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

Excitement over the start of a new school year in Boston has so far been overshadowed by significant bus delays affecting thousands of students and their families. After only a third of buses arrived on time the first day and some reported hours-long delays, officials are responding to complaints and promising improvements in the immediate future. 

“We know that parents have been frustrated, we continue to work on the issue hard, we’re throwing everything at it,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said Tuesday morning at a press conference. She and Mayor Michelle Wu addressed reporters outside of Ruth Batson Academy in Dorchester. 

The first few weeks of the school year are always difficult for the Boston Public Schools transportation system, which serves more than 22,000 riders through the deployment of about 650 buses a day. 

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

The on-time arrival rate rose to 60% on Sept. 6 and hit 73% last Friday. A BPS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for updated data through the beginning of this week.

Despite those improvements, officials are looking for answers. Last week, many members of the Boston City Council expressed concern over the delays and backed an order for a hearing to examine the issue in depth. Two councilors even called on the state to conduct an investigation into the scheduling, routing, and operations practices of the BPS transportation system. 

Wu and Skipper have been blaming two major factors for causing the issues: the implementation of a new real-time bus tracking app and an unprecedented number of new registrations at the end of summer and beginning of September.

New technology

Before this year, BPS was using an antiquated system for tracking student transportation, according to Skipper. 

“When it comes to safety, we cannot, we cannot settle. And that’s what we were doing. Our system that we had been using was 30 years old, and it was relying on clipboards and printouts,” she said. 

So BPS awarded a three-year contract to Zum over the summer. The platform is billed as a major upgrade to transparency and efficiency. Bus drivers are now using tablets to mark off students that board their buses. Parents and guardians can upload photos of their children so the driver knows who to look out for. They can also track the buses both before and after pick-up times, and get live estimates for when their children will arrive at their destinations. 

The drivers are given access to navigation based on historic 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 each week, on Tuesday nights. The first will take place this week. Skipper said these updates will allow Zum to provide better pick-up and drop-off estimates as well as install more efficient routing. 

“It takes about a week for the system to become smart, and then every week it becomes smarter and smarter,” she said. 

More than 11,000 parents and guardians of more than 13,000 bus riders have logged into Zum at least once, as of last Thursday. About 9,500 families are logging in every day, according to a blog post Wu published Monday that included many details about the transportation problems. 

Despite receiving training over the summer, some drivers accidentally terminated their routes or began them early within the app last week, causing families to receive incorrect tracking information. Now, 98% of BPS drivers are using Zum consistently, and they are giving predominantly good feedback, Wu and Skipper said.  

Bus registrations and routing

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

The mayor cited a wave of newly arrived migrant families for some of these registrations, and many others have been due to families choosing BPS options over other schools.

The problem is that BPS officials locked planned bus routes based on the student registration data they had as of Aug. 9. This was done so that bus drivers could bid on their preferred routes and conduct test runs on them.  Last year, one-third of routes were changed between the time test runs took place and the first day of school. This year, that figure doubled, according to Wu. Officials expect the number of new registrations to slow down as the year progresses. 

There are three waves of different school start times across the district. Schools within the last wave of start and dismissal times have been disproportionately affected by the delays this year. When earlier bus runs get slightly delayed, those disruptions cascade into bigger delays down the line. BPS adds substitute drivers and extra buses when big delays are predicted on later runs. The district is preparing to add more substitute drivers this week. 

Meeting the mark

In 2022, Wu signed on to a systemic improvement plan with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that averted a state takeover of the district. One of the goals outlined in that document was for BPS to hit a 95% monthly on-time percentage. This is a “threshold higher than any other school district,” Wu wrote in her blog post, adding that the district has been making improvements and is striving to “set benchmarks grounded in real world data.”

A 95% monthly on-time percentage has not yet been reached. It was 84% last September and maxed out at 92% last December and then again in March and June of 2024. 

On-time percentage within the district is tracked by the percentage of buses that arrive at a school’s address at or before school start time. But Wu and Skipper said that bus performance metrics are not standardized across the country. Their teams are looking into how districts of similar size to Boston’s measure these metrics. 

In the meantime Wu, Skipper, and other officials are planning to ride buses along particularly problematic routes Wednesday to see what drivers and students are experiencing firsthand. 

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