The final bell at 2:30 p.m. marks the end of another school day for hundreds of students as they rush out of classrooms into jam-packed hallways. Pushing open heavy metal doors and stepping outside of the front entrance, their eyes scan the numbers on the windows of school buses in an attempt to locate their bus and secure a good seat. However, as they climb up the steps of the bus, they find a sea of faces staring back at them. Every seat is taken, forcing them to either try their best to squeeze into a seat with the other students who were already sitting there or possibly even stand in the aisle. The time is 2:33 p.m.. The bus doesn’t even leave for another four minutes.
For students, this has become a normal part of their after-school routine due to changes in bus route distributions for this school year. “[The new bus distributions] make the bus extremely crowded, especially in the afternoon. Sometimes if you’re not quick enough, you can’t even get a seat, or if you can get a seat, it’s only like half a seat,” junior Mia Yang said.
The new bus distributions are not only creating an inconvenience for students, but those overcrowded buses are also a significant safety hazard. If students are sitting or standing in the aisle and the bus has to suddenly brake, they have no seat in front of them to break their fall and will lurch forward, which can potentially harm them. “There’s always people standing up in the aisle. Even when the bus is just driving, [students who are standing] have to hold onto the tops of the seats to keep their balance, and they still sometimes stumble,” Yang said.
Additionally, the sharp increase in students on certain buses may not have to do with an increase in stops the bus now makes, but rather the stops themselves. Students have observed that the number of bus stops is almost the same as last year, but there are simply too many students at each stop. “It’s frustrating because it’s like no one thought to calculate if there would be too many students for the bus before they reassigned all the bus routes,” Yang said.
However, the opposite has occurred for other buses in terms of the number of students per bus: so few people are now assigned to certain buses that every single student has the luxury of getting an entire seat to themselves. “There used to be a decent number of people on my bus last year, but the new route changes got rid of so many people. People can literally lay down in the larger seats while they wait for their stop because they don’t have to share their seat with anyone else,” junior Veronica Chunikhin said.
For other students, the number of people on their bus hasn’t changed since the last school year despite the bus route changes. “I’ve heard about the new bus distributions and how crowded other buses are, but my bus has stayed the same. Honestly, the amount of people on the bus hasn’t really changed. There’s maybe only, like, a few more people than last year,” senior Ojas Tare said.
The new bus distributions have had a clear impact on students and their comfort on the school buses, but as the current bus routes will not be changing again for the rest of this school year, people on overcrowded buses will have to deal with this predicament for the next seven months.
