The City Council is set to tackle skyrocketing school bus costs at a hearing today in a bid to explain why the number of routes has ballooned over the past decade — even though ridership plunged dramatically.
Since 2000, the number of school-age students getting yellow bus service plummeted by nearly 30,000 — to 139,000 last year.
Yet the number of routes jumped from 5,400 to more than 6,700 — nearly doubling overall yellow bus costs to a whopping $1 billion.
The many factors that have driven up yellow bus costs include:
• The Department of Education added nearly 300 routes for summer school busing in 2000 and 700 routes for a new extended school day in 2005
• Bus companies have gotten an average payout increase of 3.1 percent each year since 2001 — plus an additional 5.5 percent bump in 2005
• Between 2009 and 2012, bus drivers and matrons got annual raises of 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent and 4 percent from the bus contractors.
Much of the cost spike has come from special education busing, where routing is more complicated because of limits on how long some kids can stay on a bus.
The city put an average of nearly 17 special education kids on each yellow bus in 2000, but last year that figure was just 12 kids per bus, according to DOE data.
The bus workers’ union — which has been on strike since Jan. 16 because the city removed employee protection clauses from newly-bid contracts — has cited poor routing as one of the main problems.
An independent consulting firm had the same concerns in 2007.