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Boston gets first two electric school buses

Boston today announced the arrival of the first of 20 electricity-powered buses at the BPS bus yard in Readville, which will serve as a pilot with the goal of replacing all of the city's current 620 diesel and propane buses by 2030 - and which will start carrying students after February vacation.

The remaining 18 electric buses are expected to be delivered by Blue Bird, with electric powertrains from Cummins, over the next five weeks, under a $7-million order using federal Covid-19 relief funds. At their unveiling, Mayor Wu hailed them as a key part of her local Green New Deal plan to reduce carbon emissions in Boston. School Superintendent Mary Skipper said the buses will reduce harmful diesel emissions in particular.

The buses will look similar to old-school ones, but will have a "green bird with a plug logo on each side" - and no tailpipes.

Officials said that ten Public Works and BPS have undergone training in electric-vehicle maintenance. In the short term, BPS is training drivers, mechanics and firefighters on the buses - drivers will begin taking them out for spins during vacation week. Longer term, Madison Park Technical Vocational High School is starting an electric-vehicle maintenance curriculum for students in its automotive program this fall.

According to the mayor's office:

The BPS Department of Transportation carefully selected the first routes – 111 trips, across 42 schools – to run electric school buses based on a variety of factors, including distance from the dispatch yard charging station, total length of route, and the expected traffic patterns along the route, with a preference for stop-and-go traffic rather than highway driving. Additionally, the cold weather deployment was factored into route selection to ensure power supply for battery conditioning and bus heating. Routes travel through nearly all of Boston’s neighborhoods.

BPS is finalizing installation of 20 charging stations at the Readville bus yard, utilizing increased charging capacity that was added with support from Eversource. Each electric bus will have a dedicated charger and be charged every day. The total time to charge each bus is about three to four hours.

An estimated 2,561 students across 42 schools will be riding the 20 buses each school day. BPS currently has 620 buses on the road each day.

The city and BPS will use experiences from the pilot to better prepare for the rollout of several hundred electric buses over the next seven years.

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Comments

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Those 115 schools should really be < 100.

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If you have 640 buses and divide them evenly among the 115 schools, that comes out to about 5.6 buses per school.

Obviously they aren't using a machine to slide one of those buses into to make it 3/5 of a standard size school bus. So likely some schools will have more buses and some will have less. Some buses might be standard bus size. Some might be smaller buses. Some might be designed for students that have special needs.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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620 buses servicing 42 schools equals 14 buses per school. That seems like a lot of routes per school. We oldsters remember walking four miles uphill, both ways, to school in snow, to summer school.

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Using COVID funds because?

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And probably 20-25 different buses. The ratio doesn’t seem off to me.

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Apparently. Did you have anything else to say about that, or were you just making sure you had the facts straight?

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That’s around five and a half buses per school. I know the one I work at has way more than that for arrival and dismissal. A lot of the schools open around the same time.

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My question is how many kids ride on each bus as from what I observe most busses are half full, so hopefully the busses are not all the full size ones. And it also seems there could be some algorithym that could make the system more efficient?

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for the amount of kids, and it would be cheaper.

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MIT tried to help in the past. You can’t fix incompetence.

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The handful of buses you observe may or may not be representative of the fleet as a whole. Also it's "algorithm" and I promise you, without even having to check, they're using one.

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The expensive part of bus operations is the driver. A smaller bus has the same amount of driver cost, and nearly the same amount of power, procurement, and maintenance costs, and loses a lot of flexibility on what role it can fill.

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Hello to the year 2525

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Be on time unlike their diesel cousins.

Talk about priorities. Cart before the horse.

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Fun school bus math:

Last month a MIT lead study came out showing that busing doesn’t improve academic outcomes for Boston students of color.

Then there was this story about the $143 million spent in 2022 to shuttle 21,500 kids across the city.

City release says “An estimated 2,561 students across 42 schools will be riding the 20 buses each school day. BPS currently has 620 buses on the road each day.” I wonder what kind of magic power these 20 electric school buses have so that they will be able to transport nearly four times as many students per day (128 each) as the average school bus (34 each, a much more realistic figure).

I am looking forward to the year 2030 headline stories reporting that busing in Boston now cost $200 million to serve 15,000 students while BPS enrolment and test scores keep declining.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/24/metro/busing-doesnt-improve-acade...

https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/01/12/boston-school-bus-report

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If only our world renowned colleges could help our world frowned upon public school systems and BPS would actually listen to them....

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BPS works with MIT plenty, including a few years ago when they briefly implemented that algorithm-based plan to stagger school start times. It was a disaster, remember? Computer simulations are only as good as their assumptions.

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Who holds back the electric bus?

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