Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Distracted drivers.

My nephew recently graduated from Jeffersonville High School. The school is so large that commencement attendees were asked to park in a nearby big box retailer's lot and be shuttled in. My mother was excited. Having grown up in inner-city New Albany, it was the first time she'd ever ridden a school bus.

Things have changed.

New Albany-Floyd County CONSOLIDATED School Corporation buses travel roughly 1,000,000 miles per year. Fuel costs are so high adminstrators say it's worth spending additional money to install GPS tracking systems on the buses to try to determine more efficient routes.

And today they're closing the sale of one of the only walkable schools left in the corporation's inventory for a reported $415,000, helping to ensure that the driving inanity above will be much more difficult to correct in future.

I hope the homophobes enjoy it.

1 comment:

ian said...

The GPS systems are inefficient and far too expensive to justify. At a fraction of the costs, the school board could have hired an intern from the geography departments at IUS or UofL (or asked the city or county planning departments) to give them a full bus system analysis for connectivity, including calculations for impedance, restrictions, street hierarchy, and modeling turns.

They also could have applied for the Safe Routes to School program for federal money to save costs on busing that requires no local match.

But they probably didn't have the time, since they were too busy in their exhaustive exploration of ways to save money.