Kids' Books Ride the Bus

Youngsters who take the bus in Rochester, NY, can get a ride and a good read, thanks to the Books on Buses program, which has installed racks filled with children's books on all 250 of the city's public buses. The program is the first of its kind in the country and was initiated by the Rochester-Genessee Regional Transportation Authority to make bus rides more meaningful to kids.

"Hundreds of kids ride the bus each day with nothing to do," Mark Aesch, chief of staff for the Transportation Authority, told the Christian Science Monitor . The program has been well-received, reports the Transportation Authority, which has collected 50,000 books for the project from more than 100 local schools and libraries, as well as book publishers. And it has inspired a similar program in Anchorage, AK, where they kicked off their Books in Buses program in February 2002 by having a local bus driven by none other than Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat.