Is Bussing Really Worth $400 a Year?

          In Massachusetts, there have been many heated debates over whether to make parents pay for their child to ride the bus to school or not. Since the beginning, public transportation to school has been the easy route for many parents. It’s free, good for the environment, plus they can get to work earlier and not have to worry about getting their child to school. Having a bus just makes life easier for everyone.

On average, if the proposal goes through, parents would have to pay about $400 a year per child. If you have two kids, that’s $800 a year. If you have three kids, that’s $1,200 a year. Let’s not even think about someone having more than three kids. Imagine going from paying nothing to all of a sudden paying over $1,000 for bussing! This is a very big change and most Americans would not be able to handle it. The majority of families do not have this kind of money to just give to the transportation system, so the busses will most likely be very empty. If they only have a handful of students on the bus, they will probably raise the price even more to accommodate all of the expenses with the little amount of people paying. Then those people, who already pay the $400, won’t want to pay anymore so they will probably leave the system too. Basically, there won’t be any students riding the bus.

Let’s say a car emits x amount of pollutants into the air on the way to school. There are 50 kids driving to school in 50 different cars because their parents could not afford for their child to ride the bus. That’s 50x amount of pollutants being emitted into the air just for one day for one school. If there is 500,000 schools in the U.S., that’s 25,000,000x pollutants in one day. There is at least 200 days of school. Therefore, per year, at least 5,000,000,000x pollutants are contaminating our air because bus transportation is too expensive. Now, if all these students just rode the bus, that number would drop dramatically. Riding a bus helps the environment. We can’t help the environment though if we cannot afford it.

Expensive bussing leads to no students wanting to ride the bus. No students riding the bus leads to parents taking their kids to school which leads to more pollutants being emitted in our air. That leads us to a bad environment. The list is endless.

This proposal will just turn everything into a huge mess.