McFreedom

SCOOT is San Carlos' community-operated bus line. It runs routes early in the morning and in the afternoon, and does on-call door-to-door service other times. It's an interesting idea, and unquestionably a boon to people unable to drive. It's also used as a kind of "school bus" for the local kids. The problem is, it's expensive, and there's an upcoming election to implement a $59 "parcel tax" (paid annualy by each landowner in the city). That comes to $3.25 million dollars a year to operate this service (compared to an '03-'04 budget of $21.8 million, which was itself $4 million in the red).

The SCOOT website provides some ridership data from 2004. It shows a few interesting thing. First of all, they run no routes at all in July and August, only door-to-door. The "door-to-door" and "Caltrain commuter" numbers don't go up when the routes stop, which says pretty clearly that all the route riders are school kids. October was their peak total ridership month, and there's no partial month for school (as in September or June) and no major holidays (as in November or December). So it's probably a good, representative month of what SCOOT can do at its best.

In October they ran 3,623 "Door to Door" runs, 1,120 "Caltrain Commuters" and 12,160 Route riders for a total ridership of 16,903. A few thoughts on all of these: Especially the route riders you'd expect to be mostly round-trip excursions; two "rides" should map pretty well to one rider, going there and coming back. As well, on the routes, I think we should expect the vast majority of the traffic to be regular, weekday traffic - the same people riding the same routes, somewhere and back, Monday through Friday. These thoughts are useful to try to get at the number of people who actually benefit from SCOOT. If we assume that 80% of the route ridership fits this profile (and that's probably conservative), we find that there were about 232 kids who take SCOOT to school and back every day, providing 9,744 (58%) of the 16,903 total rides for October. It's likely that the other classes suffer from similar patterns of use.

If we charge these rides with 58% of the cost ($1.89 million), we see that we're paying $8,125 per pupil who rides the bus, anually. We could buy them all cars for that! Every year, a new one! America Bikes - an advocacy group trying to get people to bike more - claims national per-pupil busing costs were $521 per pupil in 2000. Presumably it's in their interest to make this number as large as possible, but it's utterly dwarfed by what we're paying.

The axiom behind SCOOT was that a fleet of small busses would be cheaper than setting up actual school bus service, and we'd get the added bonus of letting our less-fortunate residents use the busses when schools weren't. But this seems an awfully high cost.