Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) school tripper buses, lines School 246 and School 247, are designed to provide transportation for students to and from Milpitas High School, according to Santa Clara VTA public information officer Stacey Hendler Ross. VTA collaborated with MUSD to determine the school tripper routes and how many buses should be offered, she said. According to the VTA website, there are three School 246 buses and one School 247 bus every day after school.
These buses often fill up to maximum capacity and leave earlier than scheduled after school, forcing students to wait for a later bus or find another way to get home, said junior Maryam Mohamed, who rides the School 246 buses. She often gets turned away from the first two 3:33 p.m. and 3:40 p.m. buses because they fill up immediately after school, and she either has to wait over 30 minutes for the last bus at 4:15 p.m. or ask her parents to pick her up, she said.
“The moment it (the bus) gets there, it gets full because there are so many kids who are trying to ride it,” Mohamed said.
Students sometimes even ask their teachers to leave class a few minutes early so they can get on the bus, said senior Abira Rahman, who takes the School 246 buses.
Mohamed reported the inconsistent schedule to VTA customer service last school year but saw no significant improvement, she said.
Senior Afnaan Waqas said he rode the School 247 bus every day last year and occasionally rides it this year. The bus consistently leaves early, he said.
“It leaves right as school ends or sometimes even before the bell rings,” Waqas said. “I know for a fact that I get here (the bus stop) within a minute (after school), and sometimes I have to run to catch the bus — and it’s already down the street.”
The bus is usually overcrowded, he added.
“If you don’t get there within the first minute, you’re either going to have to get squished between 10 other people right next to the door, or you might not even get a spot inside,” Waqas said. “Sometimes they just say, ‘Nope, we can’t take any more people.’ That’s definitely an issue.”
When Waqas can’t get on the bus, he waits at the bus stop for around an hour for his parents to leave work and pick him up, which wastes time, he said. This year, he switched to riding a bike home after school partly because of the bus’s inconsistency, he said.
“With my bike, I get to control when I can go and leave, so I don’t need to worry about the bus showing up late or early,” Waqas said. “I can just grab my bike and go.”
For Mohamed, when the bus leaves early, she misses extracurriculars after school or is unable to make it home in time for prayer, she said.
“I remember that once, I was really depending on the bus to take me home for that (the prayer time),” Mohamed said. “But I had to call my parents because I couldn’t trust the bus would come when it was supposed to come.”
Sophomore Hanah Edwin, who rides the School 246 buses, said her mom works and can not pick her up after school, so when the bus leaves early, she goes to the Milpitas Library or waits at the bus stop for a close relative to pick her up.
“It can be dangerous to stay here all alone, especially for women,” Edwin said. “So I would say that the biggest issue is just safety, especially in the wintertime when it starts to get dark early.”
Rahman, who also takes the morning School 246 buses, said that the morning buses have not been showing up, leaving students without transportation to school. As a result, Rahman has nine tardies to her first period, she said.
The VTA website recommends using the bus-tracking app Transit for “up-to-the-minute” accuracy on arrival and departure times.
However, the app is unreliable, Rahman said.
“Sometimes it (the app) says, ‘Oh, the bus will come in eight minutes,’ and it just never shows up for the day,” she said. “I either have to ask my dad to drop me off at school, or I have to take two buses to school — a bus from my house to the BART station, then from the BART station to school.”
When asked about why the buses sometimes don’t show up, Ross, the VTA public information officer, said that it could be due to an overall shortage of VTA bus operators.
“If we don’t have enough bus drivers, and someone calls in sick or someone can’t make it to work that day, for whatever reason, then there’s a potential that we may miss that route or the service may change somehow,” Ross said.
VTA has not received any reports complaining about the school tripper services from students or bus operators this year, Ross said. She recommends that students call customer service if they have experienced problems with the VTA buses.
“Let us know because we certainly don’t want to leave students behind,” Ross said. “We’ll do everything we can to try and revise our service so that students can get the transportation they need.”
The customer service number is 408-321-2300, she added.
“Because we’re paying for the bus, it should be a quality service,” Mohamed said. “And the bare minimum it should do is actually take us home.”