An example of a pup trailer set up:
26 years working at a trucking firm. When I started the company was about 75% cabover, and ten years later all but two were conventionals(those two being owner-operators that lived in their trucks). Most drivers hated them, as did all of the company\s mechanics.
I’ll add my 2 cents on different school busses.
Buses with a nose are my preferred choice. Visibility is excellent in all directions (for a 40’ vehicle) if your mirrors are adjusted properly. Engine is easy to access for daily pre-trip inspection and not too noisy. Front doors are immediately on your right and it is easy to greet children and easy to get out and help them up/down stairs.
Flat-nose busses with engine up front. Visibility is OK. The engine is louder and gets in the way. And it is more difficult to access. Front axle is behind you, so you need to enter the intersection before you start steering.
Flat-nose busses with engine in the back. Engine is quieter, but it forms a wall of white noise behind the children. This really cuts down on my perception of what is happening in the bus behind me. This bus is impossible to back up safely on residential streets. The blind spot can swallow multiple cars behind you. The rear window is so high up, shorter children can hide behind the bus even from a spotter right up against the window.
Interesting Temporary_Name. I’ve never seen one. That video is worth a thousand words.
OK, that answers that, thanks @AdamF. It hadn’t occurred to me that one design or the other would make it easier to monitor the kids inside the bus, but that’s something that’s clearly a higher priority for school buses than for transit.
@N9IWP, when I lived in Bozeman, MT (pop 30,000), our city transit buses were similar to that. But that’s hardly a typical case, since our transit system consisted of a total of four buses on the road at once (plus I think a couple of spares, to allow for maintenance without route downtime). For all the more of an investment it was, those four buses really do make a big practical difference in getting around town. I imagine that the easier engine maintenance in a nose design is a big deal, when you’ve got that few of them (and the maintenance is thus done by non-specialized mechanics).
(although, looking up images, it looks like they have at least some flat-fronts now, too)
For what it’s worth, in my country, two school system employees are assigned to each bus — the driver, and a monitor to supervise the kids and allow the driver to focus on driving.
Most of the buses in the system are flat front (at least some are hybrid), but the one that serves my city is nose front (also hybrid)
Brian
I’ll point out that the Los Angeles Metro fleet is entirely CNG, except for a few electrics.
You guys must have a lot of money. What country is that?
And some extraneous school bus information:This Is What Those Black Stripes On School Buses Actually Mean
“… Those black rails—known to the savvy schoolbusheads as “rub rails”—are actually placed at very specific locations on the bus, and have important meanings…”
“… The three rails are there to demarcate the body mid-section/top of the seat, the seat line itself where all the kids’ butts are installed, and the floor line of the passenger compartment.”
The rails add some strength to the thin sheet metal sides of the bus, and provide a good visual aid for rescue and safety workers in case a bus is involved in an accident; a quick glance at these rails can show if the impact happened below the floor line, for example, which would be less serious."
I never knew that.
This is a not all that infrequent problem where I live in Brooklyn.
I live right on the water in Brooklyn, not far from the docks in Brooklyn. There isn’t any significant shipping coming into those docks anymore, hasn’t been for a long time, but there’s still plenty of operational warehouses and the like.
For trucks coming off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, or the Manhattan Bridge (they’re not allowed on the Brooklyn Bridge), there are two streets that go all the way to the dock/warehouse area. One is a wide, six-lane, two way avenue. The other is a narrow, one-way residential street…
Drivers who don’t know the area are looking at Google Maps, or some other GPS routing program. They see the narrow street first, and make the right turn to go down to where they’re delivering or picking up.
The problem is that these programs don’t tell them that they’re going to get stuck making that turn.
So they make the turn. And then they’re stuck. They can’t make the turn, and it takes them ages to wiggle out of it backwards. Often damage is done to parked cars in the process.
But if they’d kept going for just a few more blocks, they’d come to the big wide avenue that goes right down to the docks, and they’d be fine.
Probably true once, but changing.
NYC’s MTA buses are a mix. From the MTA’s site:
Our fleet continues to be one of the cleanest in the entire world with more than 3,300 Clean Diesel buses, 1,683 Hybrid-Electric buses, 749 Compressed Natural Gas buses, and 10 all-electric buses.
So mostly diesel, but they’re working on it.
By the way, your posts have bee incredibly informative. Thanks!
A slight thread resurrection, thanks to a road trip over the weekend.
This past Thursday, my wife and I drove from suburban Chicago to see my parents in northeastern Wisconsin. It was the middle of a weekday, and there were a lot of trucks on the highway. As I wasn’t the one doing the driving, and thinking about this thread, I took the opportunity to look at the trucks as we drove north. Out of several hundred semi tractors that I saw along the way, I saw exactly one cabover semi, around Sheboygan. It was hauling a trailer, but wasn’t carrying the logo of a trucking company, and it definitely looked a little long in the tooth, so I’m guessing it was either an independent operator, or a farmer.
I did notice that cabovers were pretty common among smaller delivery trucks, which my friend who works in the trucking industry tells me are called “box trucks” or “straight trucks.” Most of them seemed to be from Japanese manufacturers, like Isuzu, Mitsubishi Fuso, or Hino, and while they were common as we were driving through the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, they were pretty much non-existent in the areas in between cities. I imagine that they are a lot more agile and maneuverable for making deliveries in residential areas, or at smaller businesses.
Funny you did - we drove outside of Phoenix, down to the town of Maricopa, and we saw two cabovers, late 90s Freightliners. Both from the same company, in great shape.
There’s a lot of specialty haulers down there - recyclers, wood chip haulers (I can’t figure out why - there isn’t a tree to be seen!), and you don’t tend to see the trucks outside of the local area. They’re in their own world out there.
They can carry a larger weight load because they are spread out, thus they distribute the weight to the ground(road) over a wider area reducing ground(road) pressure and saving wear and tear on the road from the road surface to the road bed.
As an example of this (for those who aren’t especially mechanically inclined)is the M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. It weighs in roughly around 67 or 68 tons combat weight or so if memory serves. That weight is distributed through the suspension and continuous track system (which runs basically the length of the vehicle and is about 25 inches wide). so you take and area that is a little less than 32 feet long by roughly 2 feet wide times two and it gives you a ground pressure of a little under 14 psi for 67 and a fraction tons of weight.
Crap, forgot the other part.
So, while there are differences in detail between my tank and your truck and trailer, the operative principle between the two is the same. Your two spread out axles takes a larger load on the trailer and spreads the load over a wider area reducing the ground pressure at any one spot. Put your axles back together and they are still supporting the same amount of load together but now the pressure is higher and more concentrated in a smaller area of the road.
Thank you for the explanation and the clarification of the explanation. That makes total sense and I should have realized it was the pressure transferred to the ground for a secondary reason – namely that we routinely drove six-thousand pound forklifts onto the trailers thirty or forty times a load with no ill effect and that was a very concentrated load usually on one side or the other of the deck. The lift itself plus a two or three thousand pound pallet did not damage the deck, frame, or the suspension so the only item left is how it transfers to the road. (To clarify, many warehouses use pallet jacks which weigh significantly less than a whole forklift for loading and unloading but forklifts are as common or more so.) This is so obvious now that I know it I am amazed I did not deduce it before. Thank you for educating me!
Ironically I was discussing tracked vehicles just recently. Several times a week I walk through the local desert park with a friend and neighbor who is a Vietnam era veteran and has survived serious illness. We take a stroll and relive our glory days which are largely behind us at this point. We were observing a very large excavator which they use to scoop algae and other debris from the canal which is a major water source, at the point where it splits and runs through aqueducts. The excavator was not moving but we could see the tracks clearly and could examine the ‘tracks’ that the tracks left in the desert floor. (Boy, there must be a way to phrase that better than I did there!) The tracks are over two feet wide with about five or six feet between them. The individual links are short, only about two and a half inches each- but they each have rib that is about an inch and a quarter and the whole length of the width of the track and it sticks out perpendicular to the link itself for traction on loose terrain. My friend noted that on tanks and Armored Personal Carriers each link in the tracks are wider and flat without the traction rib of the construction equipment. He explained that often times tracked military vehicles must drive on paved roads and the military tracks are much better suited for that. He further explained that when those vehicles did drive on paved roads they had to put rubber booties on each link in the track to keep it from ruining the road. A gravel or dirt road did not suffer as much as a paved one from the passing of a tracked vehicle.
Oh, I am so sorry! Did you lose a bet?
(Just kidding! I have friends who own houses down there too. . . but I have never seen the houses.)
I imagine there are significantly fewer trips down to that area now that the outlet malls in Casa Grande are mostly (completely?) a thing of the past.
Excellent idea, but a Google image search for “school bus” shows a lot of vehicles that don’t appear to follow the rule.
Maricopa has really developed in the last few years. “Rows of houses that are all the same.” It used to be a sleepy little farm town, and now it’s just another Phoenix suburb, albeit farther away. It now has every food and shopping option a modern American metropolis needs.
The “biggest” thing lately is they built a bridge over the railroad. No more long waits for the constant trains than run through there.
Which is why we were there - to photograph trains. Today was the every other day Amtrack.
There are new outlet malls at the exit of Maricopa road at (the) I-10.
A long time ago I went parts hunting at the large wrecking yards there. I was impressed at the size, and the fact that it was in the desert. I joked that, if Captain Kirk went to visit Maricopa in that far future 23rd centurty, the cars would still be there. And in about the same condition. Where would they go - they are already as far out in nowhere as they could be.