San Diego school district apparently has 130,000 students. Probably 200,000 counting suburban schools outside the city.
How many kids are in those “throngs”? What is the capacity of a trolley?
The trolleys seem to run three-car trains, with I’d say a sitting/standing capacity of 100 per trolley car. Say the pertinent period is two hours, and there are four trolleys per hour on the line.
100 x 3 x 4 x 2 = 2400 people. Assuming 50% of each trolley car is full of border-crossing students (a high estimate), that’s 1200 kids per day.
About 1/2 of one percent of the entire student population of the county. Am I missing something?[/quote]Yes. You’re missing the thousands of private vehicles sporting Baja CA plates crossing the border every morning and dropping kids off for school … even as far as SD and East County (but usually those further school destinations are because the driving parent works near those schools). And you’re also missing hundreds … maybe over 1000 private vehicles with Baja plates being driven over the border every morning by high school students themselves and parked in the student parking lot of the school they’re attending.
Re: the trolley, you are almost correct, except:
In the early morning (5:30 to 6:00 am) there are likely more students boarding the trolley at SY than workers.
When students disembark at Iris and Palomar to catch buses, other students from MX get on to disembark at a station further north. Their parent dropped them off or will pick them up in the afternoon at these stations to go to their own jobs or shop before meeting their kids in the afternoon.
The border crossing students start boarding the trolley at SY about 5:30 am but the big crowds are between 6:00 am and 7:00 am. In South County, the latest any elementary school starts is about 8:30 am but most start before 8:00 am. MS/HS start 1st period earlier (7:15 am to 7:45 am).
So the “pertinent period” is about 1.5 to 2 hrs in the morning BUT you were only counting boardings at SY. You are not accounting for boardings further north on the blue line.
Your estimate of the student population is low for the entire county but high for the affected districts. I can get you the relevant figures of the four actual school districts the vast majority of border crossing students are attending.
