Tech disrupts the school bus — A Silicon Valley start-up promised to modernize school transportation. Instead, it stranded thousands of students

AllNewTypeFace , 9 months ago

Did Silicon Valley try to reinvent the bus again?

charles , 9 months ago

The Baltimore Banner has some great investigative articles on this

Xianshi , 9 months ago

Of course it did 🙄.

Maven , 9 months ago

TL;DR a company called Zuma is trying to replace school busses with a fleet of smaller vans for 5-10 kids at a time to increase efficiency. “Like Uber for kids”. The routing software did not handle the addition of a new city well.

brygphilomena , 9 months ago

I was curious about the “technology” they used since the article didn’t talk about it and I didn’t want to listen to a podcast.

Having more drivers and smaller vehicles can get past a lot of the commercial drivers license requirements. Passenger endorsements are for 16 people or more.

It’s so strange though. People are forgetting why we have busses in the first place. Economies of scale, more efficient, fewer emissions, less traffic, etc.

nilloc , 9 months ago

Also big yellow school buses have an amazingly good safety record.

deweydecibel , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Safer, too. You generally don’t want smaller buses that anyone can drive without a CDL. You want the big, honkin yellow bois, that are some of the safest vehicles on the road, party because of their size and weight.

Also, and this was a problem in the roll out: more drivers means more need for substitutes to fill in when they call off. They had drivers just not show up for various reasons, and the kids were stuck.

People are forgetting why we have busses in the first place.

No one is forgetting. This is another idiotic startup with a solution in search of a problem. And one district got suckered into it. Most districts wouldn’t dream of adopting something as idiotic as this, and if they did, parents would revolt.

deweydecibel , 9 months ago

So…more drivers, and less safe vehicles. Flawless plan.

Amaltheamannen , 9 months ago

I wish I know what happened but I’m not listening to a whole podcast. What happened to posting articles.

Mr_Blott , 9 months ago

Yeah Lemmy has a massive problem with fuckers posting YouTube vids instead of articles too.

Not just that, but fuckin infantile thumbnails too 🤢

Corkyskog , 9 months ago

It’s not just Lemmy. It’s getting harder to find good text based articles to begin with. Nowadays your lucky to get a couple paragraphs before an embedded video that might be just an add, or the story…

magmaus3 , 9 months ago

just in case, there’s an transcript available: slate.com/…/QnYzZnlFdnRndGUrTTVkRThlZlEwTGhXQmk5W…

topinambour_rex , 9 months ago

Hakf of the time I feel like reading gibberish. Is it made by alexa ?

TheGreenGolem , 9 months ago

Worse. Cortana.

Mojojojo1993 , 9 months ago

Good. The amount of disruption the school run causes. Basically makes driving at 3ish a nightmare. Should be electric buses shuttling children.

Anyone who turns up in an SUV should be immediately expelled from the school

DampSquid , 9 months ago

Did you finish reading the title? Stranded children is good?

skymtf , 9 months ago

It was routing software, the bus its self was a normal bus.

DampSquid , 9 months ago

Haha, that’ll teach me to be sassy