Family transportation: A part-time job

 

 

HopSkipDrive released its second annual survey on the State of Back to School Transportation in America. We surveyed over 1,000 parents on their struggle to manage their child’s transportation logistics and we realized the coordination time alone can was equivalent to a part-time job.

“Our second annual survey confirms yet again what we hear from our customers and experience ourselves as working parents; managing family transportation logistics consumes a great deal of time and creates tremendous stress for families. When we looked at the actual number of hours spent coordinating logistics and actual driving time, it is the equivalent of a second job,” says Joanna McFarland, HopSkipDrive CEO and Co-Founder. “HopSkipDrive was created to solve this problem, reduce that time, and make life easier for families.”

We saw that:

The hours spent on weekly child transportation logistics are the equivalent of a part-time job for many families.

Getting everyone in the family where they need to go is stressful. “Back to school” often means “back in the car.” Parents spend so much time figuring out the logistics and doing the driving, it becomes a part-time job just to get everyone where they need to go.

• 38% of parents spend more than 5 hours a week driving their kids and a third of those spend more than 10 hours.

• 62% of parents manage the transportation logistics at least several times a week with almost 10% managing the logistics several times a day.

• Child transportation logistics are a daily topic for 37% of families (sometimes more than once a day) and one in four families have these conversations several times a week.

• 87% of parents juggle coordinating the transportation schedules between them and their partner. Of these parents, 75% of them are women managing the transportation logistics in the household.

Back to school means back to stress, conflicting priorities, and job risk for working parents.

Being in multiple places at once is impossible, and working parents stress themselves out trying to manage it all.

• 2 out of 3 working parents say having to drive their kids somewhere disrupts their work on a regular basis. For 41% it’s a daily or weekly disruption.

• 44% of parents are stressed out coordinating transportation at the beginning of the school year.

• Of parents who reported spending 10 or more hours a week driving to and from school and/or extracurricular activities, 42% felt they have put their job at risk in order to meet their child’s transportation needs.

• 24% of parents say their child is or may be missing out on important enrichment activities due to lack of reliable transportation.

“When it comes to their child’s transportation needs, parents don’t have many options,” says McFarland. “Of the parents we surveyed, 48% were unaware that rideshare services like Uber and Lyft are not licensed to transport unaccompanied minors, even though it’s against their policies. Safety is our number one priority for children and all CareDrivers must pass a highly selective 15-point driver certification that goes above and beyond industry standards, so you know your child is in safe hands.”