The costs of living when gasoline is no longer cheap

Robbie Sutton, an employee with Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools Transportation Department, fills a bus with diesel fuel at Southern Nash High School in Bailey, N.C., Thursday, May 29, 2008. Every three and a half school days, Nash-Rocky Mount School buses consume 7500 gallons of fuel. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

We are likely at the very beginnings of a shift in the dominant land use and transportation "planning" paradigm of one built on cheap oil. Cheap oil enabled segrated uses and the great distance between activity centers and destinations (shopping, school, work, education, other services, friends) was made up through driving.

This doesn't just impact individuals but institutions as well, including school systems and freight delivery. Moving from having walkable communities to driving-required communities meant that school systems had to create transportation infrastructures (school buses) to bring children to and from school. When the cost of diesel fuel quadruples, that puts organizations with constrained budgets in a picke.

This is but one of the things that's going to have to change. The Wall Street Journal wrote about this last week, in "Yellow Buses Put Schools in the Red." And the Baltimore Sun wrote about a desire for neighborhood schools in Baltimore County, in "The next big thing: smaller schools." Baltimore County, like most suburban counties, places schools in a fashion where they are distant from the houses of most of the students enrolled at the school.

Sadly, in DC, we are developing a school bus infrastructure to address federal mandates for the transport of special education students. This is a huge hard to manage cost. Otherwise, city-based students can walk to school or take transit although young children generally can't get to school without being chaperoned. (I don't remember if I walked to school by myself in kindergarten and first grade. I think I did. The schools were a few blocks away on city streets in Detroit.)

People might say that DC is going in the wrong direction by closing schools. But there is a difference. DC has a school building infrastructure built for a time when there were more than 100,000 students in the schools. Now the number, including charters, is less than 75,000. There is a careful balance required with rightsizing the system, with maintaining neighborhood-based schools. While I don't think that the DCPS is probably dealing with this perfectly, it does need to be done. However, it's unfortunate that it is being done in a fashion which maximizes rather than minimizes the costs and difficulties of change, in a school system that is already experiencing massive dislocation.