If your morning commute felt suspiciously smooth this week — like, "did I accidentally teleport?" smooth — you weren't imagining things. Commuters across San Francisco reported drive times slashed nearly in half, with some getting to work in 25 minutes instead of the usual 50.

The culprit behind your normally miserable commute? Kids. Or more precisely, the massive logistical apparatus that revolves around getting kids to and from school every day.

With public schools wrapping up spring break last week and parochial schools taking theirs this week, plus a wave of families heading out on vacation, San Francisco's roads briefly resembled something functional. As one Bay Area commuter put it: "So it's the kids who's been causing all this traffic?!"

Well, yes. And this is where it gets interesting from a policy perspective.

One local resident made the point that deserves way more attention than it gets: the light traffic "kinda shows how much traffic is due to school pickup/drop-offs and bringing back school buses would help a lot." That's not just a casual observation — it's a policy indictment. San Francisco largely dismantled its yellow bus system years ago, pushing the burden of school transportation onto individual families in individual cars, clogging individual streets, burning individual gallons of gas, and wasting everyone's collective time.

The result? A city that grinds to a halt 180 school days a year because we couldn't be bothered to fund a basic transit function that virtually every other American city manages to provide.

This isn't a call for some bloated new bureaucratic program. It's the opposite — it's recognizing that sometimes the absence of a straightforward public service creates far more costly inefficiencies. Lost productivity from doubled commute times, wasted fuel, increased emissions, frayed nerves — none of that is free.

So enjoy your breezy spring break commute while it lasts. By next Monday, you'll be back to white-knuckling it on 101, stuck behind a parent triple-parked outside a school in a Suburban. Welcome back to San Francisco.