Dear county transit agency,
I appreciate that you run “school route” busses in our town to help students who live quite a distance away get to the junior high and high school. In these times of woefully inadequate school funding, when school district-run school busses are a misty watercolor memory, lots of kids depend on the school route county busses to get to and from school — including my kid.
I reckon someone at your agency appreciates that the school route busses present an outstanding opportunity to groom future generations to be enthusiastic mass-transit users. Before most of them have drivers licenses, you have a window to convince them that busses are a fast, reliable, and affordable alternative to cars. These kids have been raised as tree-huggers, so they’re receptive to this message. Heck, the car line of the damned in front of the junior high, every morning right before school and every afternoon right after school, is doing yeoman’s work to make that case for you.
Except, here’s the thing: you can only persuade these kids that mass-transit is the way to go if the school route bus actually comes when it’s supposed to before and after school rather than disappearing without a trace and leaving a whole lot of kids standing at the bus stops wondering if they will ever make it to school, or if they will ever make it home.
Honestly, for all of their typing with their thumbs and talking like LOLcats, these kids are smart enough to connect the damn dots.
With extreme irritation on behalf of my stressed out kid standing in the rain waiting for busses that never came on multiple occasions,
Dr. Free-Ride
