First day of school brings school bus delays around GTA

A long list of school bus routes experienced delays Tuesday morning in the GTA due to a grab-bag of issues that included breakdownsand replacement drivers running late.

But Kevin Hodgkinson, who manages student transportation for the Toronto District School Board and the Toronto Catholic District School Board, said that traffic was the biggest snarl, accounting for 45 per cent of delays.

That was part of the reason given to Tamara Costa, who waited about 30 minutes extra on the curb with her daughter Mackenzie.

Costa told CBC Toronto it had been a "frustrating morning:" she would be 45 minutes late to work as a result, and she was worried that Mackenzie, who is autistic, would respond badly to the disruption.

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Delays stretched from 10 to 40 minutes, depending on the route in question, and affected schools all around the city.

After learning of a school bus driver shortage in the summer, Hodgkinson's consortium, the Toronto Student Transportation Group,attempted to head off the issue by arranging for back-up drivers.

He said thedriver shortage wasnot the reason that some buses were delayed on Tuesday.

"Companies confirmed there was a driver in every seat, although some of the delays were attributed to spare drivers being dispatched on some routes when the regular driver was unable to perform the route for whatever reason this morning making some of them late," he wrote to CBC Toronto in an email.

Hodgkinsondescribed the morning's delays as a "somewhat usual September startup."

Parents cancheck on school bus delays on an onlineportal,foundhere.