Putting aside the very notable environmental issues of having many cars transporting children where it used to be one vehicle doing the same job... this would be a horrible move from a public safety perspective. School buses are pretty damn safe modes of transportation — since 2009, there's been exactly one school bus passenger in Canada who has died aboard a bus after a crash.
Put that into perspective: thousands of kids every single day are shuttled to and from school across the country. I'm aware you're in B.C.,
@Ice-Tray, but I hope you'll indulge me in using Ontario numbers here since I have a direct frame of reference. My ride was about an hour each way growing up, and Ontario estimates a school year at 194 days. I was a pretty healthy kid — so let's say for argument's sake I missed four days of school a year to keep it a nice round 190. 190 days times an hour each way times two trips comes up to 380 hours a year on a bus. Probably a bit high for the average kid, so let's use a half hour ride as a baseline instead of my hour-long one and divide that number by two. We're at 190 hours per kid over the span of a full school year.
Elementary schools run from kindergarten to grade 8, resulting in a total of nine years. (Yes, some schools only run til grade 6 and the high schools take care of the rest, but for simplicity's sake let's roll with this.) Nine years multiplied by that 190 hours per kid comes up to 1,710 hours on a bus per kid per elementary school experience. Assuming, then, that high schools run from gr. 9-12, we've got another 760 hours per kid on top of that.
Let's go deeper. Each grade has, what, 30 kids or so on average? Maybe higher, but again let's be conservative with our estimates. 30 kids times 1,710 hours (elementary) equals 51,300 hours and 30 kids times 760 hours (high school) equals 22,800 hours.
Per the
Ministry of Education of Ontario, there were 3,954 elementary schools and 896 secondary schools in the 2017-18 school year. So 3,954 times 51,300 is 202,840,200 hours spent on buses by Ontario elementary school students every year, and 896 times 22,800 is an additional 20,428,800 hours spent throughout high school.
Put 'em together, and that's
223,269,000 man-hours that Ontario kids spend on school buses every year — the equivalent of 9,302,875 full days or 25,847 years. Per year. In Ontario alone. Multiply that by 10, add in the same numbers from every other province, and that's the scope of the stat we're talking about. And in that time, one single child has died as a result of a collision. My methodology is far from perfect, but you can't tell me that's not a stellar safety record. And you mean to tell me that, somewhere, someone thought it'd be a good idea to pull buses OFF the road?! That's mind-boggling.
