I have 3 kids that attend Louden Elementary.  This year the school district basically cut all school bus service due to budget concerns.

    Now, parents have to drive their kids to school or let them walk, ride, skate, whatever. Most opt to drive them to school, it's not a bad neighborhood, but there are a few seedy aparment complexes between school and home and  my kids have had problems walking home from some gang-types. We feel it's safer to give them a ride.

     It's 104 degrees sometimes and as a parent, I don't want my kids walking home 2 miles  in the heat.

      The Californian has reported potential sex offenders trying to coax kids into a white van just a few blocks away.

  The result is close to 100 cars jamming an otherwise quiet residential street every morning and afternoon to drop off or pick up kids. Streets that are crumbling already from lack of maintainence.

  It just seems crazy to me that a state that wants to "reduce our carbon footprint" would allow something like this to happen.  Instead of 3 or 4 diesel busses we have 100 gas-burning cars making two trips a day on roads that look like alligator skin. The school district has basically transferred the cost of bussing to the parents and imposed a whole gamut of secondary expenses on the town of Bakersfield.  (Road wear, traffic congestion, lowered qualitiy of life in the affected neighborhood and the associated drop in property values, etc.)

.   The cost in time, fuel, lost wages, extra exhaust fumes,  and wear-and-tear on the roads is really riduculous when compared to runing a few efficient mass-transit vehicles.

I realize schools are facing some painful budget choices, but the "ripple effect" of this kind of thing is costing us all a lot more money than we realize.