Boston students have been plagued by late school buses this year. What’s behind the delays?

Local news

New tracking app and unprecedented sign-ups drive dismal transit numbers to start year. Improvements coming, officials say

The excitement of a new school year in Boston has so far been overshadowed by significant bus delays that have affected thousands of students and their families. After only a third of buses arrived on time on the first day and some reported delays of hours, officials are responding to complaints and promising improvements in the near future.

“We know parents are frustrated, we’re still working hard on this problem, throwing everything at it,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said at a news conference Tuesday morning. She and Mayor Michelle Wu spoke to reporters outside Ruth Batson Academy in Dorchester.

The first weeks of the school year are always difficult for the Boston Public Schools transportation system, which transports more than 22,000 passengers via about 650 buses a day.

But this year’s disruptions have been particularly widespread. Only 34% of buses arrived at schools on time on the morning of Sept. 5, according to city data. That’s the lowest percentage of buses on time for the first morning of school since at least 2016. On the first day of last year, 61% of buses were on time.

The on-time arrival rate rose to 60% on Sept. 6 and reached 73% last Friday. A BPS spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for an updated figure by earlier this week.

Despite these improvements, officials are searching for answers. Last week, several Boston City Council members expressed concern about the delays and supported a mandate for a hearing to thoroughly investigate the problem. Two council members even called for a state investigation into the planning, routing and operational practices of the BPS transit system.

At some point we have to admit it @Boston Schools transportation plan has failed many BPS students and their families. Now is the time for results and positive leadership. #bospoli

— Ed Flynn 愛德華費連 (@EdforBoston) September 17, 2024

Wu and Skipper blame two main factors for the problems: the rollout of a new real-time bus tracking app and an unprecedented number of new registrations in late summer and early September.

New technology

According to Skipper, prior to this year, BPS used an outdated system to track student transportation.

“When it comes to security, we can’t, we can’t relax. And that’s what we were doing. Our system that we were using was 30 years old and it was based on notebooks and printouts,” she said.

So BPS awarded Zum a three-year contract this summer. The platform is being touted as a major upgrade in transparency and efficiency. Bus drivers now use tablets to flag down students as they board buses. Parents and guardians can upload photos of their children so the driver knows who to look out for. They can also track buses both before and after pickup times and get live estimates of when their children will arrive.

Drivers get access to navigation based on historical Google Maps traffic data, and Zum is designed to adapt to daily traffic patterns collected over time. As such, the app will undergo “major” updates every week, on Tuesday evenings. The first of those will be this week. Skipper said these updates will allow Zum to better estimate pickup and drop-off times, as well as install more efficient routing.

“It takes about a week for the system to become intelligent, and then it gets smarter every week,” she added.

More than 11,000 parents and guardians of more than 13,000 bus passengers have logged on to Zum at least once since last Thursday. About 9,500 families log on each day, according to a blog post Wu published Monday that included extensive details about the transportation woes.

Despite training over the summer, some drivers accidentally ended their routes or started them early on the app last week, causing families to receive incorrect tracking information. Now, 98% of BPS drivers use Zum consistently and give mostly good feedback, Wu and Skipper said.

Bus registration and route

Although most families register their students for school placements and transportation options in the winter and spring, before new changes are needed, registrations can be made or changed at any time. BPS registration centers were the busiest in August and so far this month, according to Wu. There were dozens of new registrations on many days. Last Wednesday, for example, 80 new registrations were processed, according to Wu.

The mayor said some of the registrations were due to a wave of newly arrived immigrant families, while many others were due to families choosing BPS over other schools.

The problem is that BPS officials blocked planned bus routes based on student registration data they had as of Aug. 9. That was done so bus drivers could bid on preferred routes and conduct test runs on them. Last year, a third of routes were changed between the time the test runs were held and the first day of school. This year, that number has doubled, according to Wu. Officials expect the number of new registrations to taper off as the year progresses.

There are three waves of different start and end times across the district. Schools in the latest wave of start and end times have been disproportionately affected by delays this year. When earlier bus runs are slightly delayed, those disruptions turn into larger delays down the road. BPS is adding replacement drivers and additional buses when long delays are expected on later runs. The district is preparing to add more replacement drivers this week.

Meeting with the brand

In 2022, Wu signed a systematic improvement plan with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that would prevent the district from being taken over by the state. One of the goals outlined in the document was for BPS to achieve a 95% monthly on-time rate. That’s “a higher threshold than any other school district,” Wu wrote in her blog post, adding that the district is making improvements and working to “establish benchmarks based on real-world data.”

The 95% monthly on-time rate has not yet been reached. In September last year it was 84%, and in December it reached a maximum of 92%, and then in March and June 2024.

Punctuality within a district is tracked by the percentage of buses that arrive at a school address on or before the start time. But Wu and Skipper said bus performance metrics aren’t uniform across the country. Their teams are studying how districts similar in size to Boston measure those metrics.

Meanwhile, Wu, Skipper and other officials plan to ride buses on particularly problematic routes on Wednesday to see for themselves how drivers and students feel.

“As a mom, every minute of learning is incredibly important for young people. Getting them to school on time isn’t just about making sure we hit certain percentages or numbers, but giving them the whole day to get settled into their classrooms, to eat breakfast, to just have the best day they could possibly have,” Wu said. “It all starts with how they get there and how they feel when they get there.”