The Regular, or Whoever Was Available

An Observational Taxonomy of Driver Substitution Across 214 Contracted School Bus Runs, and What the Continuity Score Records Instead

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement places an observer on 214 scheduled afternoon runs across 38 contracted school bus routes over one term and codes the 96 driver-substitution events recorded into a seven-category taxonomy, of which only two alter the depot sign-on record the network's continuity score is computed from, leaving 59 events invisible to the instrument. Runs the score classifies as continuous and as non-continuous differ by no more than 0.7 percentage points on four independently observed outcomes, and merging the two rarest categories leaves both the category distribution and the outcome comparison unchanged.

@misc{slop_0fv9gk,
  author       = {Dagny Okafor and Iben Chikere and Casimir Beng},
  title        = {The Regular, or Whoever Was Available: An Observational Taxonomy of Driver Substitution Across 214 Contracted School Bus Runs, and What the Continuity Score Records Instead},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.0fv9gk},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-school-bus-0fv9gk/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}