Data center work a nightmare for bus drivers

If the construction of the Vantage Data Centers Lighthouse Campus on the north side of Port Washington that has closed some roads and flooded others with truck traffic is a frustration for motorists, it is a nightmare for school bus drivers.

Struggling to get students to school on time and home before the sun sets while navigating detours, bus drivers have been forced to share rural roads — one of which is crumbling under the weight of construction traffic — with constant convoys of dump trucks hauling 800,000 cubic yards of soil off the data center campus site and bringing stone and gravel to it, Megan Leister, manager of Johnson School Bus Service’s Port Washington terminal, which provides transportation for the Port Washington-Saukville School District, said.

“There is zero room for error,” she said. “It’s become a dangerous situation.”

The cause of the problem is obvious, and officials should have seen it coming, Leister said.

Highway LL is closed at Wisconsin Street so water and sewer lines can be extended to the data center campus, and Highland Drive, another north-south route, has been abandoned by the city and is now a construction road — all while data center work goes on around the clock.

That has funneled traffic traveling to and from the northern end of Ozaukee County and the School District onto Highway KW. Lake Drive, a narrow east-west route designed as a town road without markings or improved shoulders, is the only practical way for school buses to get back to Highway LL north of the closure, Leister said.

It is also the main road into the data center campus construction site.

“Who in their right mind decided to essentially shut down three roads at the same time without thinking about how this is going to affect people?” Leister asked. “We have 60 souls on one of our big buses. That’s a lot of lives to be responsible for, and it doesn’t seem like the people in charge of this appreciate that.”

Dixie Road farther to the north offers another route back to Highway LL, but it adds too much time to bus routes, which leaves Lake Drive, a road never intended to accommodate the amount or type of traffic it is now handling, Leister said.

“These small town roads just aren’t meant for two large vehicles to pass each other, especially when you’re talking about big school buses and big dump trucks,” she said. “We’re not talking about one or two days when traffic is bad. We’re talking about a constant stream of dump trucks every day, and the road (Lake Drive) is literally crumbling. It’s terrible.

“Now there are barrels where you turn onto Lake Drive and there’s just not enough room for a big bus to turn onto the road if there are dump trucks at the intersection.”

Leister, who drives a bus route, said she has been forced to stop on Lake Drive for extended periods as dump trucks turn into and out of the construction site.

“One of our drivers was stopped there for 21 minutes,” she said.

The delays have resulted in students being late for school, and five families have canceled bus service for their high school and middle school students because their children are missing class time, Leister said, although some of them have continued the service for their elementary school-age children because they have no other way to get them to school.

And because of a staggered schedule, delays are compounded. Bus drivers who start their days by picking up Port Washington High School and Thomas Jefferson Middle School students, who begin classes at 7:25 and 7:30 a.m., then pick up students who attend the three elementary schools in the district, where classes begin at 8:30 a.m.

The data center project and road closings have also meant that students are getting home later.

“We get calls from parents, and we feel their frustration when it’s 4:30 p.m. and they want to know where their kids are,” Leister said. “Parents don’t want their kids getting home at 5 p.m. or later.”

The bus ride for some students has stretched to more than an hour, she said.

While getting students to and from school on time has become a challenge, doing so safely is the most significant concern, Leister said.

“There is so much mud on some of these roads that it just covers the buses and the drivers can’t see out their windows,” she said, adding buses are now washed daily when the roads are muddy.

The situation, Leister said, has added stress to the already demanding job of driving a school bus at a time when there is a shortage of drivers throughout Wisconsin.

“We’re really a day care on wheels,” she said. “The more time students have to spend on a bus, the more rambunctious they can become, and that just adds to the stress of drivers who have to navigate dangerous roads while monitoring behavior.”

The reopening of Highway LL will go a long way toward alleviating the problems school bus drivers and other motorists are dealing with, and City of Port Washington officials said that is scheduled to happen at the end of February.

“We’re looking at what we can do to get Highway LL open sooner,” Port Washington City Engineer Roger Strohm said last week. “We’re doing everything we can to open it and get it in drivable condition. But if we feel it’s unsafe, we won’t open it.”

There is a chance that Highway LL won’t be paved by the end of February, he said, but the city still wants to open it when the utility work is completed — although truck traffic may be prohibited and the speed limit could be reduced until the road is paved.

A month or more of detours is a long time for school bus drivers, Leister said.

“This is dangerous, and it’s not going to get better soon,” she said.