Every route, old and version 1, on one map
All ten new elementary lines, drawn along the roads in the district’s published stop order and checked line by line against the district’s own route maps. Turn on the old buses (both schools) to compare. Pick a line or bus to see its stops; for an old bus, you’ll see where each stop’s kids go now.
New schedules: arps.org Amethyst Brook and Crocker Farm bus route pages. New lines are drawn with OpenStreetMap routing and checked against each line’s published district map. Old buses: the district’s Amethyst Brook and Crocker Farm AM run sheets. The district never published maps of the old routes, so they’re drawn stop to stop along the shortest roads and may differ from the exact roads driven.
Every old bus vs. version 1
Each stop on each old run sheet at both schools, matched to the nearest new stop on its school’s lines by street walking distance and weighted by the number of kids the sheet shows getting on there. The whole district gets up earlier. Counting the extra walk to the new stop, more than half of the old buses’ kids (328 of 611) also have a longer trip to school.
Time from old stop to school, per kid: old → new
Average minutes for each old bus’s riders: the bus ride, plus the extra walk to the new stop (the dashed end of each bar). Thicker bars mean more kids.
The numbers for every bus (table)
Click a bus to open its before-and-after map. Walks are measured stop to stop along the streets at a child’s pace (2.5 mph); home addresses aren’t on the run sheets. 9 kids whose old stop is closer to the school than to any new stop are left out of the averages, since they may now be expected to walk. So are the 25 kids with no stop on their school’s new lines within a mile.
Walking where there’s no sidewalk
We checked every kid’s new walk, from the old stop to the new one along the streets, against two independent records: the Town of Amherst’s sidewalk map and MassDOT’s 2025 Road Inventory.
Every two days, a child pedestrian is killed in the U.S.
children 14 and under were killed as pedestrians in U.S. traffic crashes from 2021 through 2024: 176, 188, 171 and 172 a year.
- 292 of the 707 (41%) were killed in the dark.
- Two in three were hit away from an intersection: along the road or crossing mid-block, not at a corner.
- In crashes involving a school bus or a vehicle used as one, more school-age pedestrians were killed between 7 and 7:59 a.m. than in any other hour, and 55% were 5 to 10 years old (2015–2024).
- In 2024 alone, 134 school-age kids were killed walking during school-commute hours on school days, by Education Week’s count from federal data.
The new routes put 409 Amherst kids at the curb earlier, some of them in the dark, and send dozens walking along roads with no sidewalk. That’s why walking conditions at each stop matter.
Sources: NHTSA, Children: 2024 Data, 2023, 2022 and 2021 (FARS; “children” = 14 and under); NHTSA, School-Transportation-Related Traffic Crashes: 2015–2024 Data (school-age = 18 and under); Education Week, Oct. 2026. No federal source counts walks to school specifically, and 2025 federal data hasn’t been published yet.
Streets kids now walk with no sidewalk
Ordered by total kid-miles without a sidewalk. Click a bus number to see its map; the no-sidewalk parts of each walk are marked with pink dots.
How we checked
Each walk is sampled about every 30 feet. Town of Amherst: a sample counts as having a sidewalk if a mapped sidewalk centerline (Amherst GIS, “Sidewalk Centerlines”, crosswalks excluded) is within about 60 feet. We tested that rule on known streets first: Wildflower Dr 95%, downtown Main St 74%, downtown S Pleasant St 161% (sidewalks on both sides), Station Rd 10%. MassDOT: each sample is matched to the nearest Road Inventory 2025 segment within about 50 feet and counts as having a sidewalk if the left or right sidewalk width is above 0 ft. Some streets are missing from MassDOT’s layer. Walks run stop to stop because home addresses aren’t on the run sheets, so a child’s full walk is usually longer. Kids whose old stop is closer to the school than to any new stop aren’t included. Neither data source records sidewalk condition or snow clearing.
Route by route: every old bus vs. version 1
Bus 6: before and after
Pick an old bus (elementary or middle/high), then step through the map: 1 Before shows the old route, 2 After shows the new line(s) those kids ride now, and 3 The walk shows how far each stop’s kids now walk to the new stop, with the stretches that have no sidewalk in pink. Buses are ordered from biggest increase in trip time (bus + walk) to smallest.
Time from stop to school, stop by stop
Each row is an old stop. The orange dot is how long those kids used to ride; the blue dot is their new ride plus the extra walk to the new stop (the dashed end of the bar). A red bar means a longer trip, green a shorter one. Thicker bars mean more kids.
Full stop-by-stop table
Method: each old stop is matched to the nearest stop on its school’s new lines by street walking distance (OpenStreetMap), walked at 2.5 mph (child pace; 3 mph for middle/high). If none is within a mile, the stop is listed as having no new stop within a mile. Time on bus = school arrival minus pickup time; old arrival 8:10 (run sheets), new arrival 7:48 (published lines). Totals are weighted by the number of kids at each stop. Home addresses are unknown, so the walk is measured old stop → new stop. House-number stops are shown by street only.
Why does every bus arrive at 7:48?
All ten new elementary lines, at both Amethyst Brook and Crocker Farm, are scheduled to pull in at exactly 7:48. Under the old route, Bus 6 pulled up to Amethyst Brook at 8:10. Its kids didn’t get a shorter ride for the earlier arrival. They got a longer one that starts 38 minutes earlier and ends 22 minutes earlier.
Every new line’s morning
From the first pickup to arrival at school. The bar starts when the first child gets on.
Bus 6, old vs new
Questions this raised
What it means at the bus stop
Thirty-two of Bus 6’s 45 kids now board between 7:14 and 7:19. Under the old route the same kids boarded between 7:57 and 8:05.
In December, that’s around sunrise. The district’s own FAQ says stops are designed for normal year-round conditions and that “routine winter weather by itself” won’t change a stop. Every Green line neighborhood stop is logged as “sidewalk status not yet confirmed.”
The carbon tipping point
When a bus route gets worse, some parents start driving. The bus still runs either way, so every car is extra. How many families have to switch before our neighborhood’s drop-off traffic out-pollutes the entire bus?
Bus assumptions
families driving and the neighborhood’s car trips emit more CO₂ than the whole bus run.
kids leaving the bus and it becomes dirtier per rider than just driving them.
Estimates, not measurements. Diesel 10.18 kg CO₂/gal, gasoline 8.89 kg CO₂/gal (EPA). A car idles at about 0.3 gal/hr. Morning only; double it if afternoon pickups switch too. Green line distance from the district’s Route Review Summary. Adjust any number above.
The district’s routing framework, checked against Bus 6
Quotes are from the district’s Parent-Ready Stop Rationale Log (route summary, rationale codes and FAQ) released with the new routes.
“Framework target: ≤40 minutes”
The district’s own summary lists the Green line at 43 minutes, over its own target. The published Crocodile line runs 46 minutes, from 7:02 to 7:48. The first Bus 6 kids now ride 34 minutes; under the old route the longest ride was 22.
Stops selected because they “help control overall ride time.”
Bus 6 kids went from 555 to 1,283 kid-minutes on the bus every morning, +131%. Only 5 of 45 kids ride the same or less.
“The absence of a sidewalk alone does not automatically make a low-speed residential walking route unsafe.”
Every Green line neighborhood stop is logged as “sidewalk status not yet confirmed.” Bus 6 kids now walk an average of 3.4 extra minutes each way, up to 8.4, on roads whose sidewalks haven’t been confirmed yet.
A cluster stop is preferred over “door-to-door service when a reasonable cluster stop exists.”
Bus 6 already used cluster stops at intersections. The bigger change is the schedule: 38 minutes earlier, to arrive 22 minutes early.
“Routine winter weather by itself” doesn’t change a stop.
Moving pickups from ~8:00 to ~7:15 puts most of these kids at the curb around sunrise in December and January, on unconfirmed-sidewalk roads.
Most route and stop requirements are “determined at the State and local/district level.”
These are local choices, so they can be adjusted locally, including start and arrival times.
The log is titled a “Parent-Ready Stop Rationale Log.”
Its times differ from the published schedules: every elementary line runs about 7 minutes later in the log (up to 13 for Blue). Some route descriptions in its summary don’t match the stops listed.
“Framework target: … ≤18 student/neighborhood stops.”
Stop counts are within the target. The larger change is time: kids on 6 of 10 elementary lines are picked up before 7:20, and every line arrives at 7:48 no matter when it started.