EPA Opens Applications For Its $5 Billion Clean School Bus Program (arstechnica.com) 156
The EPA is formally accepting applications for its Clean School Bus Program, a $5 billion program to replace dirty diesel school buses with more environmentally friendly options. Ars Technica reports: Specifically, the EPA is aiming to replace older (model year 2010 or older) diesel-powered school buses, which must be scrapped in order for a clean bus to be bought to replace them. Oh, and the old bus has to be fully functionalâ"this isn't intended as a way to make the government pay for broken junk to be replaced with shiny new buses. But the agency says it will also accept applications from schools looking for zero-emission buses that are prepared to scrap older non-diesel school buses, as well as newer internal combustion buses (which should either be sold, scrapped, or donated).
The EPA isn't requiring the replacement buses to all be electric, however. While the program will pay for battery-electric buses -- such as the Thomas C2 Jouley that was delivered to a school in Alexandria County in Virginia on Friday to mark the start of the program -- it will also pay for buses powered by propane or compressed natural gas as long as they're also model year 2021 or newer and will serve the school district for at least five years, among other requirements.
The EPA will consider applications to replace up to 25 buses at once and has set aside $250 million for zero-emission buses in 2022 and $250 million for clean school buses, with another $4.5 billion remaining for 2023-2028. Rebates range from $375,000 for a zero-emissions Class 7 or Class 8 bus down to $25,000 for smaller propane buses (classes 3-6). The application process is open until August 19, and successful applicants should be notified in October that it's time to order some new buses.
The EPA isn't requiring the replacement buses to all be electric, however. While the program will pay for battery-electric buses -- such as the Thomas C2 Jouley that was delivered to a school in Alexandria County in Virginia on Friday to mark the start of the program -- it will also pay for buses powered by propane or compressed natural gas as long as they're also model year 2021 or newer and will serve the school district for at least five years, among other requirements.
The EPA will consider applications to replace up to 25 buses at once and has set aside $250 million for zero-emission buses in 2022 and $250 million for clean school buses, with another $4.5 billion remaining for 2023-2028. Rebates range from $375,000 for a zero-emissions Class 7 or Class 8 bus down to $25,000 for smaller propane buses (classes 3-6). The application process is open until August 19, and successful applicants should be notified in October that it's time to order some new buses.
No unintended consequences? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't replace old busses? Are we sure that's what we really want?
Think this through. I'm running a district with an old bus. My decision is whether to buy a cheap new diesel bus or a flashy new zero-emissions one. I don't get a subsidy on the new one. What am I going to choose?
Even worse, I might decide to nurse the beat up old bus along for a few more years and replace my newer, probably cleaner busses, with the greener ones.
Does no one who creates these programs ever think about the perverse incentives they create?
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I have a perfect plan. Buy some used dual motor model Y, weld an existing school bus body over the power train, presto, zero emission school bus. (Uh, no FSD please, lets not go there)
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Diesel is $6 a gallon in my state. Electric vehicles are looking better every day.
Re: No unintended consequences? (Score:2)
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The EV bus is probably less likely to crash because it has traction control with instant torque reduction. It's probably also more likely to have hydraulic brakes, because it doesn't need the increased braking force of air brakes. The ABS can respond faster with hydraulic than pneumatic systems, and since about 1999 it's been common for buses to have not only 4-channel ABS, but also brake-based yaw control. An EV bus could also have torque vectoring to reduce turn radius and improve handling, though the lat
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Energy is energy. When diesel fuel prices rise electricity rates will follow. It might not be quite one-to-one but if everybody moves to electric cars because diesel fuel and gasoline prices are getting too high then electricity will become a scarce commodity too.
If you want to see diesel fuel prices go down then we need more energy on the market. Energy from just about anything will do.
I've seen power plants that can run their boilers from coal, natural gas, or fuel oil (which is just another name for d
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You mean you haven't heard about the hilarity of recent environmental summit in UK, where they announced that delegates would be shipped around in electric vehicles... and then they brought a huge amount of diesel generators to keep them running?
https://www.scotsman.com/news/... [scotsman.com]
Then they ran them on cooking oil mix once this idiocy leaked out to pretend they're climate friendly somehow. And the usual gaggle of "fact checkers" fact checked observable reality as false, as usual by pretending really, really ha
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Texas and California are already predicting rolling blackouts.
...but only one of them is simultaneously vying to become the next "Bitcoin mining capital".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Or people with EVs will charge their cars at not-peak-times and shrug.
Yes, there will be people at EV charging stations that will frown, just like there will be people at gasoline stations that will be frowning when the power goes out because the electric fuel pumps and payment processing systems won't work either.
What, do you think that ever single gas station has a backup generator on site? You're in for a rude awakening.
Re:No unintended consequences? (Score:4, Informative)
Texas can just buy more power from Mexico. But you won't hear anyone in charge admit it.
https://www.ecmag.com/section/... [ecmag.com]
Re:No unintended consequences? (Score:5, Informative)
It says 2010 or older. So it is designed to replace older buses. They just have to be fully working.
Re:No unintended consequences? (Score:5, Insightful)
It says 2010 or older. So it is designed to replace older buses. They just have to be fully working.
That's my point: this is a wasteful program which will promote keeping older, dirtier vehicles on the road in favor of scrapping perfectly functional vehicles.
I think we'd get much more value for our tax dollars if we subsidized purchases of new green busses, regardless of what the district is getting rid of. For that matter, the older and dirtier the vehicle being retired, the more subsidy you should get. Except that will lead to a black market in buying old, already-retired busses just to get the subsidy.
That's the problem with this sort of program. There's always seems to be a way to game it and subvert the intent.
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A couple of points:
From what I understand of TFS, they are only subsidizing replacement of buses built in 2010 and before. That's not promoting keeping older, dirtier buses.
They are only subsidizing replacement of working buses because if it's already in the junkyard, they don't need to give a subsidy to get it replaced.
That said, I sort of agre
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How will requiring the busses to have been manufactured before 2010 keep older vehicles on the road?
The way this kind of scheme was done in the UK was that you had to have owned the vehicle for at least six months before the scheme started, so there was no opportunity to go and buy one just for the sake of scrapping it.
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It says 2010 or older. So it is designed to replace older buses. They just have to be fully working.
That's my point: this is a wasteful program which will promote keeping older, dirtier vehicles on the road in favor of scrapping perfectly functional vehicles.
You are exactly wrong. They will explicitly only replace buses older than 2010, which is a year when many buses made a big improvement in emissions because of California emissions requirements, which are running ("on the road"). This program exactly targets the vehicles you're concerned with.
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You don’t understand the purpose of this program. It’s ultimately intended to fund development of cleaner technologies after trickling through school systems and wherever else along the way.
If some dipshit school admin thinks he’s pulling one over on the system. Well in this case the system was designed knowing that people like him are in the mix.
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It's also intended to take diesels out and put EVs in, which is clearly what the program does. ICEs used for transit or delivery routes are inherently the worst case. Removing ICE buses from neighborhoods and schools greatly improves air quality in these areas. Buses are terrible things in general for a lot of reasons and we use them for only one reason, they reduce driver manpower requirements. The EV technology available today greatly improves buses by addressing some of their weakest points, efficiency a
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Have you seen the numbers to show pavement damage from buses is a net negative? On the one hand, I think the damage scales with the square of the mass. On the other hand, each bus removes multiple cars, and cuts total mileage even further, bc those cars are not all driving a fairly efficient loop route. So it seems to me the calculations would really have to be worked through with some modelling based on real-world data on miles driven, net additional journeys, etc.
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Have you seen the numbers to show pavement damage from buses is a net negative?
Nope.
On the one hand, I think the damage scales with the square of the mass. On the other hand, each bus removes multiple cars
Yeah, but if those multiple cars are electric then... you know. Anyway we still have to use the buses until we trust autonomous vehicles with the school run, ha ha, because we need humans in them. I just mention the pavement damage because it's a problem with buses overall. They also perturb traffic, which causes problems for everyone else. That's a bigger problem with transit buses than school buses though, because school buses don't run all the time.
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If you're worried about mass and vehicles, electrification is a much smaller issue than the fact that Americans drive ever-larger SUVs and trucks. My Renault Zoe is electric and is heavier than a Renault Clio -- but it weighs 1500kg, so at least 20% less than the lightest F150.
As for peturbing traffic, buses overall make traffic run more smoothly by taking car journeys off the road. You have to look at whole system impacts. Take a busy city like mine, London, and run the models for what would happen if buse
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If you're worried about mass and vehicles, electrification is a much smaller issue than the fact that Americans drive ever-larger SUVs and trucks. My Renault Zoe is electric and is heavier than a Renault Clio -- but it weighs 1500kg, so at least 20% less than the lightest F150.
Sure, but we're now electrifying the trucks. Ford's F150 Lightning is looking like it's going to be a smash hit. However, electrified passenger vehicles and light trucks are irrelevant compared to buses which literally weigh in at multiples compared to them.
As for peturbing traffic, buses overall make traffic run more smoothly by taking car journeys off the road.
That's potentially true, if you coax, force, or cajole sufficient numbers of people into them. But studies have shown that if you free up freeway capacity, whether by building more or eliminating use, more people decide to drive because the roads are les
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I don't need to see the numbers to know that the city I live in has been cutting holes in the road at bus stops and pouring "bus pads" of concrete at the stop to mitigate the damage to asphalt surfaces. They've looked at the numbers and used it to justify the work, in a city that absolutely hates the internal combustion engine and would rather spend the money on literally anything else than road work.
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You don’t understand the purpose of this program. It’s ultimately intended to fund development of cleaner technologies after trickling through school systems and wherever else along the way.
If some dipshit school admin thinks he’s pulling one over on the system. Well in this case the system was designed knowing that people like him are in the mix.
I understand the purpose. My point is there are always a lot of dipshit school admins who have a lot of incentive to figure out how to get the subsidy regardless of whether they're working toward or against the program's purpose. And we have example after example of programs like this (e.g. "Cash for clunkers") which sound great, have the best of intentions, and don't achieve diddly squat.
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How will having a requirement of 2010 or older, and in some semblance of working condition, keep older buses on the road? This is meant to replace old buses that are on the road that have ancient emissions systems that have probably long ago failed.
If the old shitty bus isn't working enough to qualify, then it probably won't be back on the road any time soon, will it? If they're going to fix some junker, they'd fix it for the trade in on a new bus, wouldn't they?
The idea behind this is to make sure that s
Re: No unintended consequences? (Score:2)
Teachers teaching 20 students isn't exactly carbon neutral. If we packed 200 kids in a classroom and perfected the teacher with some kind of android or computer based learning system.... hrm.... :-)
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You don't want to replace things that work, because building a new thing is a massive investment, and consumer a very large amount of resources. Look up the sheer plethora of valuable minerals that must be dug up, refined, smelted, shipped around etc compared to combustion engines. EVs are not that much climate friendlier than diesel once you take that plus the grid load and need to buff that up into account.
Which means it would made sense to make a program to replace vehicles that would be replaced anyway.
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Which means it would made sense to make a program to replace vehicles that would be replaced anyway.
This is exactly what they are trying to do. That's why they are saying that it has to be at least 12 years old and still in service.
This is a much better setup than the "cash for clunkers" program that had a limit on how old the car was.
For schools, it's pretty easy to know whether the bus is still in service so even if it's a 50 year old bus if it's still in active use then it qualifies.
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That is punishment for the responsible. If you actually maintain your hardware well, 12 years is not that long of an age for a bus that effectively only runs mornings and evenings and only on schooldays.
But if you just buy and maybe change the oil once a couple of years, then yeah, 12 years is probably a long time.
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That is punishment for the responsible. If you actually maintain your hardware well, 12 years is not that long of an age for a bus that effectively only runs mornings and evenings and only on schooldays.
But if you just buy and maybe change the oil once a couple of years, then yeah, 12 years is probably a long time.
No. It's the exact opposite. If you are responsible and have a well maintained vehicle older than 12 years then it's eligible.
On the other hand, if you have a badly maintained 10 year old vehicle, it doesn't qualify.
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How are you people getting this so backwards?
If you've been responsible and actively maintained your fleet, you are likely to have more buses that are eligible for trade-in, and you get new shit.
If you've not been responsible and actively maintained your fleet, you have a barn full of junkers that either are not in service and thus not eligible, or you've been replacing your poorly-maintained junkers on a shorter schedule and your have a barn full of newer buses that are not eligible.
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Fully Charged trip around Lunez [youtube.com]
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Great, so then we'd get a shiny new electric powertrain inside a beat-up old rustbucket.
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At the very least, newer buses replaced under the program should be made available for sale to poorer districts that wouldn't otherwise replace even older/dirtier vehicles.
If they really cared about emissions, though, what they'd do is forbid parents from driving single children to/from school, and require they take a bus, bike, walk, or a 3-4 kid minimum carpool. That would also help alleviate the insane traffic jams we have in the neighborhoods near schools around here during drop-off/pickup times. Even a
Cash for Clunker School Buses (Score:2)
'nuff said.
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How much is a bus body worth vs the powertrain? Maybe there should be an option for fleets to convert them to an electric drivetrain. Buses use a solid rear axle, so something like an all-in-one electric rear axle wouldn't be hard to engineer, and there could be modular batteries that go under the bus in the space where the fuel tanks and assorted drive components reside now.
I was wondering that too: how economical is it to retrofit a green engine into an existing vehicle. My guess is it's pretty hard wedging in batteries if you didn't design the chassis for it.
Re: No unintended consequences? (Score:3)
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My guess is it's pretty hard wedging in batteries if you didn't design the chassis for it.
It's a frickin' bus... if you need some space for something then just take out a row of seats.
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Cue the "but it'll catch fire 10x more often if it isn't underneath!" replies.
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In general, retrofitting a completely different power train is difficult if:
Volume requirements of the new system are significantly greater.
Weight requirements of the new system are significantly greater.
Moving from diesel to electric, both are true.
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The program also covers compressed natural gas and propane fueled busses too - I'm wondering if this isn't also throwing some pork at some unionized labor with a "Buy American" clause. I can't imagine that a CNG or propane power plant would be bigger and heavier than diesel.
Perhaps not as powerful though, and it's not like school bus chassis are lightweight.
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If they follow the Cash for Clunkers pattern, they'll perform a sodium silicate oil change and run the engine until it destroys itself.
I would think there would be a market for taking the bus chassis and retrofitting with a different fuel system (propane conversion) or something which would be less expensive, but maybe not? Perhaps they are looking for a secondary economic effect with "buy American" clauses in the contracts?
Development patterns (Score:3, Interesting)
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I live in a very walkable town and my nearly school age kid could easily walk daily. However, around here I expect the police will probably be called if I ever let her walk. Not only do kids ride the bus from the corner by our house a handful of blocks from the school but the parents drive the kids to the spot and wait until the kids get on the bus before leaving. This is a moderate size town but with several smaller schools spread out (no doubt a surviving artifact of segregation).
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Yep, Americans are very ignorant and stupid about allowing kids a modicum of independence. And American cop and CPS pigs aren't much better. Even as an adult, I've been questioned by cops for walking to the store late at night vs driving.
We need fewer cops, but we also need to change social norms as far as pedestrianism and cycling.
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I disagree with you on that sentiment. My neighborhood has a 30 mph speed limit because the main road going through it is going up some difficult terrain and has blind corners on it, and people walking dogs or kids on the sidewalks. I regularly see people tearing up the hill doing 50+. Why shouldn't I report them if they are presenting a safety hazard to me, my pet, and my neighbors?
If you are recklessly endangering me, I'm going to do what I can to make you stop including setting up cameras to infer you [streetsblog.org]
Re: Development patterns (Score:2)
Punishment that comes in the form of a ticket in the mail weeks later doesn't work. Take a page from some countriee with more successful road slowing measures. Have them install speed bumps to keep the speed at 30mph. Also, people tend to speed less if the road is narrower. You can force people to drive slower, or ask them with a sign.
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In my not so walkable town, every kid within 1 mile of an elementary school or 2 miles from the high school has to walk/bike to school.
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This is just so weird to hear from a UK perspective. My kids have got public transport to school by themselves since they were each 11 years old, along with millions of other kids.
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Re:Development patterns (Score:5, Interesting)
Many communities are instead moving towards more centralization and busing for many reasons, the biggest one being economic. You can build one large campus with all of the modern facilities and bus kids from all over for a fraction of the cost of replicating or upgrading those facilities across the community. It's also more efficient to manage changes in enrollment with a large central campus rather than several small schools that might end up with empty classrooms due to aging of local population.
Source: Our local community recently rejected such a referendum, aimed at building one of these large central campuses, in favor of the added expense of upgrading the smaller neighborhood schools. Other nearby communities have built these large central campuses because of the cost savings with the tradeoff of more bus usage and less localized schooling, but ours decided the added expense was worth the benefits of the neighborhood schools where many of the kids can walk the short distance.
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Yah, centralization. That offers more administrative positions, anyway. But ask yourself which is better for the students? If you have a class of 50-100 in a neighborhood school, you know most of your class and all of your teachers. The teachers know most of the students in each year group.
Compare that to monster schools with 1000 kids in each year: kids know almost no one in the school; the teachers know only the kids they are directly involved with. Everyone becomes a tiny cog in a huge machine.
Sure,
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Part of the solution should also be development patterns
That's not the EPA to dictate city layout. Good, bad, whatever your plan. Not the right agency to hurl it at. Don't like that it isn't the right one to hurl at? Contact your Congressional rep, ask them to grant authority for whatever to the EPA.
I mean are we just going to see (insert some random federal agency) and then be like "Hey, you know what would be a good idea? (insert some idea that has zero relationship to the federal agency being discussed)." I mean, great, I'm glad people are thinking outs
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I'd just be happy if they established school bus stops like they used to, where all the kids within a block or two would go to that one stop to embark / disembark the bus. Seems like I get stuck behind school buses that stop at every fucking driveway on a street, stopping traffic in both directions each time, on streets that have perfectly serviceable sidewalks and low speed limits.
And then we simultaneously wonder why we have so many fat kids.
I'm all for keeping things safe if the neighborhood doesn't hav
dirty diesel school busses (Score:2)
for an insight into the genesis of the dirty school bus read Internal Combustion by Edwin Black.
http://www.internalcombustionb... [internalco...onbook.com]
ideal application? (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like school buses might be an ideal application of EV technology. (Disclaimer: we're looking into buying an EV car.) Reason: Apart from a field trip maybe once or twice a year, school buses mostly get used twice a day, and for not much more than an hour at a time. They never get driven far, and they can get juiced up in between times. If the school has a parking lot, the lot can be covered with solar panels (although I understand those are a bit pricy right now), so the buses can get charged up during the daytime, 9 to 3 or so.
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Solar panels are not that expensive relatively, and there are bifacial panels which can be used over a bus depot, where they will have a maximum effect. This is a best case, with the only exception of some rural school districts where buses may go 20-100 miles each way to pick up rural students.
As an added bonus, the buses could be useful for batteries in a power outage, similar to how some EVs can be used with an inverter for emergency power.
Then, there are upkeep costs. An EV is far simpler to maintain
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Some places have been using EV busses for close to a decade now, e.g. Shenzhen in China. The technology is proven for this kind of application, and as you say it's fairly ideal due to the usage patterns.
The battery doesn't even need to be particularly large. School busses are usually on the smaller end of the scale.
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IIRC Blue Bird built and sold the first modern (HFD) electric school bus in about 1996... hmm nope, 1994. There was little interest in them in this country until fairly recently, but the few units they had out in the field seem to have been successful.
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They appear to have made some prototypes. At the time only NiCd and NiMH batteries would have been available, which was probably the issue. Oh, well there was lead acid too, but it's too heavy.
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I believe the initial model used lead acid. It had an advertised maximum 100 mile range, so you can assume it was pretty heavy, and got more like 60 miles. Still, NREL says that school buses travel an average of about 75 miles, so for some routes that would have been OK.
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So busses only take kids home on sunny days? I agree with most of what you said, but the solar panels at the school is pointless.
Solar panels on the school are pointless in terms of the buses, but they're still a good idea. Schools should have solar power systems with islanding, so they can keep the power on in emergencies. Schools are often used as disaster management centers when things are bad enough that the kids can't go to school anyway, so it fulfills two purposes.
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The maths is that a school bus has a battery of about 210kWh, but obviously won't on average discharge to zero each night, because most routes just aren't very long, so instead will need charging about once every three to five days from 0 to 100, so you need about 70kWh per bus per night, which is about 70sq m of solar, which is a little more than twice the square metres of the bus itself. But but but intermittency. Yeah yeah. We know. Solar reduces but does not eliminate grid reliance. The perfect is the e
destroyed? (Score:2)
They're going to destroy them? What a waste. They could be transformed into campers or similar.
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Yes the way it works is generally that they have to hole the block and cut the frame. So instead of selling them to some other country with lesser emissions restrictions, where they will replace something even older and more polluting, they just destroy them. I presume the actual logic is that this generates more bus sales overall, even if the number is very small.
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The idea is to eliminate the emissions from transportation. If we replace the bus with an EV bus (still some pollution from electricity generation), but the diesel bus continues to be used then it's a net increase in pollution.
5 billion or 0.25 billion? (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
Why is this the job of the federal government? It has become such a behemoth, sucking up massive resources, some few of which dribble back to localities with program like this.
Wouldn't it be better to close down the massive federal bureaucracies, reduce the federal budget accordingly, and let states, counties and towns do their own thing?
Yeah, this is a local responsibility. (Score:2)
So, WTF? The EPA has no role in school funding. None! It should not be buying school busses. That's not its job, that's not its purpose, and so this cannot be a legitimate use of federal tax d
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Why is this the job of the federal government?
You may be surprised to learn that pollution doesn't stop at state boundaries.
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I ask the same thing when they subsidize nuclear power plants.
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No, it wouldn't be better to close down the massive federal bureaucracies. They're inefficient, but no other organization in the entire nation is capable of taking on the responsibility to move out such a huge change in transportation infrastructure. Big change always comes from the federal government because they are the vehicle through which we pool large amounts of funds to spark changes at the local level.
Highways, waterways, railroads, pipelines, phone lines, fiber optic lines, sewage, etc.-- Infrastru
All electric buses (Score:5, Interesting)
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Alas, in the USA, some things are local, some are State, and some are Federal. In general, police cars and buses are either Local or State.
Alas, the USPS (postal service) is a Federal affair. So it's noone's fault but the Federal Government....
A (soon to be) missed opportunity (Score:2)
1) Multi-person vehicle safety
2) Capacity can be actually studied and we can find optimal sizes for safety and efficency
3) School busses don't need to be super-aerodynamic in frequent-stop areas
4) Some kind of centipede "split off" design where you could service multiple areas and then work more like a train on the highway
5) Unified locking and communication for saf
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1) highly studied and accounted for in designs and operations
2) done and done, taking into account real world issues like cost of drivers, which over the lifetime of a bus exceeds the vehicle cost even though they can cost a half-million bucks (school buses usually do not, but transit buses often do)
3) they are already less aerodynamic than they used to be for various reasons because they rarely go over 60 mph where drag tends to mount up
4) haha HAhaaHa HahAh
5) unified locking? yeah let us know how that wor
Naturally? (Score:2)
Replace School Buses (Score:2)
Replace school buses with walking and biking to school.
Only Concern is Charging Infrastructure (Score:2)
I would feel much more comfortable if the first step was to outfit bus yards with the requisite bus/vehicle charging infrastructure. I've seen the work requires to trench in a ton of power, throw down another transformer, and troubleshoot the software on lesser known EVSEs that won a bid due to undercutting.
Too few people out there fully consider the cost of prepping for EV charging.
Most active discussion of the day (Score:2)
And not a trace of Funny to be found. *sigh*
Re: Seatbelts? (Score:2)
If they cut corners like seatbelts in my school bus from decades ago, who knows what other corners they cut. We did have one of those "silent defender" cameras in our school bus, but everyone suspected it was an empty box with an LED, lol. (This was before every kid had a cellphone glued to their hand.)
"You won't need seatbelts. Don't worry, in an accident it will be a pretty quick death." Kids joked.
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School buses didn't have seatbelts on purpose because kids might get stuck in them, and buses burn up really fast.
This doesn't help explain why fire control systems aren't mandatory on buses, especially school buses. They add relatively little to the total cost of a bus.
Those tall backed seats are designed to be crash arrestors. If a bus is rolled off a cliff or something they might not be much help, but in a forwards collision they are adequate.
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Those tall backed seats are designed to be crash arrestors. If a bus is rolled off a cliff or something they might not be much help, but in a forwards collision they are adequate.
We used to drive past many cliffs on the way to school.
Seats/seatbelts aside: The weight of those things probably means the kids won't suffer much in your average collision. It would have to be a head-on with a semi or something like that to kill any real percentage of them.
(Or maybe a soccer mom in some sort of oversized new SUV)
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Seats/seatbelts aside: The weight of those things probably means the kids won't suffer much in your average collision. It would have to be a head-on with a semi or something like that to kill any real percentage of them.
Exactly. A 40' school bus can weigh over ten tons empty. Hell, our 30' Blue Bird Q-Bus (which is a transit bus built like a school bus) weighs that much, but then it's got an 8.3 liter Cummins in the back and a big fucking stack of steel plates up front to balance it out. That's not uncommon for diesel pushers, though, which a lot of school buses are. Most school buses have a smaller engine however, since they usually don't need a big one to do their job.
I was in a GM new look transit bus that got hit by a
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We used to drive past many cliffs on the way to school.
So a school bus is basically a cage made out of hat channels of like 18 or 20 gauge steel, IIRC. And these channels are bent and go continuously around the whole bus. Then just above the floor level there's a continuous band of heavier steel which runs the full length of the vehicle. This is attached to the ribs that attach to the frame, and support the floor. The floor is usually 3/4" plywood, protected from below by some fairly light sheet steel. Seats are typically mounted to a track attached to the side
Re: Seatbelts? (Score:3)
A very common accident mode is a rollover. Seatbelts keep kids from bouncing around the interior. So there's something left to rescue. "Bus plunge" is really just a meme.
After the rollover, they catch fire. But if they've been bounced around the interior, there's not much left to rescue anyway.
and buses burn up really fast
Looking forward to those electric busses with Lithium-Ion batteries.
Re: We in yo economy (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you are willing to pay more than they get from the government then you can buy one. There are surplus buses for sale all the time. The prices have gone up in recent years, however. A bus that used to be literally $1500 is now commonly over $5000. The demand for bus conversions has gone way up.
Re: (Score:2)
The 1930s called and they want their chemistry back.
Re: (Score:2)
What happens if someone develops a carbon neutral ammonia that is so low in cost that we burn it as a fuel?
Then we burn it in a fixed power plant near the point of production, and send the energy to the school economically via the grid (where less than 5% will be lost in transmission, and you don't need to tie up road capacity with tanker trucks, nor risk spillage) and put it into battery-equipped electric school buses — which have 95%+ efficient electric motors instead of ~20% efficient (while cruising, so usually far worse) diesels.
Go on, ask a hard one.
The federal government creates the problem of high diesel fuel prices then tries to solve it with more government spending.
The federal government creates the problem of artif
Re: (Score:2)
Diesel school buses are only dirty because the EPA exempted them from emissions rules.
School buses represent a worst case for an ICEV (barring small engine vehicles like mopeds used around town) because of their nature — they are big because they need to carry a lot of people, they are heavy because they are big, they make a lot of stops because the people come from a variety of places. The modern emissions regime for diesels includes a DPF with DEF injection. This eliminates the vast majority of NOx emissions, but at the cost of efficiency. It also eliminates the bulk of soot producti
Re:Diesel School Buses Don't Have To Be Dirty (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, my Titan XD has the same 5.0L Cummins engine that has been used in school buses for 25 years.
Wat? The primary Cummins that's been used in school buses for 25 years was 5.9 liters and is now 6.7 liters. The second-most popular Cummins engine found in school buses used to be the C series (8.3l) but is now the L9 (8.9l.) Your Titan XD's name has an emoticon in it, and it is laughing at you.
To add to your point, the school buses are also not typically turbocharged (to reduce cost),
School buses over the last 25 years have one of the following engines: T444e, VT360, VT365, B/ISB, DT360, DT466, C/ISC, recently L9. Every single one of these engines is either literally always turbocharged (in the case of the first three) or at least ubiquitously turbocharged. It is extremely rare to find any of these engines in a school bus context without not only a turbocharger, but also an aftercooler (air to air intercooler, specifically.)
You MIGHT find some SHORT school buses from the early nineties and prior which have naturally aspirated diesels, either GM 6.2/6.5 or International-Navistar 6.9/7.3. But most of those were gassers, because you don't need a diesel to move them around effectively. You will not find a full size school bus made after 1994 with a diesel engine without a turbo.
You don't seem to know anything about school buses or diesel engines.
Re: (Score:2)
The primary Cummins that was used in school buses until 2019, in 99% of rural poor America, was a cost-reduced, naturally-aspirated version of the ISV 5.0. Full stop.
The ISV was not even available until 2013. You're talking about a period from 2013-2019. Further, it was only commonly used naturally aspirated from 2013-2016. The vast majority of V8 diesel school buses in history have used an engine from [International-]Navistar, specifically T444e, VT360, VT365. The vast majority of diesel school bus engines in history were made by the same company, if you include not only those V8s but also the Dt straight sixes (which are a much better engine, just as good as a straigh