I think this question is mundane and pointless, but I guess it’s a factual question, so I’m posting it here.
I went to school in the 80’s, and graduated in '92. I remember the bus drivers mentioning that the buses were about 20 years old or so, so we were in buses made in the 60’s and probably the 70’s.
So for no reason other than curiosity I’m curious if kids today are going to school in buses made in the 80’s.
Looks like you may be right.
Sounds like 15 years is the life expectancy.
Most of the quasi-public buses a see shuttling folks around in Cd. Juárez look to be old US-style school buses. I assumed they bought the buses after they’d had a run here, but maybe not. Not sure if we tend to run them into the ground here or if we get rid of them after a certain amount of time/miles.
I’d be amazed if standard American practice is to run school buses into the ground - these things are engineered to be the very safest passenger vehicles on the road, and you lose some of that safety advantage if you start pushing the buses to the very outer limits of their life expectency. My guess would be that, at least in more prosperous districts, buses are retired with quite a bit of useful life remaining.
The factual answer to this question will vary from school district to district. School buses are continually manufactured in the U.S. Various school districts purchase new buses every year, maybe not for their entire fleet, but to replace buses that are being retired. So across the entire US the age of the bus fleet, will vary widely.
Here’s a related question:
Why do school buses still look like they did 50 years ago? Why hasn’t the body style been updated?
If it ain’t broke…
They are supposed to be cheap and simple to make as well as durable and easy to repair. They achieve that very well the way they are. Their spartan design reflects that. They don’t usually go far at high speeds so they don’t need to be very aerodynamic with a fancy body shape or use many newer materials.
Good point. I went to school in Oregon in the Salem-Keizer school district. Either my Google-fu was weak, or else there isn’t info on-line about the age of the bus fleet.
I actually saw a new style bus just yesterday.
I think it was the Saf-T-Liner C2 on this page:
I’ve also seen other new ones that are rather ugly where the hood is sloped more than a traditional bus. I think it’s so there is better visibility to kids crossing in the front.
They don’t, at least not all of them. I grew up (in the 90s) riding buses that mostly looked like this. Obviously you still see them, but most newer ones seem to look more like this - bigger windshield, lower hood, extra window by the door. I imagine it’s a visibility issue for the driver; if I was driving something that size full of small children who would be exiting the vehicle frequently, I’d want as much glass instead of metal as possible.
Why it’s taken so long to make minor changes, I couldn’t possibly answer.
On a per-passenger basis, school buses probably have better aerodynamics than any consumer vehicle on the road. The biggest factor in aerodynamics is the cross-sectional area. A school bus has, what, maybe 4-6 times the cross-sectional area of a car? But it’ll carry about 20 times as many passengers.
They are really expensive and are a surprisingly major cost of running a school district(I’m a teacher).
Anyway, my school has a lot of new buses and a lot of old buses. The new buses aren’t that much better. They are a bit bigger and have more modern dashboard displays, but I can barely tell I’m on one of them unless I go up front.
They really don’t look like they did 50 years ago. I remember riding buses made in the early 70s when I was in the first through third grade.
4th through 8th grade, I was at a private school and all the buses were late 70s/early 80s and they were very well maintained.
The last time I rode a schoolbus on a regular basis was in around 1990…my Junior year of high school. It was a brand new bus–probably an '89 model. It had dark tinted windows, heaters for the rear of the bus, really high seatbacks with lots of padding, overhead racks that were heavily padded to prevent busted heads, etc. It even had a high tech panel above the driver’s head that had an LED for each light on the bus to indicate that they were all working.
At the time, I thought that the buses were all basically the same with a little modernization. But recently, I saw an old schoolbus in a junkyard and first thought it had to be from the 1940s. Upon closer examination and with the help of a friend, we were able to determine that it was a 1968 model. It really looked ancient, but in reality, it was just like some of the ones I rode when I first started school.
BTW, I graduated from HS in 1991 and have never been on an air-conditioned schoolbus, and it’s hot here year round. When my kids started school and had to ride a bus, I found out that the entire fleet is air-conditioned nowadays.
