According to the latest online survey results of the digital survey platform “Pollfish”, 34% of parents are most worried about the safety of their children when riding school buses. The second concern is the contagion of COVID-19. More than 60% of the respondents believe that the existing school bus system is outdated and needs to use technology to make it safer, more efficient and more environmentally friendly.
Taipei, TAIWAN (Merxwire) – According to the results of an online questionnaire released by the digital survey platform “Pollfish” from April 28 to 30 this year, 34% of parents are most worried about their children’s safety when riding the school bus. 18% of them are concerned about COVID-19 contagion in vehicle interiors. 10% are most concerned about the difficulty of tracking or the lack of transparency of information during traffic, and there will be another layer of safety concerns. More than 60% of the respondents believe that the existing school bus system is outdated and needs to use modern technology to make it safer, more efficient, and more environmentally friendly.
Problems with the current school bus system
The survey was conducted among 3,500 American adult parents with school-aged children who are accustomed to the convenience, immediacy, and transparency of modern technology. Including real-time information on children’s health insurance, monitoring the usage time of children’s tablets and mobile phones, their children’s browsing webs, various real-time messages, and positioning, etc., so that parents can quickly arrange various affairs of their children at the same time. Only their children’s school buses make progress slowly, and difficult to predict the dangers they may encounter. They will worry that they cannot be dealt with immediately.
Therefore, safety is the most important issue for parents, including all conditions on the road, driving quality and safety, whether the safety facilities in the car are complete and intact, and the atmosphere of students in the same car is all issues that parents consider. Surveys show that more than 40% of parents are concerned about bullying.
According to the National Blood Epidemic Survey in the United States, after the outbreak of COVID-19, more than half of Americans have been infected with the disease. Among them, children and adolescents aged 12 to 17 have the highest infection rate, as high as 75%, mainly due to the late start of the vaccination. More than a million people across the United States have died from the disease. Therefore, the high infection rate of school-aged children also makes nearly half of parents worry that their children will be infected with COVID-19 while riding the school bus.
Student transportation is the largest public traffic system in the United States, with approximately 500,000 school buses across the country, serving approximately 27 million students every day to and from school. The equipment, hardware, and software systems in the school bus that have not been updated for a long time have resulted in poor overall operation efficiency. Many parents believe that the old and traditional model makes it difficult for students to enroll across school districts, and also affects the educational rights of students in certain areas where school buses do not reach or school bus services are less frequent.
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Making School Bus Transportation Better
In addition to the need to update the hardware and software of the school bus, parents also want to be able to grasp the dynamic location of the school bus in a more real-time manner or set up monitoring screens to let them know when their children can go out for a ride and when they will be home. Through modern technology, the process of riding the school bus is made more transparent, and the most important safety issues are solved.
58% of parents feel that the commuting time is too long for school-aged children, and 55% of parents believe that it is because of route design and lack of resources that it is so inefficient. At the same time, parents also believe that long commuting time will affect children’s mental health and education rights. They hope to re-plan the route, reduce the traffic time, improve the efficiency of the route, and increase the choice of students to study.
More than half of the parents believe that the school bus time is not flexible, and they think that such time is difficult for working parents to pick up and drop off their children. So they want more choice and flexibility in school bus schedules. More than half of the parents are in favor of converting more than 90% of diesel school buses to electric vehicles, to avoid children’s exposure to the toxic fumes emitted by school buses, and also to reduce air pollution and the greenhouse effect.
It is hoped that through better planning and the use of technology, the safety and convenience of children’s commuting to school will be ensured, the round-trip time will be reduced, and children will have more time to study or play. The transparent and safe driving process can protect children and reassure parents. The new and more comfortable space is beneficial to children, parents, and drivers in charge of driving. It is indeed a goal worth working on together.