Pay a consultancy $200,000 to design routes. How on earth did they not realise that would go wrong. And all because they would not pay enough to attract new drivers.
My local school system pays very well to be a bus driver. The issue here isnt pay, it’s the weird split-up day and the fact that kids, by and large, are assholes. No one wants to deal with that, even for a good livable wage.
I’m a bus driver and I fucking love the split-up day since the break in the middle gives me a chance to go for a bike ride, have lunch and a nap before going back for the afternoon run. But the wage is really not “livable” even though the hourly rate is decent, since we only get 4-5 hours of work a day.
I mean… if nobody wants to do a job for the pay allotted, then the pay is by definition too low. You can make other changes that bring the acceptable pay range down (make kids not be assholes or something idk) but in the end it’s always about the pay at the end of the day.
