bus facts

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☆ i have a normal amount of side blogs

Alternatively, you could flip off the person who tried to warn you, have to violently swerve to avoid that deer, and then wait for the person you flipped off to come pull you out of the ditch you ended up in because there isn't even the fancy new iPhone SOS service where you're at because it's so far into the back country.

Or maybe even that other London transportation classic, the black taxi.

Over here, they're one of the symbols of America, on par with the Statue of Liberty, the flag, the Eagle, and well ahead of any chain restaurant you can name. People won't know any US states, but they will know these vehicles.

The thing is, here in Germany, we don't have dedicated school buses. The general idea is that kids go to school on their own. When that's not practical, they're expected to use (and given free tickets for) public transit. Public transit is designed around this requirement; there are many places where there is a bus, and anyone can get on it, but the route and timetable really only makes sense for school children. In case a dedicated school bus is really needed, that's generally subcontracted out, and the lines either use something like a Sprinter Van for smaller routes, or a normal city or interurban bus (often a used one that's a bit older). School trips are normal public transit, or a rented bus, typically a coach or regional bus.

It's not a perfect system, in the past couple of years there's been an epidemic of people bringing their kids to school in their cars instead of letting them walk, which is less than ideal. It is what it is. But building a dedicated network of public transit lines only for students, and building dedicated vehicles only for that, has never occurred to anyone here.

Of course we know about these buses, from movies and such, but they're as foreign here as cacti or pick-up trucks (actually we're seeing more and more of these here) or yellow cabs (all europeans will assume all cabs in the US are yellow until they actually visit).

You do see these buses here at times, because people still generally like the idea of the US, even if they have a lot of issues with a lot of details, and so folks bring them over, along with stretch limos and stuff (also not really a thing here). And of course, if someone goes to all that trouble, they don't do it to haul school kids, they rent it out for city tours or as a party bus or whatever.

So you see these yellow things as a symbol of faraway places, scenic vistas, some vague undefined idea of freedom that doesn't necessarily hold up to any contact with reality, and it's just a huge part of the whole US aesthetic.

And then you go to a student exchange with the US, and you finally get the chance: You yourself get to ride in one of these iconic chrome yellow buses! It looks just like in the movies! You get in, you drive in them a little…

…and you realise they're shit. Just the worst buses in the western world. Terrible suspension. Uncomfortable seats with weirdly high backs (so they don't have to put seatbelts in, they just restrict how far kids can fly in an accident). Everything made out of the cheapest materials. Turns out the reason why the US uses school buses like that instead of normal modern city buses, which the US has, is to save money and because they just hate kids.

And then it hits you why US Americans say "as American as apple pie", a dish that is made and enjoyed literally anywhere in the world, instead of "as American as yellow school buses". Of course the Americans already knew all this. They got tortured by these things forever. It would never occur to them to see this as a symbol of America, it's just a normal part of life for them. It's a symbol of school and school life and sometimes normalcy, and tells us that these actors getting out of it are supposed to be teenagers, nothing more.

school buses aren't ubiquitous in the us, only private schools had them in my hometown and even now the district i work with recently switched the high schoolers to the public metro buses with free travel passes.

i think the yellow bus is dying. we've already switched to flat fronts in many places, or my company has switched to electric, but the districts want to cut costs even more and would rather abandon school buses entirely because we "cost too much". my cousins in texas are getting forced into buses built for elementary children three high schoolers to a row against the design standards. my local district is a "walking district" which means instead of hiring buses they just build more schools (i suspect some embezzlement as this district keeps siphoning money in really strange ways and then underserving the kids); the few routes they have have as of this year been switched to a staggered timetable that forces middle schoolers to wake up even *earlier* so that one bus can service 3 schools (something that can be done, the district i worked for last year did it, but is absolutely miserable for the kids getting to school while it is still dark out and has been proven to lead to more safety incidents)...

like, i didn't ride a school bus until i was in college and we took a trip in a big old blue one with bad shocks that knocked my pocket knife out of my bag on a bad bump (i never found it) and now even the people who have used them for decades are abandoning them.