A profound change is coming to American school buses
A common smell of American childhood, the diesel fumes wafting through yellow school buses, may soon be obsolete, as school districts across the nation turn to electric buses amid falling costs and growing concerns about global warming.
The shift would spell a major change to children’s experience of school, replacing the sweet-noxious scent of diesel with the whizz and whir of electric motors underneath a school bus floor. The rollout is happening quickly — orders expanded more than tenfold since the beginning of 2021 — and the Biden administration aims to speed it up even faster with a Wednesday announcement of the winners of $965 million in subsidies for electric and low-emissions bus purchases around the country. Some advocates say they are hopeful they can electrify the entire American school bus fleet by 2030.
Proponents argue that school transportation is a natural candidate for electrification, since the buses operate on fixed routes with regular breaks that can be used to charge batteries. They say the children most dependent on school buses to get to classrooms — students of color and lower-income families — also suffer disproportionately from asthma and other illnesses that are worsened by constant exposure to diesel fumes. Studies also show that exposure to pollution worsens school performance.
“We are forever changing school bus fleets across the United States,” the head of the Environmental Protection Administration, Michael Regan, told reporters ahead of the announcement, which he planned to make with Vice President Harris in Seattle.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/10/26/electric-school-buses-climate-diesel/
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