The many costs of operating school buses in America

Abstract

The research seeks to quantify the marginal cost impact of transportation cost drivers on the total operating cost of Texas's public schools and how these costs differ between district type and environment setting. The analysis tests the validity of often cited research findings examining the widely used School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP). We present results from fixed effects regressions with panel data for the total transportation operating cost. Finding the marginal cost of an additional student is 2.5 times greater for a rural district than for an urban district. Additionally, we compare mean average values of school bus transportation metrics between rural, town, suburban, and city districts. Concluding, on average, school bus transportation costs for Rural districts are 40% more per student than a City or Suburban district. The dataset includes eleven years of transportation operating costs from 998 Texas public school districts.