Some time ago, I was involved in a conversation with the local transit commission about introducing public transit to school children, many of whom have never been on a city bus. In this process I learned that the cost of any school trip roughly doubled due to the cost of a conventional school bus.

The school bus service policy was inflexible and they would only drive A-B, wait around, then return B-A, at a rate of a few hundred dollars an hour. Alternatively, a city bus could be chartered from the transit commission - at just over half the hourly cost - and would drive wherever you wanted to go. We determined we could use the same vehicle to double back to the school and transport another load of students to a different location at no additional cost.

Eventually we came to a schedule which had the bus driving A-B-A-C-A-D to deliver, then returning students again all within the regular school day. Three times the number of students transported, for half the cost of one class getting on a school bus.

The transit commission was so interested in getting young eyes to experience inner city travel, they offered an adult day pass to every student so they could go someplace with their parents. It was even said if more than one of these trips were arranged per year, they would discount the charter fees by half.

Overall this brought the per student travel expense down from ~50% to ~15% of the overall trip cost. Put another way, a conventional school bus trip with a price tag of say $50 for parents would drop by $20.

As it turned out, the head of the school board played golf with the owners of the school bus service.