UCLA

Every school day in the United States roughly 55 million students ages 5 through 18 set out on a journey to school. Many students in the U.S. live too far from school to walk. For these students, each state and school district sets policies about school bus service—including which students are eligible for it and who pays for it—which in turn affect the school travel options from which a family can choose. Researchers have studied how children travel on this journey, especially whether they walk or bike to school, but scholars have rarely considered how public policies and funding decisions about school transportation affect students’ travel choices. To address this gap in the literature, my dissertation answers the following research question: To what extent are institutional factors, such as state and local school district policies about school bus eligibility and funding, associated with how students travel to and from school, controlling for student, school, and other relevant characteristics? I consider this question broadly across the U.S. and specifically for California, using two novel datasets of the school transportation policies of the 50 U.S. states and 119 randomly selected California school districts. I link these policies to student travel behavior data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). I also use travel behavior data from the 2001, 2009, 2017, and 2022 iterations of the NHTS to assess how school travel mode selection has changed over time. This dissertation advances the literature on school transportation and travel by establishing the significant role of state and local policy in how families select travel mode. My research finds little practical change in how students commute to school from 2001 to 2022, a finding that departs from substantial changes in the three decades prior. Meanwhile, across the U.S., school transportation policies varied substantially from state to state. At the district level in California, a state without strong school transportation policy or funding, school district transportation policies varied widely in the absence of state requirements. State support (legislative and/or financial) for school bus service was associated with a downstream increase in students’ use of the school bus. Far fewer California students were eligible for school bus service than students in the rest of the U.S. and, in turn, far fewer of them traveled by school bus. In all, I find that policy plays an important role in how students travel to school. In particular, state policy enables and encourages more students to use the school bus and fewer students to rely on private cars. For education policymakers, this dissertation can inform how state and district leaders create or amend school transportation policies and how they allocate resources toward these programs, all of which potentially improve equitable access to educational opportunities. These findings can also expand transportation planners’ thinking about how to reduce automobile use—and in turn reduce greenhouse gas emissions and traffic congestion—by leveraging school bus service for children in addition to encouraging the use of public transit among adults.