Since returning to in-person classes in the wake of the pandemic, schools have faced a less deadly but equally dire predicament: an ever worsening, nationwide shortage of school bus drivers. This has led to longer commutes for students, and uncertainty for parents, who may not be sure how or when their children are getting to school and back home again.
In New York City, where I chose to live with my two school-aged children for some inexplicable reason, back-to-school busing has been even more uncertain than in prior post-pandemic years, with continued driver shortages and a narrowly averted bus driver strike. Anecdotally, what this has meant for me, as a parent, is standing around on the corner waiting for a bus long after its scheduled arrival time.
In an attempt to ease my scheduling woes, I decided to pick up a pair of Apple AirTags to stick in my kids’ backpacks, as they are too young for iPhones of their own. I read up on AirTags beforehand; I know that they don’t have their own GPS trackers but work by talking to the network of Apple Bluetooth enabled devices. But I live in one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. Certainly a school bus passes enough Bluetooth devices in a given commute to provide at least reasonably accurate tracking—enough so that I’d be able to tell when the bus is roughly near the stop—right?
As it turns out, no: In practice, AirTags are unreliable (if not completely useless) for tracking things that are moving quickly. As Forbes recently noted:
Don’t think that if you see your car being stolen off the drive, you’ll be able to see a little dot moving across Apple Maps, plotting the car’s live journey. It’s not a GPS tracker and the updates provided from an AirTag are sporadic.
Boy, I’ll say. Though their performance varies day to day, often the AirTags won’t update for 15 to 20 minutes or more during the kids’ bus ride home, making them functionally incapable of performing the task for which I naively purchased them. The results are a bit better for my son, who rides a bus with more younger kids likely to be met at their stops by phone-toting parents or babysitters, but still not accurate enough to rely on; sometimes my daughter’s location won’t update at all during the day, from the time she leaves for school until she’s standing right next to me in the afternoon.
On the plus side, Apple has solved one problem that makes AirTags more useful: In iOS 17, their location can now be shared with another iCloud account, so more than one person can receive updates on its location, so my spouse and I can finally both check on the kids’ theoretical locations on our respective phones. On the minus side, AirTags still can’t be tracked from the web-based Find My tool.
So how can you accurately track your kids, whether on the bus or at soccer practice? Unfortunately, you’re going to need to spring for something that uses GPS. And if you don’t want to give them a phone, that’s going to cost you—most devices created solely for the purpose come with a monthly subscription fee that’s going to add up quickly; you can expect to pay around $9–$20 per month, per device. Perhaps that’s a small price to pay for peace of mind, or even just to avoid standing on the street for 35 minutes every afternoon, hoping in vain that today the bus will come on time.