The Ulaanbaatar City Mayor’s Office has been operating special school buses to safely transport primary and middle school students between their homes and schools for seven years, as part of efforts to reduce traffic congestion in the capital city. When the “School Bus” project was first launched, it covered 29 schools in Ulaanbaatar, with 40 buses operating on 35 routes. During the 2025–2026 academic year, however, 296 buses served 13,000-plus students from 76 schools across 60 routes.

For the current academic year, the Governor of the Capital City and the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar, B.Purevdagva recently said that preparations were underway to expand the number of participating schools and bus routes as much as possible, with the service planned to cover students from first to sixth grade.

Officials from the City’s Public Transportation Policy Department said that the schedules and details of the new school bus routes have not yet been announced, but are expected to be officially presented to the public soon. Officials also noted that considerable work remains to be done during the preparation stage following the decision to expand the service from students in grades second to fifth to those in grades first to sixth.

The number of these yellow “children’s buses” has been increasing year by year, and as the service continues to expand, it increasingly appears that eventually every public and private school in the capital could have dedicated transportation. During the last academic year alone, the number of “yellow buses” serving students was equivalent to around 20 percent of the buses operating in Ulaanbaatar’s public transportation system on a daily basis.

There is no doubt that reducing the flow of traffic heading toward schools and kindergartens is necessary to ease congestion, and that the government should take responsibility for ensuring that children can travel safely between home and school. But whether yellow school buses are the main solution is another question.

Rather than rushing to purchase buses by the dozens and simply transporting large numbers of children from primary and middle schools, there are many issues that should first be carefully considered, calculated and studied, experts have recently warned. Global practices and experience also point to the same conclusion.

NEED OR SHOW OF FORMALITY?

A person who has travelled extensively abroad and gained a broader perspective made a rather telling observation: “In other countries, special buses are used to transport children of farmers living far from urban areas, as well as students in newly developed residential areas where schools have not yet been built, to the nearest school. Here, however, this type of transportation is serving students who bypass schools near their homes to attend schools elsewhere, thereby adding to traffic congestion.”

A review of international practices appears to support this observation. In North American countries, which are considered to be the pioneers of school bus services, such buses were introduced to safely transport children from remote areas without public transportation, particularly because farms were located far from residential settlements. Today, such services are still available in some regions of the United States and Canada, where farming is highly developed.

According to research by the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP), school bus services are commonly used in cities with highly dispersed or sprawling development, underdeveloped integrated public transportation systems and a large number of detached residential areas, following the North American model.

School buses are also commonly used in some regions of Europe and developing countries to transport children living in small villages located dozens of miles from urban settlements or in areas with difficult natural conditions. In Denmark, for example, dedicated school transportation is reportedly provided only to students who live more than four kilometres from their schools.

In contrast, school buses are rarely used in Western European countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands, where public transportation is well developed and infrastructure and the built environment are considered highly accessible. Instead, students are encouraged to travel to school independently, using regular public transportation either free of charge or at discounted fares.

There are only a handful of countries in Asia, including Mongolia, China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, where school buses are operated specifically as a means of reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. Viewed in this light, the model most commonly used around the world is one in which dedicated buses transport children living far from urban centres to school, thereby ensuring their right to education. In Mongolia, however, city authorities appear to have continued operating school buses not so much out of necessity, but rather as a way of addressing, or concealing, the shortcomings arising from chaotic urban planning.

‘LEAK’ FOR UNNECESSARY SPENDING

The General Law on Education and related regulations contain an important concept known as the designated school catchment area. Under this system, children are expected to attend the school located closest to their registered place of residence. In other words, they are entitled to enrol in and receive general education at the school assigned to their officially registered khoroo or district.

Unfortunately, in Ulaanbaatar, the lack of sufficient schools and kindergartens, overcrowding, and significant differences in the quality of education and learning environments depending on location and ownership have left parents with little choice but to send their children to schools outside their designated catchment areas. It appears that the “School Bus” project was launched precisely in response to this vulnerable situation, with the aim of easing the burden on parents.

In a sense, it would not be entirely wrong to say that the government introduced this special service partly to make up for its failure to adequately fulfil its obligations under the law and regulations.

But how much has the introduction of dedicated school buses actually reduced traffic congestion in the city? There is currently no detailed study that measures and quantifies this. The Capital City Public Transportation Policy Department and the General Education Department report the number of students transported by school buses each year, but apparently have no precise means of measuring the buses’ actual impact on traffic flows.

It seems that the project has been implemented largely on the assumption that, as long as children are using the service, it must be contributing to reducing traffic congestion to some extent, a vague estimate rather than a conclusion supported by concrete data.

The Capital City Education Department determines bus schedules and routes based on students’ home addresses and locations, school capacity and demand. Meanwhile, the Capital City Public Transportation Policy Department has been providing buses for students in cooperation with public transportation operators, as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives and the city’s project.

Although schools on the respective routes are reportedly responsible for covering the cost of the bus service, the main source of funding ultimately comes from the pockets of taxpayers like you and me. After all, all public schools are financed through the state budget.

Therefore, if the service is deemed necessary, it is important to implement it in a more organised and efficient manner based on concrete calculations and research, and to ensure that it reaches those who genuinely need it, such as children living in remote districts or in khoroos without schools or kindergartens.

Every year, there are complaints that school buses do not operate according to their designated schedules, are inaccessible in some areas, provide only short waiting times, and tend to pick up younger students while leaving middle-school students behind.

This year, for instance, citizens have criticised the decision to transport first-graders by school bus, arguing that it creates additional costs because these children are subject to a “hand-to-hand” arrangement under which only their parents or guardians are supposed to take them to and pick them up from school.

For a city like ours, with limited economic capacity and resources and a high level of inefficient public spending, avoiding another “leak” for unnecessary expenditure should be more important than anything else.

ISSUES IDENTIFIED BY CITY PLANNERS

Experts say Mongolia is making several systemic and infrastructure-related mistakes in operating school bus services. We raised the issue and sought the views of professionals in a Facebook group of urban planners and architects.

An expert B.Uuganbayar said, “The most basic mistake is that school bus routes have not been planned in coordination with traffic congestion and existing public transportation routes. School buses get stuck in traffic just like private cars and regular public transportation. As a result, children arrive late for class. After experiencing this several times, some parents choose to drive their children themselves, thinking, ‘It would be better to take them by private car.’ There is no infrastructure that allows school buses to transport students safely and get them to school on time. If such infrastructure is unavailable, then, following the example of other countries, special measures should be taken to free up certain road lanes and regulate traffic during school drop-off and pick-up hours.”

Another specialist said, “You can tell from the school bus routes that the school zoning system, or designated school catchment areas, is not being implemented at all. Even within the city, some routes are extremely long, diverted far from direct paths and winding like a maze. This creates the risk of spending hours stuck in traffic and failing to reach designated stops on time. If we estimate that 6,000 students will use school buses next year, we need to map the locations of all those students, identify overlapping routes and coordinate them with the city’s main public transportation routes. Transportation specialists are the ones who can properly calculate and design this system. I don’t know how our public transportation authorities come up with these routes.”

The experts also pointed out other difficulties, including the lack of designated spaces or pull-off areas near schools where special vehicles can stop and children can safely board and disembark. Although systems using location-tracking chips and mobile apps have been introduced to track school buses, they do not operate reliably, leaving parents unable to receive timely information.

In some foreign countries, when a school bus stops and displays its “STOP” sign, all vehicles approaching from behind or in the opposite direction are legally required to slow down and stop. Mongolia has no similarly detailed legal provision, which reportedly means that students travelling by school bus can face even greater risks than those travelling in private cars with their parents.