This might sound like a very stupid questions to those in the know, but I'll take my chances.
Since most Dutch kids bike to school we don't have school buses here. They seem to pop up in many American TV programmes though. So how does the school bus system work? Do they have set routes and if you just happen to live on the route you can use the bus? Or do they come and pick up every kid, no matter where they live? Are the buses organised by every school for their own pupils? Do you have to pay for school buses?

All in all, I don't know ANYthing about school buses, apart from the fact that they exist. Please help me solve the mystery.

In Australia it is much like that, if you live near the bus stop, you can walk to the stop and get on the bus (in the Outback, usually mini buses are used [low numbers of students] and every child is picked up from outside their front gate, as it is sometimes km's to their houses ), if it goes to the nearest school to the childs house, it is free travel, if not, you have to pay the difference . . . in the States it is basically the same as that, bus fares are included in the school 'fee's, and, their School Buses are NEW ; it is appalling in Australia that many School Buses here are not new, the situation is improving tho' . . . with government 'loans'

My kids took a school bus for a few year. The stop was about a block and a half away and they walked there and back. I felt really sorry for the people who lived in the house by the bus stop though, because a lot of those kids were unaccompanied and badly behaved and a fair amount of damage happened on the front lawn with some degree of regularity.

Here, you pay if you live within walking distance, (in town) but if you are out in the country it is free. The bus goes usually to the end of the driveway, and when you move in to a house in the country you need to let them know that you are there and will require the service. So few kids in town here take the bus that the drivers seem to let them off at their houses, or at least at the end of their street.
When I lived in the city and took the bus to high school lo those many years ago it just stopped at a regular city bus stop, which we walked to. We had to pay.

Even though we didn't live in the country, my kids didn't have to pay for the school bus.
This was because the district we lived in had been assigned to a school that was far enough away that walking was not feasible for most of the kids, especially the younger ones. It would have taken anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to walk, with most of that being down very busy roads. Some of the older kids. with longer legs, might have been able to make it in half an hour, if they didn't dawdle along the way.
There were two schools physically closer to us, but they were both too full to accomodate us.

The same applies for us, Leau. Each bus is assigned a particular route and if you live in the district, you can catch the bus near your house -but only if you plan to attend the school designated for you. Otherwise, you are responsible for your own ride to school.
It is sad that the buses here are so out of control, discipline - wise, that there's no way I'd let my kids ride them. There have been several situations where fist fights have broken out and even knives drawn. My peace of mind is well worth the extra gas money.

Edited to add: I have always admired [especially] the traffic design in the Netherlands. By using bikes and walking, I am sure your traffic fatalities are much lower than ours, though I haven't seen any stats.

When I was just entering the work force in my 20's, I worked for a school district in the Transportation Office. Setting up the routes for a particular school was time consuming. In our district it was free to ride the school bus and, like ktstew said, if you went to a school outside of your specified area, you were responsible for your own transportation. There were specified stops that the students had to meet at; the bus did not go house to house. However, in order to qualify for the bus, a student had to live a particular distance from the school he/she was attending. For elementary (kindergarten through 6th grade) if they lived within 1/2 mile from the school, they had to walk. Over 1/2 mile and they qualified to ride. Junior High students (7th - 9th) had to walk 1 mile and High School students (10th - 12th) had to walk 2 miles. No matter what the weather was, you followed those rules. I'm sure it's different for other areas of the US because I lived in the desert southwest where the weather was mostly fair and warm anyway. In colder areas the distances may be shorter.

Ha, I live in a small enough town that there is nowhere in town that is considered too far to walk! Just the one public school, too.

In the city in which I grew up, there were very few school buses - mostly we took public transit and got a special rate. Our bus passes were much cheaper than those of other people, but we could not use them on weekends or after I think it was 6 pm.

Funding cuts in California have meant that busses have been cut down a lot more. Fewer districts are able to provide bus service for the entire area.

This district gives them discount passes on the city bus system.

Growing up however, they bussed us all into the one high school in a 320 mile radius. Leau, well, you were in the town the school was located in when you visited me, but, my parents' place is seven miles north of there.
I hated riding that bus with a passion because it went to every dairy farm and waited for the kid to come out. It took hours seemingly.

In France, they required some payment at one point, but it was subsidized by the township and on a sliding scale. It was extremely dangerous as we had no sidewalks out there on this windy road that everyone took and drove like fiends. We only let our kids take that bus when they were in the same school area which did not happen often.

When I was younger, we loved our bus drivers as they'd play Beatles music on the radio and we'd talk with our friends.

As my boys don't go to the nearest school we would have to pay approx £1400 to send them on the bus per year the bus stop is about a 10 minute walk from our house. There is only one bus each morning and evening that runs to the school, so when they stay for after school sports they still need collecting sometimes twice a week.

Luckily work commitments allows either hubby or I to take them in the morning. After school they often walk a couple of miles and get the bus home. This is their choice (they don't want to get the bus from outside the school as it passes at least 4 other schools on the way home), when they board the bus it is usually quite empty with people they know travelling to our village.

Here they have a school bus system, it is not free.

For years it was just for certain state schools and for some private schools (catholic schools), the state fee-paying school didn't have buses. After some shouting by us parents, the fee paying state schools got some buses, but still not as good a service as the private schools which wasn't fair.

Going to school in the morning, my kids had to be driven a mile and a half to the nearest bus stop for their school bus, the kids living across the road to us just walked around the corner for their bus. I can't really remember about the afternoon, my daughter's school had a bus which took them to the bus station so they could catch a normal bus home, I think my son might have been able to catch the bus with those from the private schools, they were close by.

Mostly they used to catch the normal buses home and I received a phone call once they got off and would then go to fetch them, sometimes they arrived half an hour apart which was not pleasing. I didn't expect them to walk a mile and a half at the end of the school day, apart from anything else, it was dark in winter.

By the way, I'm selling my house in one town and it's within walking distance of three schools. I think it was the major selling point.

This one is five minutes from the secondary school at best. You could virtually put your kid on a cable and send him out the window to school in the morning.

I see the minivans and SUVs all queuing up in the morning and afternoon but I know that high schoolers hate riding with their parents and I'm glad I live here.

Our public school system has free bussing to the closest school within your particular schoolboard. We can send our kids to any school we wish (within or outside of the schoolboard zone where we live) providing we work out/provide the transportation there and back --- schools themselves can refuse to accept students from out of their normal drawing area. (I'm not sure whether bussing to catholic/separate and private schools is free or if they have to pay.)

Bussing is available to anyone living 2km or further from the school --- all that is required is to let the schoolboard know that you have a child in school (I believe the school board is automatically notified if the child is registered prior to the start of the school year --- if you move into the area during the school year it is up to you to notify the board that you have a child that requires bussing to school.)

In most cases, kids here are picked up at the road (designated stop is at the end of their driveway) --- in some cases where there are several houses together and a common stop is justified (ie one stop instead of several stops within a few hundred feet of each other) a common designated stop is in place.
Kids here are required to be at the road before the bus arrives in the morning --- school buses legally do NOT have to stop if the kids are not at their designated stop. (Drivers are instructed NOT to stop if they aren't at the stop.)

Thanks for all the replies, they have certainly clarified things!

To be honest, I hadn't yet thought about the concept of walking to school. I'm so used to my bike that I hardly walk anywhere. Although, when I was in primary school, our school didn't have enough bike racks so only kids who lived further than 1 km away were allowed to bike to school. The rest had to walk.

The last time I made a comment about rain in the Netherlands, I got my comeuppance and it rained like we were there. However, the thing I don't get is that when it's raining really hard, do you put on ponchos and ride your bike anyway?
I rode my bike fourteen miles a day for years in school, but when it rained, I got a ride from someone.

Yes, we ride our bikes no matter what. I usually put on a rain suit (click here for a picture. That's not me though, it's just a random picture!). Last time I wore one was...today!

When I was in high school I could sometimes convince my mum or my best friend's mum to give us a ride to school. Usually though they told us we wouldn't melt so just get on that bike.

I would be in favour of new road rules when it rains: give all bikers right of way, as it's unfair to have to wait for people who are dry in their cars!

P.S. Of course, in high school it's not "cool" to wear a rain suit, so a lot of kids would show up in class completely soaked just because they thought they looked more fashionable. Glad I was never one of them!

Obviously the Dutch children are much hardier than ours, I am sure ours would melt.

Then again, when I lived in Scotland, I know they would leave the row of prams outside the shops because they knew that the air was good for their cheeks! Coming from a warmer clime, I couldn't get over that.
They had rain things for when it was raining, namely almost every day.


I figured as much for the Netherlands. I know I assumed that people just got used to riding bikes when they were little and grew up that way. Here, no kid wants to be seen wearing a raincoat either. Or an umbrella! No way!

Where I live in South Australia. Most primary school aged kids got driven to school. In high school though, more take the bus. we don't have a set school bus on the way to school, we have to catch public transport, but in the afternoon, the lucky people that live in or near the city, Carey Gully, or the Adelaide hills get a bus only for school kids. We still have to pay though.

There is a huge row going on here at present, 'they' changed the school bus operators at the beginning of this year and there is under capacity so some children are sitting three to a seat (instead of two) and some are standing. The buses are supposed to have seat belts but obviously do not.

Typical government mess, they changed our ordinary bus operator to Connex a few years ago and there were all manner of problems, now the school bus runs changed to Connex too. One wonders why, the previous bus operator was far cheaper for them for both the regular buses and the school bus service.