In many school districts, children with mental handicaps are often picked up for school by a small version of a school bus. It becomes a jokey reference to call someone mentally challenged if they “Ride the short bus”
To be clear, those are usually for any handicap, as they are outfitted with wheelchair access and usually have extra adults riding along to help.
They are (or at least were in my area at that time) much more comfortable, similar to public transit busses. I got to ride along with a friend with a muscular problem on one a few times in the late 90s early noughties and it was lux.
Our school uses them for pretty much all students with special needs not just mobility issues. It gives them a shorter route, less kids, more adult supervision, and the option for seatbelts.
The seatbelts are more so that the non-verbal autistic kids don’t start running down the aisles and pushing buttons while the bus is moving.
Also, kids aren’t “regular” or “irregular”….
Yeah, pretty much every American public school student understands that the shorter bus picks up the handicapped kids. It might take a few years before they’ve heard the mean-spirited phrase of “riding the short bus,” but it’s pretty much universally understood by the time a kid leaves elementary school.
I remember I got picked up by a short bus to take me to sports practice in middle school, and got teased mercilessly because of it. I can’t imagine what the handicapped kids had to deal with because of it. I try not to use the phrase myself, since you’re probably bringing up bad childhood memories from anyone who actually rode one of the smaller busses.
It’s astonishing to me that in a country as car-brained and individualistic as America, school buses are so ubiquitous that not only is everyone familiar with them, they’re even familiar with how their design changes for different minority groups.
Lol, the “individual freedom” is just the packaging for how they pitch it to workers.
The real beneficiaries of car-centric infrastructure are the employers, who get to purchase cheap land in the middle of nowhere and demand workers be able to get there as quick as physically possible with zero to little notice.
From that lens, of course American kids take the bus to school. Anything that would take adults away from their jobs for an extra minute is unacceptable.
I’m just passing by to marvel at how somebody on good old car-hating Lemmy managed to pull off the mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion “mass transportation (a bus) is bad now.”
Let’s not forget that having the means to pull in students from a disparate area was key in finally being able to desegregate schools, literally to the extent that motherfuckers to this very day use “busing” as a euphemism for, “We’re mad about there being black kids in our kids’ school.”
We should be able to talk about how one dynamic of a society impacts another, without having to extend that to a universal moral claim about whether an inanimate object aligns with the forces of good or evil.
Employers like that parents are able to come into the office early and not have to schedule their work day around school transportation
Employers have much more power than labor does, in deciding how the US operates
Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that even in a culture that otherwise prefers cars to an unreasonable degree (and, as you mentioned, has a tinge of racial stigma around school buses), we nonetheless think of buses as the default mode of school transportation
The thing is, Australia is only slightly better as regards motornormativity and individualism. But the American concept of school buses is rather foreign to us. Most kids are either driven to school or take the same public transport that everyone else uses.
Public transport is seen as being really sketchy and dangerous in America, so the idea of letting your kid ride it unattended is seen as neglectful in many areas. There’s even a whole Simpsons episode about it, where Homer is his classic idiot self, telling his kid to ride the bus like that’s okay, and spends the episode trying to find her when she inevitably ends up somewhere she’s not supposed to be. At the same time, parents are expected to be at work by the time the kids are going to school, so it’s not common to have the parents drive them, either. Thus, the ubiquity of the school bus.
In many school districts, children with mental handicaps are often picked up for school by a small version of a school bus. It becomes a jokey reference to call someone mentally challenged if they “Ride the short bus”
To be clear, those are usually for any handicap, as they are outfitted with wheelchair access and usually have extra adults riding along to help.
They are (or at least were in my area at that time) much more comfortable, similar to public transit busses. I got to ride along with a friend with a muscular problem on one a few times in the late 90s early noughties and it was lux.
Our school uses them for pretty much all students with special needs not just mobility issues. It gives them a shorter route, less kids, more adult supervision, and the option for seatbelts.
So regular kids don’t get to be safe? Oof.
The seatbelts are more so that the non-verbal autistic kids don’t start running down the aisles and pushing buttons while the bus is moving. Also, kids aren’t “regular” or “irregular”….
Oh huh. And this is common enough where you are that people use it as a metaphor and people broadly understand its meaning?
Yeah, pretty much every American public school student understands that the shorter bus picks up the handicapped kids. It might take a few years before they’ve heard the mean-spirited phrase of “riding the short bus,” but it’s pretty much universally understood by the time a kid leaves elementary school.
I remember I got picked up by a short bus to take me to sports practice in middle school, and got teased mercilessly because of it. I can’t imagine what the handicapped kids had to deal with because of it. I try not to use the phrase myself, since you’re probably bringing up bad childhood memories from anyone who actually rode one of the smaller busses.
It’s astonishing to me that in a country as car-brained and individualistic as America, school buses are so ubiquitous that not only is everyone familiar with them, they’re even familiar with how their design changes for different minority groups.
Lol, the “individual freedom” is just the packaging for how they pitch it to workers.
The real beneficiaries of car-centric infrastructure are the employers, who get to purchase cheap land in the middle of nowhere and demand workers be able to get there as quick as physically possible with zero to little notice.
From that lens, of course American kids take the bus to school. Anything that would take adults away from their jobs for an extra minute is unacceptable.
I’m just passing by to marvel at how somebody on good old car-hating Lemmy managed to pull off the mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion “mass transportation (a bus) is bad now.”
Let’s not forget that having the means to pull in students from a disparate area was key in finally being able to desegregate schools, literally to the extent that motherfuckers to this very day use “busing” as a euphemism for, “We’re mad about there being black kids in our kids’ school.”
When did I say mass transportation is bad?
We should be able to talk about how one dynamic of a society impacts another, without having to extend that to a universal moral claim about whether an inanimate object aligns with the forces of good or evil.
The thing is, Australia is only slightly better as regards motornormativity and individualism. But the American concept of school buses is rather foreign to us. Most kids are either driven to school or take the same public transport that everyone else uses.
A lot are driven to school, but our public transit is a literal joke.
Public transport is seen as being really sketchy and dangerous in America, so the idea of letting your kid ride it unattended is seen as neglectful in many areas. There’s even a whole Simpsons episode about it, where Homer is his classic idiot self, telling his kid to ride the bus like that’s okay, and spends the episode trying to find her when she inevitably ends up somewhere she’s not supposed to be. At the same time, parents are expected to be at work by the time the kids are going to school, so it’s not common to have the parents drive them, either. Thus, the ubiquity of the school bus.
In the US, yes. It was more common before the mid-2010s when the r-slur was very commonly used.
That slur is getting disturbingly popular on Lemmy.
Learned something today.