Annual Student Rides is a method of calculating individual rides in an effort to establish total yellow school bus ridership. The figure for the United States is slightly more than an estimated 10 billion rides per year!

Nationwide, the state school bus officials report about 24,000,000 students ride school buses daily, and then proceed to report the total number of miles, about 4.3 billion, that school buses travel annually. It's like mixing metaphors. Clearly, the concept of daily rides of young people is dissimilar from annual miles that buses travel.

While the figure of 24,000,000 is accurate as far as it goes, it only counts one-way ridership and ignores all extracurricular rides. The Annual Student Ridership Formula answers how many individual student rides are provided, and does so by state!

In addition to the rides provided to publicly-funded K-12 students during the regular school year, the Annual Student Ridership Formula estimates an additional, minimum, one billion rides for private school and Head Start transportation during the regular school year, and summer school service.

The best way to understand Annual Student Rides is to examine three key industry terms. These terms were adopted by the 12th National Conference on Student Transportation in 1995. They are Student Rides, Activity Trips, and Field Trips:

Student rides: The number of students transported in a given system multiplied by the number of one-way trips in a school bus, e.g. a school district that transports 1,000 students provides 2,000 student rides daily, or 360,000 student rides to and from school annually. To determine the total number of student rides annually, the district would add the actual or estimated number of students transported on activity trips (times 2) to the figure above."

Activity trips: "The transportation of students to any event sanctioned for pupil attendance or authorized by an officer, employee or agent of a public or private school, other than to-and-from school transportation. See also Field Trips."

Field trips: The transportation of students to an event or destination which is an extension of a classroom activity, i.e. a part of the curriculum. A field trip is one type of activity trip."

Thus, the daily to-and-from school trips, plus activity or field trips, must be tabulated to arrive at the total number of Annual Student Rides. The number of trips to-and-from school is reported annually by the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services. The data reported is considered reliable as it is based on reimbursements to school districts. Activity trips or field trips are more difficult numbers to ascertain. Most states do not even tabulate these data.

In an effort to develop useable extracurricular data, the editor of School Transportation News has informally surveyed industry leaders for the past decade. While the estimates range far afield, no school transportation official has ever disputed that extracurricular trips account for a minimum of 10 percent additional ridership over and above the daily to and from ridership.

Thus, for purposes of the Annual Student Ride calculation the figure of 10 percent will be used. Following is the formula applied to Kentucky. It is based on daily one-way ridership data supplied by the Pupil Transportation Unit of the Kentucky Department of Education.

The methodology described above is actually a widely used formula in the passenger transportation business, though the terminology to describe it varies by industry.

Here for example, is the formula as employed by the American Public Transportation Association. APTA represents more than 1,000 public transit operators nationwide. APTA uses the term Unlinked Passenger Trip to report its ridership. The association reports about six billion unlinked trips by bus and three billion unlinked trips by rail transit annually. APTA's definition of APTA's Unlinked Passenger Trips counts individual rides.

"An Unlinked Transit Passenger Trip is a trip on one transit vehicle regardless of the type of fare paid or transfer presented. A person riding only one vehicle from origin to destination takes ONE unlinked passenger trip; a person who transfers to a second vehicle takes TWO unlinked passenger trips; a person who transfers to a third vehicle take THREE unlinked passenger trips. The number of unlinked transit passenger trips is about two to four times higher than the number of people riding transit; most people take two trips per day, those who transfer take four or six. A passenger is counted each time he/she boards a vehicle even though he/she may be on the same journey from origin to destination."

APTA reports that about 15 percent of its ridership is student ridership. The figure is broadly accepted but imprecise due to two factors: 1) public transit includes college and university ridership of students up to the age of 22, and 2) generally tabulates student rides for K-12 students only during weekdays and not weekends. Based on its methodology, the association calculates that federally funded public transit provides about 900,000,000 rides to students annually.

Annual Student Ridership by State