“This story was originally published by Outlier Media . Detroit buses are now free to all of the city’s K-12 students , which means 10th grader Jessica Horton has a free pass to a long wait outside a liquor store after school. It’d be a quick trip home if her parents could leave work to pick her up. Instead, Horton stands around with dozens of other students outside a liquor-lotto joint on the city’s eastside, hoping a bus will get her home in under an hour. “We get out of school at 3:20 p.m. but we don’t get a bus until 3:55,” Horton said. “We’d have to get out of class before the bell” to make the 3:27 p.m. bus. The city’s bus schedules are often woefully misaligned with school schedules. Pair that with a system-wide afternoon on-time rate that hovers near 70% , and it’s clear that Detroit Department of Transportation buses — effectively the primary public transit option for many high schoolers — have serious drawbacks. Mayor Mary Sheffield took office with a promise to focus on the city’s youngest residents, and her administration quickly applied that lens to public transit. In April, the city launched a pilot program making bus rides free for students. Robert Cramer, executive director of transit for the city, said a conversation with students at Cody High School also pushed the department to improve its bus-tracking system. Meanwhile, students still face long waits and poorly timed routes. Consider Southeastern High School, where Horton is a student. The first bus scheduled to arrive at one of the closest stops arrives just minutes after school lets out. Most don’t make it in time, but a handful of students run out of class to catch it. Earlier this month, Outlier Media waited with a group of students for 30 minutes for the next bus. Two students rush to catch the bus. Cramer acknowledged the scheduling issues and said many of them could be fixed with simple changes. He hopes improvements will be in place by the time school starts next year. “It takes a little bit of time … but if these are adjustments that we can make to reflect [the mayor’s] extra emphasis on educational outcomes and supporting students and their families, this should be a slam dunk.” He said potential changes include schedule tweaks and assigning additional or larger buses to routes frequented by students. Students are less likely to attend school consistently when they lack reliable transportation, research shows. Chronic absenteeism disrupts student learning. A recent pilot program that provided yellow bus service to students at two Detroit high schools showed top district officials that better transit options at neighborhood schools would improve attendance rates. Bus routes don’t match school schedules Detroit high schoolers, like their peers in many major U.S. cities, have long relied on public transit to get to school. But taking a bus to school got harder as the city careened toward bankruptcy in the 2010s. As the bus system shrank, Cramer said, routes and schedules that once favored students were left by the wayside. An Outlier Media review of bus routes found that more than 40% of high schools in the Detroit Public Schools Community District are served by buses that run infrequently or at times that poorly match school schedules. (See more about our methodology at the bottom of the story.) And timing isn’t the only issue. In the case of Southeastern students, dozens often crowd together waiting for the bus — more than a single city bus can handle. “If they see a whole bunch of kids, they won’t stop for the ones that can’t fit,” said Aaron West, a 9th grader at Southeastern. Problems can multiply when students need to transfer buses, which is common because many Detroit students attend high school far from home. Transfers are often poorly timed, consigning students to long waits for a second or third bus. “If they have to transfer, almost half the time they miss it, and then they have to call an Uber if they want to be on time,” said Lindsey Matson, deputy director of youth organizing at 482Forward, an education advocacy group. “And they don’t have Uber money.” How we reported this story The findings in this story came from an Outlier Media analysis comparing Detroit city bus schedules to high school bell schedules in Detroit. Outlier used ChatGPT to generate a Python script for the analysis. See the code here . The analysis included 23 Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) high schools. To simplify the analysis, charter schools were excluded, along with schools that may offer transportation or that operate on irregular schedules, such as career and technical education schools and the Jerry L. White Center. We used publicly available location data for schools and city bus stops to calculate the four stops closest to each school. Schools are frequently served by more than one bus route, and each route has one stop for each direction of travel. Most schools had at least four stops within a quarter mile. We collected bus schedule data through a DDOT API . We gathered bell schedules for each school from the DPSCD website . We considered bus and school schedules to be misaligned if students had to wait at least 30 minutes before or after school: a conservative measure of inconvenience by public transit standards. We excluded buses that arrived fewer than six minutes (the typical walk time from stops to schools in our analysis) before the first bell or after the last bell. At eight of the 23 schools we analyzed, buses were scheduled to arrive 30 minutes or more before the first bell — or just a few minutes before the bell, with a long gap since the earlier bus. At seven other schools, students would have to wait at least 30 minutes after the last bell for the first available bus.The analysis does not account for the fact that DDOT buses are frequently late , which makes getting to school by bus even more of a challenge. Koby Levin is a reporter for Outlier Media. You can reach him at koby@outliermedia.org .
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