I rode school buses to and fro throughout my years in public school, from about 1964 to 1975. Twenty-seven years on, while you occasionally see newer models with some marginal changes to the body style, they still look virtually the same as they looked 27 years ago, and for that matter 38 years ago. “International Harvester” has become “Navistar”, but their buses look the same as ever. “Crown” coaches, the larger ones without the “engine snout” in front, also look virtually unchanged.
So naturally I got to wondering how long before 1963 did they look like that? Does anyone have a clue?
The Blue Bird site shows some old photos whle the Laidlaw site only has a really old photo. (While Navistar and competitors build the engines and chassis, the body is often a Laidlaw or Blue Bird assembly.)
On the other hand, FreightLiner’s Thomas Bus Co, produces the whole thing–and as this photo shows, some look like a typical city bus.
My memory is that they simply followed “normal” bus design up until the 1950s, or so, when Greyhound started buying only 'cab over" designs, while school buses continued to develop with front-mounted engines. The older Blue Bird phot looks like any other cross-country bus of the 1920s and its later bus could be a 1940s Greyhound if the colors were different.
WAG: Some of the regulations from the first link may have inhibited some styling changes. (In addition, school boards may have rejected “modernized” bus shapes to avoid being accused of spending money on “luxuries”.)
Have they always been yellow? And is it a state or federal law that they be? Or is it just voluntarily agreed to?
I’m surprised they aren’t all required to be the cab-over design (most are not). It would eliminate the danger of running over a kid who walks in front of it and not require those goofy extending safety guards on the front bumper.
All states and provinces in North America have regulated that school buses must abide by specific standards. In Canada, the standard is referenced as CAN/CSA D250; in the USA, it’s written right into legislation varies from state to state a bit, but D250 is the basic model; if you read most of the various state standards you can tell they’re all from the same place.
The color of a school bus is actually called “School Bus Yellow.” That’s the actual name of that specific shade.
Before anyone asks “Why aren’t there seat belts on school buses?” I’ll answer it; because every study ever done has suggested that they’d cause more injuries than they’d prevent, and aren’t necessary anyway, since a school bus is just about the safest mode of transportation there is.
So US schools own the buses themselves? That explains a lot to me.
Here in Sydney, the State Department of Education charters buses from either private bus companies, or the government-run transit authorities. The driver simply changes the destination board to “SPECIAL” or SCHOOL BUS". In the times outside of school bus hours, the bus reverts to revenue service on a public route.
So, our school buses look just like whatever the adult population uses, depending on the local bus company.
The downside of this is that school buses tend to run during peak hours, so the bus companies need enough buses to cater for both schoolchildren and commuters, and some buses will spend large parts of the day idle. That’s why when I was a kid, the school buses were ancient specimens kept out of retirement just for that purpose (I think things have improved now), and the fare-paying public rode the modern ones. The US system is probably the better one.
Another aspect of school buses in the US is that most states also mandate special traffic laws concerning them - traffic is required to stop in both directions on an undivided road for a schoolbus which is loading or unloading children. Such laws would be impractical if school buses weren’t easily identifiable and allowed to have special stop signals mounted on them.
There are companies that specialize in school bus operation. Most schools use their services rather than buy their own buses . I believe Laidlaw is the largest school bus operator, with 40,000 vehicles in their fleet. These buses are designed and built as school buses.
Not necessarily, Hail Ants. My daughter’s school bus is of the cab-over type, and it’s still got that “goofy” guard on the front.
I’ve wondered that, too, Hermann. I went to a very small school as a child. It had five bus routes–four were long buses, and the fifth (with the least riders) used the short bus. I would guess that any “special” students who rode the bus rode the regular bus for their route. (I lived in town, so I never rode the bus anyway.) It was only when I moved to Minnesota that I came across the concept of the short bus being for the mentally retarded. Actually, at that school, they didn’t use actual short yellow school buses–they used gray vans with the “This vehicle stops at all railroad crossings” stickers on the back.
I’ve wondered why my daughter’s kindergarten bus isn’t a short bus–there are few enough riders. Perhaps it’s because the short bus has a bit of a stigma around here.
Another thing is that school buses often travel routes that are completely different than those of any city buses that might be nearby.
City transit systems in Ontario often modify their routes to pass by schools. The city of Mississauga, for example, also has some routes (#71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77) that only operate when students are coming and going to school, and travel between the school and a high-volume destination, such as the bus station at the mall.
In rural areas many small local schools have been closed, and the students are bused to regional or district schools. The school buses travel up and down the sideroads, and during bad weather the students wait in little shelters at the ends of their homes’ driveways. This is in areas that will never have the population density to support anything like a city transit system.
TheLoadedDog, what do the rural areas in Australia do for school buses?
Side note:
I’m a suburban boy. For years I’d seen these little shelters by the road at the ends of rural driveways. There would be fake southern-colonial ones in front of the houses with the prefab two-storey metal columns on the porch. There would be brick ones in front of the Fifties and Sixties ranch-style bungalows. There would be ramshackle wooden ones in front of the century-old brick-and-granite farmhouses whose owners had fallen on hard times.
I figured that they were some kind of rural stylistic affectation that never reached the 'burbs, little pillboxes for fake Beefeater guards maybe. It completely never occured to me that they might be bus shelters for kids waiting for the school bus…
Sending kids to special schools (rather than either institutionalizing them or simply leaving them home) is a fairly recent (from my advanced years) innovation in itself. Given that such schools frequently have a very wide area from which to draw fairly small classes, it makes more sense to send out five or six busses with capacities between six and 15, than to send out a 60-passenger behemoth and then waiting for it to spend four hours finding all the kids around the county, so short busses did tend to evolve with the special schools.
It was probably in the 1970s that I saw my first special needs bus, although I am sure that somewhere the practice began earlier than that.
Tom, the reason I asked is because my aunt had Downs Syndrome, and I can remember even back in the 1970s when I was a little kid, that she was picked up at my Grandmas by a “shortbus”.
Well, as I said, there may be some schools (with short busses) that date to an earlier period, but I suspect that most will date to the 1970s. The school in my county was built around that time and I remember the commotion caused in Michigan when they began reducing and closing the residential facilities at the beginning of the 1970s.
I graduated HS in 2001, and the buses servicing my school were very old, no aircon, cracked vinyl seats, no seatbelts. They were also very overcrowded.
So, I would agree that they are retired public buses, it seems not much has changed.
(Oh well, I use nice air-conned public buses now I’m at uni. :))
Sorry, I missed this bit before.
Our school buses looked different from public buses. They probably look like public buses looked like about twenty years ago, because thats what they are (public buses from 20 years ago).
(It may be different in Sydney, I was in Ipswich, near Brisbane.)
I wonder how long the short-bus stigma has prevailed? Everyone seems to understand what is meant by it these days, but I don’t remember anyone using the term when I was in school.
But I do remember one or two years when the school bus operator did a second morning run, because some kids didn’t need to be at school until 10. I was one of those, and I was the only kid from my neighborhood doing that. So I had the whole bus to myself every morning.
It’s referred to as “National School Bus Yellow” in most U.S. legislation, and in Standard CAN/CSA D250 as “National School Bus Yellow.” Don’t ask me for the exact dye mix or colour frequency 'cause I don’t know.
I HAVE seen it called “Chrome Yellow” though, so that may be the designation in some jurisdictions.
NOTE: As to short buses, they aren’t quite as safe as the big ones.
