Local transportation and education experts say Baltimore City’s student transit issues can be solved by prioritizing student data and putting money where the needs are.
On Monday night, a crowd of over 100 students and community members gathered at a town hall in R. House held by The Baltimore Banner as a follow-up to their months-long investigation published in February.
The Banner’s reporting found that one in four of public buses — relied on by over 25,000 city students to get to and from school — arrive late or not at all in the morning, causing poor attendance and lower first-period grades.
Monday’s panel of experts focused on solutions to the multifaceted problem. But leaders from the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) and the city school system declined invitations to participate.
Roger Schulman leads the Fund for Educational Excellence, a nonprofit aiming to reduce city school inequities. He said the first step is collecting student data, which the Maryland Transit Administration does not do.
“I think hearing from the people who use your service is incredibly valuable, and while it's time consuming and it takes effort, it's not that hard to do,” he said. “What students need from the MTA is not considered when they are setting routes. So we know that when they are doing their route analysis, they are not talking to anyone under 18.”
The nonprofit’s 2021 report on student transit found that students make up around 18% of MTA ridership. Older students often take multiple buses because of school choice policies that allow them to attend any high school in the city.
“And I did not know until yesterday that the school system pays $0 to the transit agency for carrying all of those students,” said Greg Newmark, an urban planning professor at Morgan State University.
Newmark called that a “huge unfunded burden” for the city school system to “just dump on the transit agency.” If district leaders contributed money, he said, MTA could offer other services, like specific buses for student routes.
Newmark also said the city has faulty traffic lights and poor street design that cause “bus bunching.”
“And so a lot of what would make the buses run more effectively is making just the streets run more effectively,” he said.
Brooke Bourne, a senior at Western High School, said transferring is the worst part about taking public transit to school.
“For example, the bus that I get on to get to school runs maybe every 40 [minutes] to an hour,” she said. “That gets [me] to another bus that runs every 40 to an hour, and I could be just getting off the bus to get on the connecting bus, and the bus pulls off, or the bus is full by the time it gets to you, and then it just rides right past.”
That forces some students to walk the rest of the way, Bourne said. But that raises other accessibility issues.
Rowan Shober-Levine, 17, is a junior at Baltimore School for the Arts. He has a disability, and says the walk from the bus stop to school is “long and strenuous.”
“And so I'm wondering, what are we doing to help disabled students?” they asked.
Ashley Esposito, a commissioner on the Baltimore City school board, said the group is having conversations about what it would mean to prioritize solving transportation issues for students.
“Right now, we're definitely in listening mode,” she said. “I think what I'm trying to grasp…is if our focus should be advocating for a yellow bus fleet, or if it should be advocating with the MTA to improve what already exists.”
Esposito said she’s especially focused on supporting the most disadvantaged students, like those with disabilities and those experiencing homelessness.
“As someone who was formerly in foster care and dealt with depression when I was in high school, had getting on a bus been a barrier, you better bet my attendance would have been way worse than it already was,” she said. “And so as we are digging into the transportation issue, I do think that we have a responsibility to understand the intersectional experience of students, and especially the students that are most negatively impacted, the most at risk.”
