In New York, the straightforward task of transporting children to and from school has become a morass of good and bad intentions, shortsighted marketplace policies and outright corruption.

Image Credit The New York Times

For decades, the city has embraced anticompetitive measures and carried on business relations with an array of bus companies, including some that have been implicated in bribery, been under the sway of organized crime and, in one case, run by a man who displayed a pistol at a negotiating session.

Both union leaders and city employees have gone to prison for shaking down bus companies, offering in return labor peace, advance notice of inspections or approval of lucrative extra routes.

Educational policies, driven both by the Bloomberg administration and the federal government, that afford parents greater choice in where to send their children, as well as extended school days, have also helped to drive up costs, in part because of longer distances the buses must travel, along more tailored routes. The special education population has also mushroomed in the last three decades, school officials say, and now represents about a third of the 150,000 students who receive busing, with increasing numbers of them being taken beyond the city’s borders. The city in some cases is constrained by how many of these students can be placed on a bus and for how long, which can drive up the number of routes and costs, city officials said. Busing costs the city $1.1 billion today, compared with $100 million in 1979.

Efforts to wrestle down the costs have been delayed by the city’s basic needs; a lawsuit; a notorious failed experiment in 2007 when the city tried to revise the busing network in midyear; and an unwillingness to challenge the calcified system that was, in some quarters, popular.