School-Oriented Development: Bridging the Divide Between Education and Transportation Planning

[00:00:05.950] - Em Hall

Welcome to Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning, where we're bringing you a series of interviews with pioneers and industry leaders who are offering insights into the most challenging issues facing our field. This podcast is produced by the American Planning Association's Transportation Planning Division. TPD connects planners working across all transportation modes to share innovation, foster collaboration, and advocate for sustainable mobility solutions.

 

[00:00:33.120] - Divya Gandhi

I'm Divya Gandhi, a transportation planner and a member of the Transportation Planning Division Board.

 

[00:00:39.970] - Em Hall

And I'm Dr. Em Hall, an urban planning consultant and member of the TPD Board of Directors.

 

[00:00:46.370] - Divya Gandhi

In this episode, we speak with Matthew Palmer, a senior research scholar and school camp project director at North Carolina State University. We really enjoyed this conversation. Let's get right into it. Well, Matthew, welcome to Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning. I want to start by thanking you for being here with us today at the National Planning Conference in Detroit and for all the work that you've been leading across school systems and all national transportation efforts. So to start us off today, what brought you into this intersection of planning and transportation, and what has shaped your perspective along the way?

 

[00:01:30.780] - Mathew Palmer

Good afternoon, Divya. It's good to see you, and Em, as well. Excited to be here today. I began my career as a classroom teacher in South Central Los Angeles in California. California, like other states, does not necessarily guarantee nor provide school yellow bus transportation to all students. And so in many larger urban school systems, It's a reality that students arrive at school through a variety of modes. They have the school bus, sometimes walking and biking if it's close enough, transit, light rail, passenger vehicle, even heavy rail. Students are truly getting to school in nearly every mode of travel.

 

[00:02:12.590] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:02:12.980] - Mathew Palmer

What I was able to experience in a challenging way was that arriving to school on time and ready to learn is essential to what happens in the classroom towards our goals and ambitions with public education. What it means, particularly in the urban education environment, is that students' school day does not start when the bell time starts.

 

[00:02:37.260] - Em Hall

Hmm.

 

[00:02:37.360] - Mathew Palmer

The school day starts when they exit or enter in— exit the home or enter the community on a near daily basis. That's over 5,000 trips across the course from kindergarten through 12th grade.

 

[00:02:50.240] - Em Hall

Wow.

 

[00:02:50.650] - Mathew Palmer

So you're setting travel mode choices at an early phase in life. What I also understood is that because we don't have guaranteed transportation service and there are gaps in our transportation networks, what that means is that ultimately students arriving and ready to learn doesn't happen as often as we hope it does. The percentage of absenteeism or not going to school at all is well into the 10, 20, 30% depending on school district in the country. In some school districts, it's as high as 70% of students that don't attend daily.

 

[00:03:23.180] - Em Hall

My gosh.

 

[00:03:23.820] - Mathew Palmer

There's a lot of reasons for that, but the structural reasons have to do with getting kids from home to school and the variability by state. I was focused on the lived experience of children. As planners, we oftentimes look at issues in a land use transportation lens, talk about distance and VMT and other technical terms, when we put on our child eyes for a moment and we think through what is the lived experience in the day in the life of a child, from when they wake up to when they go to bed, and transportation is the link and the bridge between home and school. And we generally say that mobility has 2 dimensions. One is transportation— where can I get—

 

[00:04:03.230] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:04:03.940] - Mathew Palmer

An education— how do I grow in getting to those places? So when we think of mobility as having multiple axes as far as, yes, transportation, mobility, and access, but also what am I obtaining in skills when I get to those places?

 

[00:04:19.490] - Divya Gandhi

Uh-huh.

 

[00:04:20.550] - Mathew Palmer

We have many students that have geographic isolation. We talk about food deserts and other areas in which we don't have all of the public amenities. Transportation is the way that we bridge students to those amenities, and school travel really is kind of at the core of many issues in our society. I could go into my career and the steps in the pathway to get there, but let me ask you this. When you were children, how did you get to school?

 

[00:04:44.100] - Em Hall

I was just thinking of that question. So we had yellow bus service. I grew up in Indianapolis in, what were they called, the township schools? So there was Indianapolis Public Schools, and then the townships were the outer ring right outside the interstate. There was an active school busing program when I was going to school in the '80s. And so we had kids coming in from inside 465 and coming out to our schools. And that was provided for everybody. Yellow bus service was kindergarten through 12th grade if you needed it. I did have access to a family car later on, which meant I had to pick up all my friends on the way to school, and that was fine. But yeah, that was my experience.

 

[00:05:25.570] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah, I went to school in India, primary school and high school, and I We always had a school bus to get to school too. Yeah.

 

[00:05:35.130] - Mathew Palmer

Hmm.

 

[00:05:35.550] - Divya Gandhi

It was the way to get to— yeah.

 

[00:05:38.160] - Mathew Palmer

All over the world, you know, over a billion students are going to school every day.

 

[00:05:42.810] - Em Hall

Hmm.

 

[00:05:44.030] - Divya Gandhi

Yep.

 

[00:05:44.570] - Mathew Palmer

They're setting in their travel mode experiences and expectations before we ever get to them as, you know, 45-year-olds trying to get them to mode shift. Those modes are codified at an early age. I had the unique experience and opportunity to work as an intern when I was in grad school in Ghana with the UN Environmental Program. We were looking at emissions and energy generation in Ghana. But it was the actual experience going every day and watching a 7-level transportation system in Accra, Ghana go from really moving 2 million people around and children by themselves in, you know, really suited and booted from the get-go. Kindergartners in suits navigating an entire transportation system by themselves in the negotiating fare and rates with the driver of informal transportation systems. And you realize, you know, in the US, and I think to your point, we have history and culture and legacy. We've used school transportation as a means to balance demographic imbalances.

 

[00:06:45.640] - Em Hall

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:06:46.620] - Mathew Palmer

And that's a notable— that's been a pursuit in the progressive service of education for a long time. In a more global context, The yellow school bus does often not exist in its current iteration in the US. And so when we focus on that trip, we're actually beginning to introduce children to their communities. In the UK and in New Zealand and Australia, we call it children's geographies. How do children see the city? And how do they see themselves in the city?

 

[00:07:15.330] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah.

 

[00:07:16.440] - Mathew Palmer

I was just in Manhattan, and when you watch school get out at 3:30 and the streets are flooded with kids that are not being chaperoned and You know, we do a lot of, call it hand-holding, with school transportation. When we allow children to be part of the fabric of the city and we plan for all users, not only do children benefit, their parents, their grandparents, and the broader community benefits.

 

[00:07:37.770] - Em Hall

Right.

 

[00:07:38.350] - Mathew Palmer

So at its core, we've identified a land use, school facility, housing, school boundaries even conversation. I mean, you were talking about student assignment, all of these layers of where do children live, where is their housing, and the density of that housing and its connectivity to the transportation network. Mm-hmm.

 

[00:07:54.220] - Divya Gandhi

Totally.

 

[00:07:54.770] - Mathew Palmer

Where are those schools built? And how do those bridges ultimately play out in their lived experiences as far as what modes they can take and what impacts them on the journey?

 

[00:08:03.860] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm. Totally. Well, what you're saying, Matthew, really resonates. You know, when we focus on that trip to school, we're not just moving children from point A to B, but we're actually introducing them to their communities and shaping how they experience that from a very early age. Building on that, today you've mentioned that seeing how kids got to school is what really pulled you into transportation and community planning and land use, as you just mentioned. What was it that you were observing on those streets that shaped not just, you know, your interest in the field, but also the kind of researcher and practitioner that you've come to become?

 

[00:08:44.360] - Mathew Palmer

Yeah, what I, what I observed, I'll start From the experiential perspective, again, looking at it through child eyes, is I would have students tell me stories about— I worked at a last chance charter school in South Central near Crenshaw High School. So it was in a makeshift commercial land use sort of— they actually made Master Locks, the metal locks. And so there would be a metal saw on the other side of the wall as I was teaching science about, you know, an inconvenient truth in climate change. Quite ironic. And so And so I would hear from my students that had come from 2 hours away that they wake up at 4 AM to get the light rail in Los Angeles, to get to a bus, to get to another bus, to then walk half a mile through a gang-infested neighborhood.

 

[00:09:29.760] - Em Hall

Sure.

 

[00:09:31.780] - Mathew Palmer

They were more mature at the time. I was, I think, 23, and they were largely 16, 17, and 18. They had more experience. Mature might not be the word, but they certainly had wisdom and experience as far as navigating the city and the complexity of the gaps in our transportation systems. And they would say that, you know, I didn't make it to school till 10, but the reason was all of these things that happened through the course of the day.

 

[00:09:55.920] - Em Hall

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:09:57.040] - Mathew Palmer

I began then getting into geospatial analysis at Cal State Northridge just as a teacher, taking night classes. So I would teach all day, then drive 4 hours up the 405 from Hawthorne, more or less, to Northridge. That's about a 4-hour commute.

 

[00:10:14.110] - Em Hall

Oh my gosh.

 

[00:10:14.850] - Mathew Palmer

Listening to podcasts on transportation and land use planning back in the early 2000s. Oh my gosh. Getting into GIS and asking the question, am I more a geographer or planner? I tacked it down that in GIS and geospatial analysis, we're looking at problems. Planning is trying to fix the problem. Right? Knowledge to action, very much in the John Friedman framework. So I ended up at UCLA. with a variety of spatial justice professors that really gave me insight into the right to the city, what it means to have access as a human right, as a public good. And ultimately, I was asking the question in retort, well, who thinks about children in cities? And the answer very quickly was, well, no one does. You're asking questions that should be asked, but we're not really looking at it in planning.

 

[00:11:02.600] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:11:03.730] - Mathew Palmer

The Center for Cities and Schools at UC Berkeley had more of a pedagogical, instructional, and a little school facilities focus. I was really looking at it from a transportation lens. I ended up, after graduating UCLA, at the National Center for Safe Routes to School, which was based in UNC Chapel Hill, which then brought me into my doctoral program, and the discovery that we had in the College of Engineering at NC State University one of the most robust student enrollment and transportation systems and methods in the country.

 

[00:11:34.190] - Divya Gandhi

Oh, wow.

 

[00:11:34.350] - Mathew Palmer

And so they brought me on almost as a postdoc to begin to explore what could we build. That was in 2015.

 

[00:11:41.180] - Divya Gandhi

Wow.

 

[00:11:41.350] - Mathew Palmer

And it's now almost 12 years later.

 

[00:11:44.650] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah.

 

[00:11:45.070] - Mathew Palmer

But we've been bringing together really 3 core constructs around— we jokingly say babies, buildings, and buses. But we look at a land use transportation problem and are really trying to bridge it functionally and say student enrollment, where schools are built, and ultimately your transportation design are going to inform the lived experience for children. So I'm the director of the project. We call it School Camp, but it's school and community-aligned master planning where we're bringing transportation into an otherwise more educational policy topic that we've never really brought those worlds together. Concurrently, in 2015, we started the Public Schools Interest Group with APA. And at that time, we're really focused on enrollment and facilities. And transportation oftentimes is one of those dot, dot, dot, right? Oh yes, there's a transportation impact for where we build the school or student assignment. What I've discovered is we have a systems-level problem, and have devoted my career to kind of bridging that space as a practitioner and a researcher in transportation, ultimately through the means of student assignment and school planning.

 

[00:12:51.040] - Em Hall

Where do you think that divide comes from? Why have education and transportation not evolved together, but even have sort of diverged in some ways?

 

[00:12:59.150] - Mathew Palmer

Yeah, it's a really juicy story. Spill the beans, Ryan. It's really exciting. I want to kind of go into 2 phases of planning history in concurrency with education. So starting with the Graft era in the early 1900s of New York especially, we were seeing where the politicization of public education— remembering that uniform public education has only existed in its own existence for about 100 years.

 

[00:13:26.630] - Divya Gandhi

Sure.

 

[00:13:26.760] - Mathew Palmer

So we're not talking about hundreds and hundreds of years to get to this point.

 

[00:13:30.920] - Divya Gandhi

Right.

 

[00:13:31.660] - Mathew Palmer

But in the early days of public education, it became highly politicized. And so the decision was made to separate the apparatus of city council and county commissioners, which is a politically appointed and elected series of decisions, from public education. That it was in the interest to keep that nonpartisan and apolitical. Correspondingly, what it meant is over the last 100 years, almost like the Galápagos Islands, planning for schools has taken its own you could call it a practical drift away from the evolution of transportation. There are some folks in a school district that might know GIS or their transportation director has some familiarity with school bus routing.

 

[00:14:09.640] - Em Hall

Sure.

 

[00:14:11.070] - Mathew Palmer

But where we are today as a planning field is light-years, almost another planet from where this started. And concurrently, the industry of transportation and land use planning has evolved in its own way. Schools were once at the heart of it. So I'll take you to phase 2. Phase 1 was we separated boards of education politically from city council and county commissioner. Phase 2 was then Clarence Perry and the Regional Plan Association in New York placing schools in the heart of the neighborhood plan unit in 1929.

 

[00:14:42.360] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:14:42.760] - Mathew Palmer

If you look at the Midwest especially, you can see many communities across the country that as they were industrializing and building out in the '20s, '30s, and '40s, schools were at the epicenter of emergent neighborhoods. That was 100 years ago.

 

[00:14:58.260] - Em Hall

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:14:59.050] - Mathew Palmer

Demographics have shifted. Aging in place, we can talk about. But ultimately what it's meant is that where once schools were at the heart of a community, we have begun to build larger schools that are oftentimes at the edges of community, which themselves propagate sprawl, which then turns farmland into neighborhoods because they're near the school. So it could be a wonderful story of coordinating public investment to have to yield the best outcomes. Unfortunately, because of the way that we've separated over the last 100 years, that does not occur. And you mentioned your experience on the school bus in Indianapolis, and that's exactly what many Americans have experienced, where we started thinking of transportation not only as an access to get to school, but to overcome other land use, residential patterning, segregation.

 

[00:15:47.760] - Em Hall

Right.

 

[00:15:49.280] - Mathew Palmer

In the modern day, we're left with some legacy of both, of neighborhood schools and using schools to balance enrollment. What that's meant is transportation, and I would say largely planning, has left this topic a little bit into saying, well, that's the schools, they need to figure that out.

 

[00:16:04.180] - Em Hall

Right, right.

 

[00:16:05.380] - Mathew Palmer

Here's the, here's the boil the water. There's 3 points I would want to make to you all. Number one, schools are the largest employer and the largest investment that we make in infrastructure in most communities, particularly at a local expenditure level. Yes, we spend a lot on roads, but oftentimes that's state and federal. From a local expenditure level, schools account oftentimes for half of a county's budget, particularly when it comes to capital. So we make jobs and we make jobs through building schools.

 

[00:16:34.250] - Em Hall

And you're just talking like K-12 here, right? Not even universities or anything like that.

 

[00:16:37.680] - Mathew Palmer

Yep, just K-12. Schools and roads are the number 1 and number 2 public infrastructure investments in the country. We plan for roads very concretely, no pun intended. Planning for schools, we have kind of left it alone. So that's number 1. Number 2, schools account for 20% of the cost of living when it relates to acquisition of a home or renting a home. The proximity and quality of a school influences how much it costs to live there. And then number 3, and this is a big one for our listeners today, schools account for at least 30% of morning travel congestion.

 

[00:17:15.870] - Divya Gandhi

Wow.

 

[00:17:16.680] - Mathew Palmer

So one, we create jobs. We impact housing and are impacted by housing. And then 3, for those of us that have focused on vehicle miles traveled, emissions, and congestion, this is quite literally the lowest-hanging fruit that we have out of the door.

 

[00:17:34.750] - Em Hall

Yeah.

 

[00:17:36.110] - Mathew Palmer

So there is a separation, but there is also an opportunity. I think in our world we have to learn language, right? And I invoke transportation and travel congestion as an opportunity for us as an industry and as a field of planning to talk about shared objectives. People want kids to be able to get to school on time. It really is that easy.

 

[00:18:00.430] - Divya Gandhi

Hmm.

 

[00:18:01.470] - Mathew Palmer

And at the same time, while that motive is not necessarily the motive of an MPO or county or a city transportation department, congestion and quality of life certainly are. And we can talk about the other indirect benefits like broader public health, childhood obesity, emissions, we can get to all of those levels by focusing our efforts. I might almost say in the abundance there, saying we're doing great hard work, but we're not flying together.

 

[00:18:27.070] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to— yeah, I want to focus a little bit on that in a way that, you know, you've developed tools to quantify these economic benefits that you just started talking about and the costs associated with school siting decisions. How do you use data to make the case to people who aren't already, you know, converts on school boards, real estate developers, elected officials? And what still doesn't translate into a spreadsheet?

 

[00:19:01.160] - Mathew Palmer

So I'll use a good example. We had a Board of Education in North Carolina that over the summer in a closed session in June decided to close one of the 2 high schools. The enrollment had fallen to the point where they didn't need— from a facility enrollment and capacity perspective, they didn't need 2 schools.

 

[00:19:19.120] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:19:20.250] - Mathew Palmer

Now, when you consider consolidation and closure, you're saving money on staffing positions, maybe the energy bill, right? That's on the benefit side. But on the cost side, any of us that are transportation planners, if you have 2 nodes and you eliminate one, you're going to have more travel. Well, it ended up the money they thought they were saving on the staffing and the energy was more than overcome by the additional 30 bus drivers and the buses that they would need to acquire with the fuel to operate the buses. Wow.

 

[00:19:53.340] - Divya Gandhi

Goodness.

 

[00:19:54.010] - Mathew Palmer

So to get to your question, it is a conversation about, number one, systems planning. When we pull the thread, remember I said babies, buildings, and buses. They took a building offline. They had the same number of students, but that had derivative impact on transportation.

 

[00:20:09.970] - Em Hall

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:20:10.560] - Mathew Palmer

We talk about systems planning, we're really looking at that intersectional demography, land use, and transportation piece. I can't say that in a board meeting about those terms. What we have to talk about is the price of gas, the cost of milk, right? The things that people experience, and especially in these times, the direct budget implications of choice. And so to your question, Divya, what I really tried to do is lay down a few different frameworks. Number one, Do we have clarification and specification on the problem that we're trying to solve, and do we have good data that's informing that problem? Or are we going into closed board sessions using lived experience and making hunches on which schools we should keep open, right? The true cost of operating a school district isn't just building a school and staffing it, it's also running it.

 

[00:20:56.330] - Divya Gandhi

Right.

 

[00:20:56.790] - Mathew Palmer

I spent 6 years running Durham Public Schools in North Carolina, and these conversational points were at the heartbeat of what we were trying to do to make sure that when we make decisions about enrollment, we're also mindful of the transportation operational and fiscal impacts.

 

[00:21:11.090] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:21:11.780] - Mathew Palmer

At the same time, and this is looking more intergovernmentally or from collaboration to a developer or a school system, excuse me, city council, when we think about other stakeholders and why they should care about schools, we do have to talk in— there are one, there is a fractionalization of incentives. So what is motivating the transportation planners, often at a city, county, state, or federal level, tends to do with access and mobility. We do a lot of modeling in regards to trip generation and what it means for congestion and roadway capacity.

 

[00:21:43.920] - Em Hall

Right, right.

 

[00:21:45.700] - Mathew Palmer

At the same time, the incentives for why we do that fiscally are at an entirely different level. They're often coming from state and federal budgets. What we're talking about here are local budgets. And so you have this sort of pulling apart of different budgetary incentives for why we should work together. Transportation, hard infrastructure often is state and federal. What we're talking about with daily operating school systems is oftentimes county and local.

 

[00:22:11.910] - Em Hall

Hmm.

 

[00:22:12.160] - Mathew Palmer

There are ways to wed those 2 worlds together. And typically that is to your point about the cost of building a school isn't just building it, it's where we build it.

 

[00:22:22.850] - Em Hall

Right.

 

[00:22:22.990] - Mathew Palmer

That's going to have impact for operating the school transportation system, and it'll have impact for people getting to work and the broader capacities of the local roadways.

 

[00:22:32.810] - Divya Gandhi

Right, right. So, talking about stakeholders and also sort of thinking about, you know, our entire communities coming together, I'm curious, you know, when, when you look at schools this way as a systems-level force shaping everything from housing patterns to daily mobility, what do you see as you know, the biggest opportunity to rethink how we plan around schools, not just for the students, but for our entire communities.

 

[00:23:01.800] - Mathew Palmer

I mentioned that I ran or operated Durham Public Schools for 6 years. We got through not only COVID-19, we did a generational school boundaries project. We were able to do free breakfast and lunch for all students. We built 4 schools. And after having done all of that work in support of bringing together these different domains, I want to say a school district in most communities is the largest transit provider, is the largest restaurant, has the most books in libraries, has parks. We call them playgrounds, right? All of these amenities are located in schools. I would say that if we have an opportunity, it's to reconceptualize schools as community mobility hubs.

 

[00:23:46.670] - Divya Gandhi

Interesting.

 

[00:23:47.410] - Mathew Palmer

We've done transit-oriented development. What if we really conceptualize from a residential and program service level, co-locating or with adjacency, bringing those services at or near schools? And when we direct transportation access around those nodes and those hubs, again, we did transit-oriented development, we continue to do that across the country. That same idea of clustering services around a fixed point. Children are already going to school. Can they also, you know, this is where we go to vote. This is where we go in times of crisis. These are resiliency hubs for energy, for food when we don't have those opportunities in other parts. We're supporting Asheville and Buncombe County that went through Hurricane Helene.

 

[00:24:30.380] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:24:31.420] - Mathew Palmer

And they're saying schools are where everyone came when the hurricane hit Appalachia.

 

[00:24:35.130] - Em Hall

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:24:36.410] - Mathew Palmer

So a school is much more than just where we learn and provide instruction. It's where we really are a conduit and throughput to many of the public services that we support families with. I'll never forget figuring out how to provide food for 30,000 students in Durham, North Carolina with COVID and social distancing. And we realized that it was transportation hubs that we had to deploy food at. So we would map out 100 different community stops, and that's where our school buses would pull up and families, hundreds at a time, would come and be fed through distributing that way.

 

[00:25:11.920] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:25:13.450] - Mathew Palmer

So I'm saying that to say that schools really are community anchors.

 

[00:25:17.240] - Divya Gandhi

Yes.

 

[00:25:17.720] - Mathew Palmer

We've been there 100 years ago with Clarence Perry's model. We've gotten busy with a lot of other things as far as our other competing priorities. We understand that people need to get to work on time and that we need to keep traffic moving. But when we are thoughtful about where we build schools and really braiding together service, often in rural communities it's the school bus and the transit service provider that are the only vehicles that go down that road that day?

 

[00:25:45.420] - Em Hall

Right.

 

[00:25:45.530] - Mathew Palmer

Do we have to have 2? Right. In these times with, with where we are at budgetarily at a federal, state, and local level, this is where my team came online. So a year ago, I started with the idea that we really have an opportunity in this country to bring together transportation and land use planning at a school district, city, and county level. My team is called SchoolCamp, which is School and Community Aligned Master Planning. So we are working with cities and counties to support decisions that school districts are making for these exact outcomes. And actually, that's very much why I wanted to be on the podcast today, was to talk to you about how transportation has a unique opportunity to broaden the conversation with school transportation and school districts. If we are flying alone, we're only using the resources we have, but when we leverage those resources for optimizing service for all residents in a community, we can do more.

 

[00:26:42.980] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:26:43.850] - Mathew Palmer

Yeah.

 

[00:26:44.170] - Em Hall

Yeah. So you asked us the question how we got to school, but we didn't ask you the question of how you got to school as a kid.

 

[00:26:50.080] - Mathew Palmer

Oh, boy. Well, it's a very romantic story. I, I lived about a mile and a half from school in kindergarten, and I'd walk every day through, you know, highly trafficked roads with no sidewalk on the side of the, side of the road. And then ultimately, you know, a couple of dirt roads that were shortcuts kind of over the river and through the woods. And I made it. Um, and then we moved further away and I took, um, yeah, I'd wake up at 5:00 AM waiting in the dark in rural Michigan, uh, right outside of Ann Arbor and waiting for the bus to come. And it's 10 degrees or colder in the dark at 5:30 in the morning because I had to take 3 transfer buses.

 

[00:27:35.920] - Em Hall

Oh gosh.

 

[00:27:36.560] - Mathew Palmer

Because it was that far for me to get to my school. And when I, when I share with you that lived experience, You know, what happens on the bus, and that includes the in-cabin emissions, the noise, sometimes the fights, you know, can we think of that as the beginning of the school day, not just the service? In Maine, they put books on school buses because the rides are so long.

 

[00:28:00.080] - Em Hall

Oh, wow.

 

[00:28:00.290] - Mathew Palmer

So the school buses serve as mobile libraries so students can read.

 

[00:28:03.340] - Divya Gandhi

That's kind of cool.

 

[00:28:04.720] - Mathew Palmer

But yeah, I've been volunteering with my kids walking and biking to school, kind of trying to walk the talk. now that I'm a parent.

 

[00:28:12.560] - Em Hall

Yeah. So I think, you know, to kind of close this out for now, because hopefully this is the beginning of a more robust conversation between transportation planners and educators and others who care about these issues. But what is your vision going forward for where this goes? And what are maybe, like, a couple of small steps that current practitioners or academics could take to start to unify what have become these very disparate areas.

 

[00:28:46.240] - Mathew Palmer

Yep. Well, I want to give a couple of, a couple of plugs for APA. So if this topic about collaboration between transportation at a city, county, MPO, council of government level is of interest on the land use transportation side, we have the Public Schools and Communities Division with APA. I am the chair-elect. Shannon Jacks is our chair, and we're very much mindful of the opportunity we have at a divisional level to bring together these conversations. In addition, in May at the virtual online conference, I'll have a session on housing and public education that talks about the land use part of this. Where are students coming from and what do we do on the land use side?

 

[00:29:27.210] - Em Hall

Wow.

 

[00:29:28.030] - Mathew Palmer

Within what can we do, and that really is, I think, ultimately what we should be focused on these days is what can we do with our— the awareness that we have.

 

[00:29:37.140] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:29:38.640] - Mathew Palmer

I would say that as we look at conversations for comprehensive plans at a school district level, we should be thinking about including transportation professionals in how do we co-locate or choreograph investment. So that would include making sure that when we build schools, can both a school bus and a public city bus or transit vehicle arrive at that school, the turn radius all the way to the location of where a bus stop would be. When we think investing in crosswalks, have we been thoughtful about when we provide a crosswalk from a neighborhood to a school, we may have just removed the need for 3 school buses. We have real-world case studies of that. So thinking about schools as anchors for investment, again, I jokingly call it SOD, but school-oriented development.

 

[00:30:28.430] - Em Hall

I like it.

 

[00:30:29.710] - Mathew Palmer

And for school districts, we're really trying to open their eyes and the doors to the idea that, well, historically, providing yellow bus service happens in a school bus routing platform.

 

[00:30:40.100] - Divya Gandhi

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:30:41.210] - Mathew Palmer

Our colleagues and partners at the city and county transportation departments are highly skilled and might be great collaborators to input on how we best service our students. One thing we've looked at is when we have neighborhood bus stops that are both serving transit and school buses, that provide shelter, that can even provide on-time arrival updated information, waste bins, otherwise. So when transit and school buses work together, we can leverage those investments at an asset level. And I would say more broadly, one of our goals is to include MPOs in conversations on land use and transportation with schools. So having schools and metropolitan planning organizations working concurrently, as well as at the county and city levels. That's in an ideal state. I realize that you need a lot of people and capacity to make that work. It really does start in conversations like this and in institutions like the American Planning Association, because what we're really trying to say is, if you care about congestion, the cost of housing, and jobs, the easiest way to start that conversation is to call your nearby school district or Divya and Em.

 

[00:31:51.650] - Em Hall

Absolutely.

 

[00:31:53.840] - Mathew Palmer

To continue that conversation. Again, This is what we do professionally as a practitioner to bring together at a community level. Oftentimes folks in city transportation don't know how or when to start working with schools.

 

[00:32:09.790] - Divya Gandhi

Right.

 

[00:32:10.280] - Mathew Palmer

So we're, we're trying to get schools to open that dialogue, but it can be both ways. We'll be in Houston for the APA conference next year.

 

[00:32:19.710] - Em Hall

Okay.

 

[00:32:20.340] - Mathew Palmer

And we will have another I call it a field trip. Our annual meeting will be at another Houston ISD school. We're working with them now. Coming attraction, I can't tell you where just yet, but it'll be near the conference. And what we are trying to do for planners is when we held the session here in Detroit, we had school buses parked right outside so people could remember what's it like to ride on a school bus.

 

[00:32:44.660] - Em Hall

That's right.

 

[00:32:44.970] - Mathew Palmer

And the number of grown adults that get all emotional Because it brings back the memories.

 

[00:32:49.780] - Divya Gandhi

It does.

 

[00:32:50.100] - Em Hall

Right?

 

[00:32:50.290] - Mathew Palmer

So when we use that lived experience of remembering child's eyes, right, how are we working together to get kids to school? All boats rise.

 

[00:32:59.880] - Em Hall

Yeah. Thank you for giving us, I think, a really new and different way as transportation planners to think about the work that we're doing in so many different aspects. It's been an extremely informative conversation, Matthew, and we're grateful for your time.

 

[00:33:13.750] - Divya Gandhi

Thank you. Thank you, Matthew. Thanks for listening to another episode of Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning, an APA podcast series brought to you by the APA's Transportation Planning Division. To learn more about the division, please visit TPD's website at transportation.planning.org. And if you want to hear more great conversations with experts from across the planning landscape, subscribe to the APA Podcast so you'll never miss an episode. You can find the APA Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our entire library of past episodes at planning.org/podcast.