How Many People Can Fit on a School Bus?

By Staff WriterLast Updated April 03, 2020

A typical school bus carries 54 children. An any given school day in the United States, approximately 480,000 school buses are at work transporting over 25 million students. More than half of all students take the bus to school.

School buses are an efficient way of transporting students. Each bus replaces about 36 cars that otherwise would be needed to transport kids to their schools. If there were no buses, 17,333,333 cars would be needed to drive students to school. On average, each school bus travels about 12,000 miles annually, for a national total of 5,760,000,000 miles. This saves approximately 62,399,998,800 miles of personal, individual car use each year.