This electric school bus has a range of up to 300 miles

The Type-D school bus uses a 387 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery.

See full article...

 

[lurknomore]

I've covered wireless charging for EVs before but it always receives such an overwhelmingly negative reaction from this audience (who cannot accept that it works better with cars than inefficient handheld devices) so I don't really bother any more.

Here's a link to the last time I covered it: https://meincmagazine.com/cars/2022/09/whats-the-state-of-wireless-ev-charging

The problem with wireless charging of cars is that it takes a lot of infrastructure and constraints to improve on a simple plug+cable, if you do it when stopped. And them magnutic waves gonna gimme cancer of the phone.

The radio had some guy talking about charging as you drive yesterday, without a single mention of the fundamental speed problem : Even at perfect 100kW wireless charging, if you go a mile per minute, charging a mere 30kWh, less than half your US battery, takes 18 miles of continuous high-power coils (many many miles of actual copper) embedded and properly maintained in the highway, so it ain't happening any time soon given the general highway neglect-until-it-crumbles approach.
I guess on the 405 you could charge cars a lot more as they crawl...

 

[mmiller7]

Comments are understanding "route" to mean the distance from the school to the farthest child. That is not the case. The route would be the total driving route, from parking, distance between all the pickups, to the school, then the next pick ups and the next school, (since they made a point of one way) and then either back to charging or round trip.


Example:
Parking 10 miles to first kid, 2 miles to the next pickup (PU) + 4 + 1 + 10 + 7 + 5 + 6 (a series of zig zagging through not always straight rural roads) + then 45 miles back to the school. All those dots after the parking to first PU could be 45 miles or less from the school, but the total driving added up to 90 miles. That's just pulling numbers out of thin air. That doesn't seem crazy considering how US rural living is hands-off for design. Also, the parking could be 50+ miles away because they have one lot for the whole rural school district or something. In Florida, they do not park the buses at the schools usually.

Sometimes I feel it's unfortunate our laws don't exempt rural outliers from coverage of government services, because we spend a lot of already small budgets on the handful of rural kids. We pump 50% of such a big budget over all into defense, it's small potatoes.

I think a lot of people don't grasp the roads don't often go directly where you want them.

My Elementary school was just on the other side of our neighborhood...which was split in half by a couple creeks and golf course, so the route by car looks like a giant letter "C" taking the roads. And there can be other funkyness like rules about whether the bus can pass thru another county or not. Some routes might be faster to just take X road over and down, but for reasons I don't fully understand (liability? insurance?) the X road briefly passes thru a different county so they have to instead take a far longer route on roads A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, and K.

Also even small neighborhoods when you get done snaking thru every street, cul-de-sac, etc. might be an extra 5+ miles of driving with lots of doubling back and forth to hit all the houses. These are all small numbers, but they all add up.

 

[crmarvin42]

Honestly if this was me and I lived in school district that insisted on making me ride a bus for an hour instead of walking across a field, I'd get myself emancipated and home school myself.

When I was a kid I lived down the street from one of the dozen or so elementary schools in the city. Like a 5 to 10 min walk for a grade-schooler with short legs. While trying to figure out the bussing routes one year they temporarily had me taking the bus to a school much further away from home, just because it was "on the way" from the bus storage yard to that school. All the parents of kids who were supposed to ride that bus stormed city hall and got that shit fixed before the first day of school, thankfully.

Later, when I moved up to the middle school it was almost an hour of walking to get to school from my home, and there were busses that drove by my street. However, we were within the walking radius and so had to walk. The problem was that they determined the walk/ride line at the MS based on "as the crow flies" distances, and didn't take into account that there was a literal mountain ridge between my home and the MS, or that some of us had to carry heavy orchestra instruments back and forth (my cello was almost as big as I was). I had to walk up the hill, around the hospital at the crest of the hill (Until I figured out which doors were never locked and started walking through the hospital) and then back down the other side to get to school, and then reverse it all to go home.

Of course, all of this gets a lot easier if we abandon dedicated school busses and instead invest in public transit that also happens to stop at or near schools. Give the kids a voucher to ride the bus, and then everyone benefits from the bus route. Not just the kids. Sure, wouldn't work in rural communities, but would have worked just fine in the one I grew up in.

 

[stevenjazz787]

I think a lot of people don't grasp the roads don't often go directly where you want them.

My Elementary school was just on the other side of our neighborhood...which was split in half by a couple creeks and golf course, so the route by car looks like a giant letter "C" taking the roads. And there can be other funkyness like rules about whether the bus can pass thru another county or not. Some routes might be faster to just take X road over and down, but for reasons I don't fully understand (liability? insurance?) the X road briefly passes thru a different county so they have to instead take a far longer route on roads A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, and K.

Also even small neighborhoods when you get done snaking thru every street, cul-de-sac, etc. might be an extra 5+ miles of driving with lots of doubling back and forth to hit all the houses. These are all small numbers, but they all add up.

It's true, my oldest kid's school is literally on the other side of a highway, if you climbed up 30 feet you could probably see it. It's an 8 mile drive, because the overpass is 4 miles away by twisty roads. 4 miles, go under the overpass, 4 miles on indirect roads again to the school.

 

[RunUpHill]

We need to hear from some school bus DRIVERS. Are the hours insane? Is the pay worthwhile? Are there drivers' labor unions? What's the worst and best parts of the job?

 

[numerobis]

The problem with wireless charging of cars is that it takes a lot of infrastructure and constraints to improve on a simple plug+cable, if you do it when stopped. And them magnutic waves gonna gimme cancer of the phone.

The radio had some guy talking about charging as you drive yesterday, without a single mention of the fundamental speed problem : Even at perfect 100kW wireless charging, if you go a mile per minute, charging a mere 30kWh, less than half your US battery, takes 18 miles of continuous high-power coils (many many miles of actual copper) embedded and properly maintained in the highway, so it ain't happening any time soon given the general highway neglect-until-it-crumbles approach.
I guess on the 405 you could charge cars a lot more as they crawl...

At that rate you only need to power 10-20% of the road to charge cars for indefinite range on the highway; less if you focus on the slow-speed parts of the highway.

 

[foamfinger]

How many routes are 147 miles (which seems crazy anyway)? This has to be an extreme outlier, why not just keep diesel buses on those and focus on electrifying more of the shorter routes

Big Sky Country. Kids are on the buses for hours each way and some districts installed wifi on their buses to give their students the ability to do homework on the bus.

 

[stevenjazz787]

When I was a kid I lived down the street from one of the dozen or so elementary schools in the city. Like a 5 to 10 min walk for a grade-schooler with short legs. While trying to figure out the bussing routes one year they temporarily had me taking the bus to a school much further away from home, just because it was "on the way" from the bus storage yard to that school. All the parents of kids who were supposed to ride that bus stormed city hall and got that shit fixed before the first day of school, thankfully.

Later, when I moved up to the middle school it was almost an hour of walking to get to school from my home, and there were busses that drove by my street. However, we were within the walking radius and so had to walk. The problem was that they determined the walk/ride line at the MS based on "as the crow flies" distances, and didn't take into account that there was a literal mountain ridge between my home and the MS, or that some of us had to carry heavy orchestra instruments back and forth (my cello was almost as big as I was). I had to walk up the hill, around the hospital at the crest of the hill (Until I figured out which doors were never locked and started walking through the hospital) and then back down the other side to get to school, and then reverse it all to go home.

Of course, all of this gets a lot easier if we abandon dedicated school busses and instead invest in public transit that also happens to stop at or near schools. Give the kids a voucher to ride the bus, and then everyone benefits from the bus route. Not just the kids. Sure, wouldn't work in rural communities, but would have worked just fine in the one I grew up in.

This sounds exactly like my middle school experience, but replace orchestra with band and mountain with intentionally designed communities to move traffic subsections filled with house.

 

[lurknomore]

At that rate you only need to power 10-20% of the road to charge cars for indefinite range on the highway; less if you focus on the slow-speed parts of the highway.

20% of 2 lanes for hundreds/thousands/tens_of_thousands of miles ?

Since most EVs can already go over 200 miles on a charge and charge in under an hour, and that's going to improve by 30-50% before you even get the permits, and another 30-50% before you've built the first 100 miles, I'm going go with "ain't happening", even in the craziest Blue States.

 

[ranthog]

We need to hear from some school bus DRIVERS. Are the hours insane? Is the pay worthwhile? Are there drivers' labor unions? What's the worst and best parts of the job?

They are public school jobs. The pay almost certainly sucks, because we shit on our schools.

 

[ranthog]

20% of 2 lanes for hundreds/thousands/tens_of_thousands of miles ?

Since most EVs can already go over 200 miles on a charge and charge in under an hour, and that's going to improve by 30-50% before you even get the permits, and another 30-50% before you've built the first 100 miles, I'm going go with "ain't happening", even in the craziest Blue States.

There ain't any crazy blue states.

The most you might get is a pilot project on a few miles of road anywhere as part of a research program. Which is not necessarily money poorly spent. But you'd have to prove financial feasibility and get automakers on board before any one would consider deploying this type of technology.

 

[halse]

Honestly if this was me and I lived in school district that insisted on making me ride a bus for an hour instead of walking across a field, I'd get myself emancipated and home school mysel

Sounds like the original post is a troll.
Public schools can not require you to take a bus to school, only give you the option.

 

[MMarsh]

I am not understanding why swapping is unrealistic. The general concept is built into almost any LI battery tool with the ability to swap out a discharged battery with a full one and plug empty one into a charger. We are only talking scale here.

Design a battery with grab holds for equipment capable of pulling battery, have platform ready to hold battery once out and have quick connect or slider connections for battery connector.

The problem isn't the concept, it's the infrastructure.

Charging a fleet of buses = take the existing four-acre gravel lot, add a transformer, add some buried cables, add some plugs. Done.

Swapping batteries regularly = you need flat concrete, storage racks, equipment capable of safely lifting one-tonne things with high precision, staff to maintain the automated parts of it, staff to do the non-automated parts.... AND you need all the same charging infrastructure as before.

Swappable batteries are easy when they fit in your hand. They rapidly get less easy when you need forklifts to move them. The cost of all that extra infrastructure is likely to exceed the cost of just putting a bigger battery in each bus.

 

[DovePig]

[...]
Swapping batteries regularly = you need flat concrete, storage racks, equipment capable of safely lifting one-tonne things with high precision, staff to maintain the automated parts of it, staff to do the non-automated parts.... AND you need all the same charging infrastructure as before.

Especially if your only staff to do all that is Groundskeeper Willie...

 

[_dgc_]

I am not understanding why swapping is unrealistic. The general concept is built into almost any LI battery tool with the ability to swap out a discharged battery with a full one and plug empty one into a charger. We are only talking scale here.

Design a battery with grab holds for equipment capable of pulling battery, have platform ready to hold battery once out and have quick connect or slider connections for battery connector.

There is nothing impossible about swapping batteries in vehicles, it is just completely impractical from an economic standpoint. Would you buy a 40K motor unit, and a 20K battery unit, or would you buy a 50K vehicle (times whatever for the bus)?

Unless you expect to typically sell multiple battery packs per motor, why would you separate them? Replaceable vehicle batteries essentially need two containers for the battery instead of one - a place to put it that is strong enough to hold the battery pack, with quick connect terminals robust enough for enough cycles, plus the packaging of the battery, all of it strong enough to handle a forklift or whatever slamming things in and out.

Then there is the whole maintenance issue - if you are rough with your portable tool/battery, it's your problem to buy a replacement (or throw the burning object outdoors, if you manage to crush the battery). If the school system's maintenance person is careless connecting a vehicle battery, it's likely to involve calling the dealer, complaining, potential recalls if there was a fire hazard. You aren't going to treat a battery pack costing thousands as disposable.

 

[Architect_of_Insanity]

Two things:

What a weird way of describing range.

I can't imagine living somewhere so remote as a child that the bus route is 147 miles.

I'd imagine that these don't use heat pumps, which could drastically improve winter range. Busses are also pretty large interiors to heat and might consume triple the power a car does for locomotion, so it's not shocking that winter uses so much power. Other than the winter performance on very long routes, it looks like it's very feasible to do EV busses that work almost everywhere. I think focusing on the 90% rather than the exceptions first is the best idea and it looks like they've been doing that.

It seems that you're on the right path to making an EV bus better. Insulate the heck out of it, install multiple heat pumps for both AC and heat. And I would toss on top of it - store them in a climate controlled building for charging so their interiors are stable on the first mile.

The bus doesn't have to go all out to condition the interior and starts out with a warm battery for good range.

 

[Architect_of_Insanity]

There is nothing impossible about swapping batteries in vehicles, it is just completely impractical from an economic standpoint. Would you buy a 40K motor unit, and a 20K battery unit, or would you buy a 50K vehicle (times whatever for the bus)?

Unless you expect to typically sell multiple battery packs per motor, why would you separate them? Replaceable vehicle batteries essentially need two containers for the battery instead of one - a place to put it that is strong enough to hold the battery pack, with quick connect terminals robust enough for enough cycles, plus the packaging of the battery, all of it strong enough to handle a forklift or whatever slamming things in and out.

Then there is the whole maintenance issue - if you are rough with your portable tool/battery, it's your problem to buy a replacement (or throw the burning object outdoors, if you manage to crush the battery). If the school system's maintenance person is careless connecting a vehicle battery, it's likely to involve calling the dealer, complaining, potential recalls if there was a fire hazard. You aren't going to treat a battery pack costing thousands as disposable.

They did this back in the early 80's... it worked fine and was 100% automated. Bus arrived, connected to an overhead power feed (like city trams, only just in the this spot), machines moved the exhausted battery out and replaced with a fresh charged battery, bus disconnected from the overhead power feed and off it went.

 

[Nalyd]

luxury i tells you, luxury. we had to walk 147 miles, up hill, both ways, carrying a dead horse for our lunch, with no shoes, just bits of broken glass for socks.

Too bad you didn't think to make some shoes out of the hide of that horse. Then it would have weighed less, and the shoes would have protected the pavement from your glass shard socks.

 

[BigOlBlimp]

Easy. Don't use electric for that route.

 

[lloyddean]

Although not stated I would suspect those mentioned longer routes are most likely in support of school Sporting event transports.

 

[Lord Bayaz]

Wonder how big the battery is on the short bus.

 

[ranthog]

Although not stated I would suspect those mentioned longer routes are most likely in support of school Sporting event transports.

The longer routes are almost certainly the normal daily rural routes. When you get into some of the rural areas out on the great plains and mountain west you can have some pretty long distances for bus routes, especially with consolidated school districts.

Keep in mind that all bus routes have some time driving from where the bus is parked to the start of the route. For 147 mile bus route, likely that the bus may be driving a long ways out to start picking up students. So the driver may be driving a half hour before anyone gets on the bus, and another set of miles after the route is complete to where they park the busses.

 

[ranthog]

Easy. Don't use electric for that route.

That is an option today, but that can't be the option in the long run. We need busses designed with larger battery packs to handle the longer routes. Like everything else, we need to start deploying that technology today.

 

[defaultluser]

A few notes:
1) My ride in the morning was about an hour, I was the last stop on the route. This was in Montgomery County, MD, right next to DC. Was in the magnet program and shifting students from upcounty to downcounty was a fair distance. It's been a few years, but I believe it was 6am pickup, 7-7:15 drop off, for me. Other kids had to get on the bus well before me.

2) Charge to charge implies depot-route-depot, which could easily add several (tens) of miles to the route.

3) I'm surprised they weren't getting close to the limit even in urban areas. Depending on how many start times your district has, I could see the same bus running two or three routes before being able to charge.

4) Not to your point, but I was under the impression that charging to 100 and depleting the battery isn't good for longevity. shouldn't we be treating the base bus as having a 90 mile effective range if charged to 80% and used to 20%?

No, its iron phosphate, so there is no range reduction from overzealous charging. also, zero battery fires.

my rural school loop back in the 1980s in Elroy , TX would have easily been handled by this (start at farms, pass Elroy, pass though smith., ends at high school / baty/ hill crest/pop.) hornby-dunlap has its own busing region

whatever you need to charge-up, you just top-off for the 4+ hours they sit at the bus barn before homeward journey - but the total route was under 90 minutes one-way

 

[stevenjazz787]

Nice try... but everyone knows the doors go BEHIND the wheels.

You're thinking of the Original Series, which included the pre-letter designated types and -A and -B, by the time the -D came around for the Next Generation, the wheel was placed behind the front door.

Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_bus_manufacturers

 

[PaulWTAMU]

I can't imagine living somewhere so remote as a child that the bus route is 147 miles.

I probably did growing up. Clear Creek County, Colorado had one combined middle/high school in Idaho Springs, for the whole county (about 390 square miles). Three elementary schools (King Murphy, which was in the middle of nowhere, then one in Georgetown and one in Idaho Springs). For some godawful reason my address sent me to King Murphy, which was like 45-60 minutes on a bus each way. Instead of having me go to Idaho Springs for elementary (about 15-20 minutes each way on a bus).

These sorts of places exist but I'd honestly put them as a really low priority when it comes to EV's; there's not all that many of them, and the budgets for capital expenses tend to be pretty low.

 

[raelx]

Screw the battery. How does 147 mile one way bus route for school work at all? That's just insane.

Quite possible that the route is not for one school but all the schools the bus does in say the morning run. Like early run for High school and then a second run for Elementary. It's doing 147 miles in the morning but only half would be for any one kid on the bus. 90min bus ride is not unheard of.

 

[jonah]

For those who live in school districts that use sequential bussing, how do the logistics of that work? Are the school start/end times significantly different to allow the bus to do it's route, then get to the next school in the sequence?

Our relatively small rural town has a bus per route, each bus goes from one school to the next, then goes out starts doing drop off. As with many here, we have regular driver shortages and routes get combined, which obviously significantly increases the route length.

Yes. Here middle school starts at 7:30, HS 8:30, and elementary at 9:30. The buses run continuously from ~6:30-9:15 or so, then for a similar amount of time in the afternoon, starting at ~2.

 

[The Dark]

There is nothing impossible about swapping batteries in vehicles, it is just completely impractical from an economic standpoint. Would you buy a 40K motor unit, and a 20K battery unit, or would you buy a 50K vehicle (times whatever for the bus)?

Unless you expect to typically sell multiple battery packs per motor, why would you separate them? Replaceable vehicle batteries essentially need two containers for the battery instead of one - a place to put it that is strong enough to hold the battery pack, with quick connect terminals robust enough for enough cycles, plus the packaging of the battery, all of it strong enough to handle a forklift or whatever slamming things in and out.

Then there is the whole maintenance issue - if you are rough with your portable tool/battery, it's your problem to buy a replacement (or throw the burning object outdoors, if you manage to crush the battery). If the school system's maintenance person is careless connecting a vehicle battery, it's likely to involve calling the dealer, complaining, potential recalls if there was a fire hazard. You aren't going to treat a battery pack costing thousands as disposable.

For modern batteries, it probably makes more sense to invest in quicker charging rather than swapping battery packs, but it has been done in the past because of limitations of early battery chemistry.

Curtis Publishing (Lady's Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, The Country Gentleman, and other periodicals) used battery swapping on their electric trucks from 1912 to 1964. Normal operation was a three-point system, since Curtis didn't want drivers to be idle while 10 tons of cargo was being unloaded and loaded, so a driver would take magazines from the printing press to the post office, pick up an empty truck at the post office and take it to the railyard, drop it off for loading and pick up a truck with paper to drive back to the press. They used nine lead-acid batteries that were 60" long by 8" wide and 14" tall that produced 10 volts each and were rebuilt every ten years. The batteries would normally be swapped daily because they lasted 22 hours under that intermittent use but were slow charging, but some trucks ran continuously for 48 hours during peak season through swapping batteries every six hours.

 

[ranthog]

These sorts of places exist but I'd honestly put them as a really low priority when it comes to EV's; there's not all that many of them, and the budgets for capital expenses tend to be pretty low.

These places already get grants from the federal government to help pay for replacement busses. Given that school districts will drive a bus for 10+ years, it is important to start helping them look at electrification now. Every time they purchase a diesel vehicle you're locking them into emissions for more than a decade.

In the long run, you're likely going to reduce the amount of subsidies these districts need given the fact they'll be cheaper to charge.

 

[real mikeb_60]

Two things:

What a weird way of describing range.

I can't imagine living somewhere so remote as a child that the bus route is 147 miles.

I'd imagine that these don't use heat pumps, which could drastically improve winter range. Busses are also pretty large interiors to heat and might consume triple the power a car does for locomotion, so it's not shocking that winter uses so much power. Other than the winter performance on very long routes, it looks like it's very feasible to do EV busses that work almost everywhere. I think focusing on the 90% rather than the exceptions first is the best idea and it looks like they've been doing that.

A heat pump would help, yes, but on significantly sub-zero (F) mornings it won't be enough, and the backup resistance heaters would be used too. And that kind of operation must be allowed for, operating on the longest route the school district has, for the bus to be a practical sale.'

OTOH, as somebody else said, that's a BIG honkin' battery. Ideal application, methinks, for that phantom solid-state battery that holds twice the charge in half the space (and weight?).

Note also that school buses are often used on other runs too, such as school field trips or sports trips. Those can be much longer than the standard bus runs. Many school districts that converted to CNG (a decade ago, when California was forcing that) kept some diesel buses around for those trips. As CNG became more available, that became less of a problem (make a deal with other school districts for refueling near the destination while the game is going on, perhaps). What we'll be seeing, now that CA is forcing conversion to electric school buses, is that districts will keep some CNG buses around for the same reason. Teams and field trips for districts in my region often have destinations more than 100 miles away. It's not always financially (or legally) feasible to charter a bus for them.

 

[real mikeb_60]

Honestly if this was me and I lived in school district that insisted on making me ride a bus for an hour instead of walking across a field, I'd get myself emancipated and home school myself.

The school district where I live would not carry students who lived less than 1/2 mile (elementary level), 1 mile (middle school), or 2 miles (high school) from the school site. So my daughter walked or got a ride in Mom's Taxi to elementary school, got the school bus to middle school (farthest away of the 3 levels) walking home from the elementary school where it stopped, and rode Mom's Taxi or a carpool with other parents and kids to high school (just under the 2-mile limit) except for one year when they would carry kids who lived within 2 miles for an extra charge.

 

[real mikeb_60]

These places already get grants from the federal government to help pay for replacement busses. Given that school districts will drive a bus for 10+ years, it is important to start helping them look at electrification now. Every time they purchase a diesel vehicle you're locking them into emissions for more than a decade.

In the long run, you're likely going to reduce the amount of subsidies these districts need given the fact they'll be cheaper to charge.

When CNG was the thing 10-15 years ago, school districts griped because they were forced to get rid of good, working, 40-year-old diesels. That smoked so much the kids riding the buses were effectively smoking a pack a day from exhaust leakage or open windows (those 40-yr-old buses didn't have a/c either). Tier-4 diesel was offered as an alternative for places where CNG wouldn't work, which helped. Now, they're all griping about having to replace good, working, 10-15 yr old CNG and Tier-4 buses with electric, and getting less (though not zero by any means) money to help.

 

[qazwart]

How many routes are 147 miles (which seems crazy anyway)? This has to be an extreme outlier, why not just keep diesel buses on those and focus on electrifying more of the shorter routes.

Imagine a bus going 30 miles out to the start of their route, then weaving 40 miles back to the school picking up the kids and dropping them off at a high school. Then maybe doing it over again in the morning for the elementary age school kids.

 

[jock2nerd]

A few notes:
1) My ride in the morning was about an hour, I was the last stop on the route. This was in Montgomery County, MD, right next to DC. Was in the magnet program and shifting students from upcounty to downcounty was a fair distance. It's been a few years, but I believe it was 6am pickup, 7-7:15 drop off, for me. Other kids had to get on the bus well before me.

2) Charge to charge implies depot-route-depot, which could easily add several (tens) of miles to the route.

3) I'm surprised they weren't getting close to the limit even in urban areas. Depending on how many start times your district has, I could see the same bus running two or three routes before being able to charge.

4) Not to your point, but I was under the impression that charging to 100 and depleting the battery isn't good for longevity. shouldn't we be treating the base bus as having a 90 mile effective range if charged to 80% and used to 20%?

LFP batteries seem quite happy to be charged to 100%.

 

[qazwart]

Why are they using electric heaters rather than heat pumps? Almost every electric car sold has switched to heat pumps. They’re way more efficient Also it might be worth better insulating the busses, so they don’t lose so much heat. Most of the school buses I’ve seen are basically corrugated metal boxes with seats.

 

[ranthog]

A heat pump would help, yes, but on significantly sub-zero (F) mornings it won't be enough, and the backup resistance heaters would be used too. And that kind of operation must be allowed for, operating on the longest route the school district has, for the bus to be a practical sale.'

OTOH, as somebody else said, that's a BIG honkin' battery. Ideal application, methinks, for that phantom solid-state battery that holds twice the charge in half the space (and weight?).

Note also that school buses are often used on other runs too, such as school field trips or sports trips. Those can be much longer than the standard bus runs. Many school districts that converted to CNG (a decade ago, when California was forcing that) kept some diesel buses around for those trips. As CNG became more available, that became less of a problem (make a deal with other school districts for refueling near the destination while the game is going on, perhaps). What we'll be seeing, now that CA is forcing conversion to electric school buses, is that districts will keep some CNG buses around for the same reason. Teams and field trips for districts in my region often have destinations more than 100 miles away. It's not always financially (or legally) feasible to charter a bus for them.

Likely the district will put in some charging ports that other schools busses can use while parked for the event, and it will eventually even out between districts. Even 3 to 4 hours of charging at an event will significantly extend the ranges for trips that aren't effectively over night affairs.

Districts will also likely keep on hand some of the longer range busses for events.

 

[DovePig]

I probably did growing up. Clear Creek County, Colorado had one combined middle/high school in Idaho Springs, for the whole county (about 390 square miles). Three elementary schools (King Murphy, which was in the middle of nowhere, then one in Georgetown and one in Idaho Springs). For some godawful reason my address sent me to King Murphy, which was like 45-60 minutes on a bus each way. Instead of having me go to Idaho Springs for elementary (about 15-20 minutes each way on a bus).

Wait, there was no option for you to go to the Idaho Springs elementary? Like your parents choosing a different elementary school, if it had any available space? Is that because of purely county founding or what? Apologies for sounding perplexed, but it works differently here (not saying better, just differently).

 

[numerobis]

Why are they using electric heaters rather than heat pumps? Almost every electric car sold has switched to heat pumps. They’re way more efficient Also it might be worth better insulating the busses, so they don’t lose so much heat. Most of the school buses I’ve seen are basically corrugated metal boxes with seats.

I don't see any reason to believe it's not a heat pump. The spec sheet says "75,000 BTU/h, front, rear, electric" for HVAC. If it was separate systems for heating than for cooling I'd expect to see two numbers.

 

[ranthog]

Wait, there was no option for you to go to the Idaho Springs elementary? Like your parents choosing a different elementary school, if it had any available space? Is that because of purely county founding or what? Apologies for sounding perplexed, but it works differently here (not saying better, just differently).

Likely just because of how the population in the district shook out. You don't always end up at the closest school, as some schools may serve a larger areas than others. This especially can happen if there are population shifts within a district which mean district buildings are no longer in ideal locations anymore.

I'd note that not all school districts allow you to enroll in a different school in the district easily. On top of that they almost certainly don't provide bussing to the other school even if they let you enroll there. So if the parents didn't want to drive them every time, they have to take what they get.