I normally play games with home schooling, so I haven't had to think about this kind of thing for a while. A 2x2 lot; facing the house, the driveway is placed on the left side. There's a car in the garage and another on the driveway, and when the yellow bus returns from school in the afternoon, it pulls all the way to the end of the lot, and so stops with the door in the middle of the driveway. Door opens, but no kid appears. The driver just sits there, honking away til the cows come home, but the kid won't get off the bus. I figured it was a fluke, and thought maybe I could "Batbox" the situation, but I couldn't figure out which option was the right one, so... I quit the lot without saving and went back to the neighborhood before returning. But... same thing happened on the re-try. I thought to myself, "is the kid afraid to leave the bus because the driveway is right there, and he thinks the Impala might come to life and try to run him over?" Sounds silly, but... when I deleted the Chevy, bingo - the kid pops out of the bus. Weird, right? So I had to re-configure the whole front half of the house and put the garage off to the right of the front door, so that when the bus pulls up, there's no scary driveway there to impede the safe return of the schoolkids. Is this to be expected? Both parents had the day off work, so there was no two vehicles trying to arrive simultaneously, or anything like that. Crisis averted, but what gives? And, can the Lot Debugger do anything in this situation, next time around?

Yes, if you put a driveway so that it's blocking the vehicle portal and there's a car on that driveway, that will block people from getting off of the vehicle. Same thing if you put the driveway partially on top of a vehicle portal and and some other vehicle is at the portal when the car returns home - the sim won't be able to get out of the car until the vehicle on the portal leaves. If you're playing with a smaller lot than the game normally allows, or using mods to place driveways in places they are not normally allowed to go, you have to be aware of this.

I find that Inge's portal revealer can help with driveway placements in situations like this.

Well, like I said, this was just a standard 2x2 residential lot, and the driveway was where I usually put it - 2 squares from the edge of the lot, so I can place an extension inside a garage if desired. I suppose that yes, maybe I do usually put driveways on the right-hand side, and this house seemed better with it on the left. I guess I never paid much attention to where exactly the schoolbus stopped before. I've occasionally had issues where kids were playing in the driveway when parents had to leave for work, that kind of thing.

@simsample - re: portal revealer - Good to know; I'll check it out. I'm assuming that it works on community lots also? Although on community lots, I can pick where the vehicle portal sits by moving the public phone, right?

I think the phone determines the cutscene framing, but you need to actually move the portals themselves. I would just use the portal revealer to show you where the portals are when placing the driveways, rather than moving the portals.

As simsample said, but I'll add, I regularly move portals to where I want them (like near crosswalks for the pedestrian ones or adding them to newly made corner lots) so if the driveway is where you want it and the portal is not, it's probably fine to move it.