Between when Jose Ramos drops his students off at 8 a.m. and when they leave school seven hours later, he doesn’t get much more than a block away. For a bus driver whose students are all physically disabled, a parking space nearby is simply too valuable to give up.
“This school not supposed to be here,” he said from the driver’s seat of his short yellow bus. “Too much traffic.”
Upwards of 20 buses are needed to transport the more than 80 students of iHOPE Academy at 53rd Street and 7th Avenue, a school serving students with traumatic brain injuries just a stone’s throw away from Times Square. Many students use wheelchairs they are unable to push on their own.
There are no designated school bus parking zones on the street, and each takes between 10 and 15 minutes to load or unload.
The result is that “each morning there are an enormous number of small school buses that are dropping off special needs kids and then picking them up between 3 and 4 o’clock,” said nearby resident Russel Schacter at an August community board meeting. “So it’s become quite a congested area on 7th Avenue right there at certain times of the day.”
On a recent Tuesday, the vast majority of buses were parked over two blocks on 53rd Street hours before school let out. The school buses, competing with tour buses, luxury black cars and delivery vehicles for parking spaces, were planted in turning lanes, designated taxi stands and metered parking areas.
The buses did not fully clear out until 90 minutes after the school day ended.
“Sometimes people come in with the taxi, with the luggage, and they can’t park over here,” said Maribel Sanchez, one of the school bus drivers. The school is located across the street from a Sheraton and less than a block from a Hilton.
Of the many routes she’s done for her employer over the years, Sanchez said, “this is the hard route.”
“Since relocating to its Midtown Manhattan location in 2022, iHOPE Academy has been advocating for assistance from the Department of Transportation and Office of Pupil Transportation as well as the Mayor’s Office for additional designated bus space,” said the academy’s principal, Shani Chill, in a statement.
The Department of Transportation did not respond to requests for comment. The Office of Pupil Transportation referred to the department for comment.
Marisa Mack, the district manager for Community Board 5, blamed congestion in the area on idling tour buses and commercial delivery trucks.
“There are no issues with the school or its busing logistics,” she said.
On the stretch of 53rd Street where the school lies, police issued 444 parking tickets over the most recent fiscal year, including 136 tickets for commercial vehicles, according to NYC OpenData. No tickets were issued to buses in the same timeframe.
Mack said that a proposed “microhub” pilot would at least alleviate the issue of delivery trucks in the area. The pilot would require delivery drivers to offload goods from trucks at a site away from their intended dropoff point.
But Catherine Ponte, a Department of Transportation official, told a Sept. 23 community board meeting that the proposal “was at an early phase” and would likely not come to fruition until spring at the earliest. No location has been nailed down yet, she added.