled smartphone era, is already underway. Starting this school year, all buses will be required to have GPS units installed in them, at first so the boards and bus companies can track where they are.
Eventually — perhaps in about a year, after the kinks are worked out, says Ryan Bird of the Toronto District School Board — this will enable parents to track from their smartphone their children’s bus as it moves along the route, in the same way Uber users can now track their ride or food deliveries in real time.
These two overdue steps seem likely to virtually solve the communication part of the problem for most parents — though the boards are also planning to staff call centres during peak times such as the start of the school year to deal with any confusion over the phone lines.
As for the lack of drivers and of timely buses running at all, which was the central problem back in September, a big part of the cause had to do with all the private bus contracts being newly awarded this year. New companies were taking over almost all routes, hiring new drivers to serve them, and that caused problems.
Bird emphasizes the operator contracts are not changing this year, so there ought to be less confusion in that regard.
But another source of delay was apparently that route information was not given to the bus companies early enough for them to advise all their drivers and then deal with shuffling around based on driver demands (a lot of drivers, apparently, will quit if they do not like their route, or will have gotten themselves hired by two different companies so they can choose the route they prefer, leaving the other one suddenly without a driver after routes have been assigned). So the boards will provide the route information to bus companies earlier in hopes of minimizing any last-minute surprises and working more closely with the companies on route planning to head off any problems. Bird says current communications say neither the bus companies nor the boards are expecting any problems this coming year like those experienced last year.
As a parent — and as a citizen whose government runs this bus service to safely get children to school on time — these measures together provide a lot of reassurance. Provided the school boards, as Bird suggests, “apply a lot of lessons we’ve learned” the next time the contracts turn over, the immediate problems seem to be taken care of.
The communication measures, particularly, seem long overdue. It’s sad that it took a minor crisis to prompt these updates, though that is often the case with government agencies afraid of being accused of wasting money on frills such as communicating with citizens who use their services. Either way, this progress looks like good news.
Of course, the proof will be at the curbside come September. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire