Long Term Effects of Light Rail Replacing School Buses

Here's the long term effects of Minneapolis replacing school buses for high school students with light rail and public buses.

1)The students get to use the passes all day and all evening.  So it's not just getting to school. They can go anywhere in the Twin Cities. 

2)Eventually schools will discover that a student can take a class at one high school location, then go to another location for another class. They will also discover that some students do better in in school in late afternoon or evening, and that schools will stay open later.  And they will discover that all this flexibility increases student learning, increases course options, and is cheaper financially.

3)A whole generation of young people will now grow up not needing nor wanting cars.

We have a whole chapter on The Pedagogy of Trains in our new book,forecasting all this. But we just did not know it would start happening so soon.  Cars are dead.

Comments

[Ted K.]

San Francisco, Calif. has used public transit for school access since at least the 1960's for both public and private schools. There have been periods when school buses were used but the costs usually killed off most of them after a few years. I know someone who attended two high schools in 1975 (?) because the second high school was the only one in the city with a certain class.

By the way, why does it have to be two high schools ? Couldn't a high school junior or senior be taking courses at a community college (voc.ed. / adv.placement / college prep.) and thereby get an early start on their career or college education ?

[Ted K.]

There's a link glitch in the last paragraph of the post - s/b :
"The Pedagogy of Trains" (Ch.8's title from the book "The Pedagogy of the 21st Century").

[Ted K.]

The comment software has an HTML stripper. The URL is below and available for right-clinking or copying.

http://www.pedagogy21.org/