Boston Mayor Michelle Wu rides bus to school amid late arrivals, tracking app complaints

By Penny Kmitt

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    BOSTON, Massachusetts (WBZ) — Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is vowing to improve school bus efficiency and getting students to school on time, despite a tracking app that is still resulting in late arrivals to school and delays.

Boston parents report bus delays

Boston Public School officials thought the new app, Zum, would improve service and eliminate delays. Parents said that hasn’t been the case.

“And all of a sudden it just skipped his stop, I got him there 25 minutes late,” parent Cheryl Buckman said.

“He was supposed to be home at 5:05, didn’t get home until 6:18,” another parent told WBZ-TV.

Zum allows parents to track their child’s bus and get updates on delays. It also collects real time traffic data, which BPS officials will then use to create new, hopefully more efficient, routes every Tuesday night for the foreseeable future.

Mayor Michelle Wu takes bus to school

To test the app, Wu and Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper took the bus to Higginson-Lewis K-8 School and arrived about 20 minutes late, six minutes after classes began.

“When kids get here late, we still need to make sure they get breakfast, we still need to make sure that they’re greeted but that’s harder because our teachers and our students are already upstairs in their classes,” Higginson-Lewis K-8 principal Dana Skelly said.

Zum school bus app

Wu said her team will continuously analyze the data collected from the app to hopefully improve efficiency every week.

“We got lots of notes about, ‘OK, I’m going to move this sign to the end of the curb so that cars can’t park here and block the buses’ and so there’s little tweaks that we’ll keep making,” Wu said.

Currently, about 60% of BPS families use the Zum app. Wu is asking families to let their drivers know at least two hours early if their child won’t be taking the bus that day.

“That stop will be removed altogether, so the driver doesn’t even have to drive by that,” said Wu.

Wu said her goal is to get back to last year’s numbers of 95% percent of all BPS students getting to school within 15 minutes of the first bell. She said to get there will require collaboration between bus drivers, parents and administrators.

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