You are reading this because you are interested in an object that may have an effect on the car portal.   The car portal is a hidden (invisible) object on each lot that controls the car pool and school bus.

Some of my objects stop the car pool or school bus coming because it would be inconvenient or unrealistic in the game.  For example, if you are using Event Control objects, you would not expect your event attendees to rush off and jump into cars when they are meant to be attending a concert.  And it would be strange if the school bus arrived to pick up kids who had just arrived to attend the school you have set up on your lot using the School Bell.

My objects interact with the car portal by telling it lies about whether people have already been to work, or what the date is so it thinks the children have already been to school.   None of my objects alters the way the portal works.  Removing my object from your lot will stop its effect on the car portal within up to 48 Sim hours at the most, usually by the next morning.

None of my objects alters or replaces the file called carportal.iff which contains the car portal object itself with its program code.   There are some downloads on other sites that do, and if you have any of those, then it is possible you may notice unexpected effects on your game when my objects interact with it.

If in spite of removing objects that deliberately stop the cars, you still don't get a car pool or school bus for two mornings in a row, it's possible your current lot has either lost its portal or got it confused somehow.  For players in this position, provided you have not overwritten the Maxis original portal with a 3rd party portal, you can get it sorted by using my Car Portal Manager, which is an in-game object with a menu, and also does not interfere with the file on disk.