School Buses Carry 2x More Passengers Than Public Transit. Electrify Them!

Surprising, but true: school buses carry more than twice as many passengers annually in the U.S. as public transit and rail combined, according to a report co-sponsored by San Diego Gas and Electric. With 480,000 yellow buses versus 66,000 public transit buses nationwide, schools collectively operate the largest transit system in the nation.

And this vast system excels at one kind of safety. Children on school buses are 70 times more likely to arrive at school without injury than if they arrived via passenger vehicle.

But the fact that 95% of school buses run on diesel fuel hurts children’s health. Diesel also worsens social inequity, and damages our shared climate. Children who ride diesel school buses are 46x more likely to develop lung-related cancer than children who don’t. Low-income children are impacted the worst.  

Electric school buses, though, emit no cancer-causing exhaust, and they help us reach our climate goals. They are more than double the cost of diesel to purchase at this point, but less than half the cost of diesel to fuel and maintain over the 16 year life of the bus. Additionally, one study estimates $8,200 saved in community health costs over the life of an electric school bus.

School buses actually run fewer hours and fewer miles than public transit and rail, i.e. operating 180-200 days per year rather than 300+ days/year, and six hours/day rather than 12-18 hours/day. Every diesel school bus hour and mile, though, is doubly dense with passengers, young ones, breathing carcinogenic diesel exhaust. That last part is what we’ve got to change.

Electric school buses (ESB's) are sprouting up in Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, New York and Michigan among other states, with the majority in California. To succeed, ESB's require partnerships between utilities and school districts. Social equity analysis determines which routes the e-buses serve. Some are funded by Volkswagen settlement money, in a poetic justice of profit-avarice-turned-to-public-good that needs to become more common.

Here in Oregon, Portland General Electric is developing a pilot program that aims to get the state’s first electric school buses on the road within 2020. I managed this program briefly until my position got dissolved in PGE’s reorg. I’m rooting for the program to succeed, and am confident it will. I’m moving forward with writing Electrifying Transit, a newsletter I started in 2017-2018, with this article the first in a series that will now address school bus fleets as well as public transit fleets.

Buses are the people’s transportation. Running them on diesel rather than electricity hurts people, particularly children and the most vulnerable, and damages the climate. Let’s work together to accelerate the transition from diesel-fueled transit to electrified transit.

I look forward to seeing many of you next week at Roadmap, the (inter)national conference here in Portland on electric mobility, presented by Forth.