I’ve spent a good part of my career thinking about how we measure transportation performance. Like many in our industry, I’ve helped develop ways to quantify success, compare systems and identify opportunities for improvement. I still believe those things matter. But lately, I’ve found myself wondering whether we’ve been answering the wrong question.
Student transportation has always had to justify itself. That’s nothing new. Yet I can’t help but think that, somewhere along the way, we became so good at purportedly demonstrating our value through savings that we forgot to show the value of the outcomes we support. It’s time to start a different conversation.
The World Has Changed
Declining enrollment, school closures, grade realignments, school choice, specialized programming, and alternative learning pathways are reshaping how students access education. Transportation professionals have done an excellent job recognizing these trends. We’ve talked at length about how they will affect routing, fleet utilization, staffing and operations. What we’ve done less well is ask what these changes mean for the role transportation plays within the education system. Here’s the thing: Every one of those changes make transportation more important not less to the success of students.
As educational opportunities become more diverse and geographically dispersed, transportation is no longer simply connecting students to the neighborhood school. It is connecting students to opportunity. And that’s a fundamentally different responsibility.
Succeeding All the Way to Unsustainability
For decades, transportation professionals have been remarkably good at answering one particular question: “How efficiently can you do your job?” And to be fair, there was a reason for that. We understood that resources were limited. We wanted to demonstrate responsible stewardship. We wanted school boards and district leaders to know we could be trusted with taxpayer dollars.
So, we talked about efficiency. We minimized bus counts. We maximized seating capacity. We reduced deadhead miles. We optimized routes. We proudly shared stories about doing more with less.
None of that was wrong. In fact, it was what many of us believed people wanted (or needed) to hear. But I’ve started to wonder if we misunderstood our audience.
The efficiency so diligently pursued by so many departments has introduced an element of uncertainty and unsustainability to many transportation operations. By minimizing the number of buses and maximizing efficiency, we have left policy makers in a position where they have to make a binary choice between greater investments or eliminating services. I am fearful that greater investments is not a path many will take.
What Do ‘They’ Want from You?
I don’t think most parents wake up wondering how efficiently we utilized fleet assets yesterday morning. I don’t think board members are hoping transportation can shave another percentage point off bus utilization.
What they want is much simpler. They want transportation to work. They want the bus to be like a light switch. Flip it on, and it works exactly as expected. They don’t spend much time thinking about the wiring behind the walls that makes it possible.
Transportation is much the same way. When it works, very few people think about it. When it doesn’t, everything else begins to unravel pretty quickly. And perhaps that’s where we’ve gone astray. We’ve spent years explaining how efficiently we run transportation systems when what people really needed to understand was why those systems matter in the first place.
Sometimes the Obvious is Not So Obvious
One phrase has become almost impossible to avoid in education: “We don’t want to divert resources from the classroom.” No service gets hit with that phrase more than transportation. It is both a reminder and a warning.
It’s also a statement that almost everyone instinctively agrees with. With everyone’s heads nodding, the conversation often ends before it really begins. But I think it’s worth asking a simple question: “Does transportation actually divert resources from the classroom?”
It certainly requires resources. No one disputes that. However, I would argue that transportation does not divert resources from classrooms. Instead, transportation fills classrooms and that’s resources to a district.
Every student sitting in a classroom today first depended on someone figuring out how to get them there. Every magnet program, special education placement, regional program or school choice initiative depends on transportation to transform opportunity into reality.
For years, we’ve measured success largely by how little transportation costs. We’ve celebrated our ability to provide the same level of service with fewer buses, fewer people or fewer dollars.
Those are worthwhile accomplishments, but they aren’t the mission. The mission is educational access. Efficiency should support that mission, but it should never become the mission itself.
The future of education funding is becoming increasingly uncertain, and transportation funding sits squarely in the middle of that uncertainty. Many state funding formulas continue to rely on student enrollment at precisely the moment enrollment is declining. Public schools are also serving an educational landscape, where more families are choosing charter schools, private schools, homeschooling and other educational pathways. These realities place increasing pressure on district budgets, while transportation funding rarely changes in ways that acknowledge the additional complexity required to support them.
Which brings me back to what I think is the fundamental point. None of those educational models work if students cannot get there. And expanding opportunity is only meaningful if students can actually access it. Transportation is not competing with educational opportunity. It is what makes educational opportunity possible.
A Different Way to Think About Success
If we’re going to rethink how transportation communicates its value, then I think we also need to rethink what we mean by capacity and capability. And before anyone assumes I’m talking about seating capacity, I’m not. Capacity is our ability to respond to the question, “How are we going to get all these students where they need to be?” It includes buses, funding, technology, personnel, time, partnerships and every other resource that allows us to build and sustain a transportation system. It is our organizational capacity to do the work.
Capability is something different. It is our ability to use those resources well. It’s the knowledge, experience, creativity and professionalism transportation teams bring to solving increasingly complicated problems. Those two ideas are important because they change the conversation.
Imagine someone asks, “How many additional students could we transport to more schools with only a modest increase in resources?” In an organization focused almost exclusively on efficiency, the answer often becomes “Very few.” Not because it can’t be done but because additional demand is viewed primarily as additional cost.
A capacity/capability-focused organization tends to answer differently: “It depends.” How many more students could gain access to educational opportunities? What would the incremental investment be? How can we maximize access while responsibly managing additional resources? Those aren’t simply different answers. They’re different philosophies.
What We Measure Says More About Us Than Anyone Else
This is the uncomfortable part. If this conversation is going to change, I think we have to acknowledge that our own profession bears some responsibility for where we are today. For years, we’ve proudly told stories about accomplishing more with fewer resources.
Every time we solved a problem no one heard about… Every time we absorbed another challenge without asking for additional support… Every time we found another efficiency… we reinforced a narrative that transportation’s greatest value was its ability to cost less. We wanted to demonstrate professionalism, innovation, stewardship and responsibility.
Instead, we may have unintentionally taught decision-makers that transportation would always find a way to absorb the next challenge. If the only story we tell is how little we need, we shouldn’t be surprised when people conclude we need very little.
From Here to Where?
I’m not suggesting efficiency no longer matters. It absolutely does. Public resources deserve thoughtful stewardship, and transportation professionals have earned a reputation for delivering exactly that. But efficiency cannot remain our highest calling.
The educational environment is changing too quickly. Transportation is becoming more central to how students access learning, not less. As districts adapt to changing demographics, expanded educational choice, and increasingly specialized programming, transportation becomes one of the few services capable of connecting students to those opportunities.
That changes the conversation. At least it should. It also means transportation leaders may have to become less comfortable with the quiet professionalism that has long defined our work. We’ve often preferred to let that work speak for itself. Operationally, that’s admirable. Strategically, it may no longer be enough. Transportation leaders need to become better advocates, and not for bigger budgets simply because we want them, but for investments that match the educational outcomes our communities expect.
If we continue defining our value by how little transportation costs, others will continue seeing transportation as something worth spending less on.
But if we begin defining our value by the educational opportunities transportation makes possible, perhaps we can finally start having the conversation our profession and our students deserve.
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Tim Ammon is the owner of Ammon Consulting Group and has 25 years of experience focused on routing efficiency and effectiveness as well as operational performance for school districts nationwide. He is a frequent speaker at STN EXPO conferences and an expert commentator for School Transportation News.
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