there is no way i'm riding the bus

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If you are a high school junior or senior in overclass snoburbia, it is a humiliation to ride the school bus. (It's bad enough your parents make you go to a school that has school buses.) Riding the school bus means you don't have a hand-me-down luxury car or a friend with one. 

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Comments

[Kathy J, Washington Gardener Mag]

Soooo true and that also translates to metro/rideon bus disdain among their overclass parents who ride metro, but would NEVER set their butts down in a bus seat lest they have too close an encounter with the great unwashed.

[Justafed]

So I guess I belong to a lower stratum of the overclass (family income only about 90th percentile, less favorable Lexus/Toyota ratio in the immediate neighborhood), but around here it isn't a problem to ride a bus, as long as you only get off at the right suburban Metro station. Time of day is also key: the 6:53 AM (or whenever it comes) is all iPads and kindles, but I have received information that this is not true for either the 5:53 or the 7:53.

[Doris]

School buses are extremely uncomfortable. I drove my daughter to & from school through 9th & 10th grade because I didn't want her waiting out in the cold/rain/whatever and because she had activities after school most of the year. When she got her license, they had stopped the activity buses, so we had to get her a car so she could get back & forth as I had started working then and could take her but not pick her up.

[Queen of The Weezils]

This never ceases to amaze me. I'm in snoburbia (wait - does Gaithersburg count?) but yet not part of it because we are DINKs. Anyway, on the rare times I have a weekday off I am always stunned by the parade of SUVs to the schools. In the old neighborhood, we even lived within easy walking distance from the schools!

Parents, WTF?

[Joel]

I grew up in Newton, which is Massachusetts' version of Bethesda (Tom Perrota even linked the two cities in his novel about Yale). I grew up walking to elementary school and taking the bus to junior and high school. It never occurred to me that my parents could or would drive me to school until I had begun participating in varsity sports. Most of my peers rode the bus, too.

I'm thirty, so it's not like we're talking about a long-forgotten era. Now, the residents of my former city drive their kids everywhere. You hardly ever see a kid walking and god forbid you see one on the bus. I, for one, have no idea how this happened.

[Nekole]

I hated the bus... Always have, always will... but that was mainly because high school transport for me sucked (elementary I was driven to and from because we were just inside of the 1 mile or whatever it is that they start doing buses-too far to walk, but not far enough for a bus- and middle school because I could-and am right now-looking at one of the staircases to the middle school) started at 7:25, I still had to be up at 5:30 because my school bus came to the bus stop a block away at 6:05. So I spent 1/2 of 9th grade on the school bus to and from school, 1/2 of 9th grade driven to school and taking school bus home 1/2 of 10th grade driven to and taking school and/or metro bus home (I finally started using the Students Ride Free program) 1/2 of 10th grade taking metro bus to school and home, and all of 11th grade I was driven because I moved in with my mother who was within 2 miles from the school, but the road we live on has no sidewalks and many blind spots. Now I drive... what do I drive? a 1993 Mercury Cougar that my dad bought for $250 from a guy in Seizureville (Leisure World). Would I like to have a fancy new or somewhat new hand-me-down? Yeah... but when I get in an accident, and total the car (because every new driver does total a car within the first 2 years) it'll be $250 gone byebye instead of $5,000-$20,000+.