No plumes or fumes, and Steelton-Highspire’s new big yellow school buses drive like golf carts
STEELTON, Pa. (WHTM) — Michelle Strohecker will be the first to admit she was a little skeptical when she learned she would be driving some of the first electric school buses in Pennsylvania.
People don’t like change, after all. And Strohecker — the location manager in the Steelton-Highspire School District for First Student, the big student transportation company — and the other drivers who work with and for her have been driving noisy diesel buses for a long time.
But now they’re here, and Strohecker is a convert. They’re clean, technologically advanced and “so very, very quiet,” she said.
The six electric school buses First Student showed off here — which by next month will transport most of the district’s students who ride buses to school — are the company’s first in Pennsylvania and among about 350 it operates so far nationally; First Student says it will replace 30,000 diesel buses with electric buses by 2035.
The district’s superintendent, Dr. Mick Iskric, said he was “blown away” when he got the news the district won a competitive EPA grant to get the buses.
But maybe he shouldn’t have been so surprised: Steelton-Highspire, after all, is — as far as Iskric knows — the only district in Pennsylvania that runs entirely on solar power, which will power the bus chargers too. That means they’ll be even more environmentally friendly than other electric vehicles, which might get their electricity from nonrenewable sources.
So a district that not only runs it’s buildings on solar power but now also its buses on electricity that comes from the district’s same solar farm?
“I just found out yesterday we’re potentially the only school district in the United States that can claim that,” said Iskric, who was joined by government and industry leaders at a press event Thursday launching the new electric bus fleet.
Like anything new, the buses will take getting used to for all involved: the drivers, of course, but also students and people whose communities the buses traverse. In addition to their broader environmental benefits (i.e., helping to address climate change), Kevin Matthews — Cincinnati-based First Student’s head of electrification — said people will appreciate less local air and noise polution.
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But the quiet buses — an electronically amplifed turn signal was the most audible noise during a ride Thursday — mean people can’t rely on the same audio cues to alert them a school bus is near. Because of what they won’t hear, they’ll have to watch more closely, Matthews said, which is also becoming true of other vehicles.
Strohecker said students who procrastinate — and wait until they hear the loud bus rumbling down the street to run out of their houses in the morning at the last minute — might have to just “make sure they are at the bus stop on time.”
She said drivers have also warned students — half-jokingly — the drivers will be able to hear students’ conversations now on the quieter buses.
As for the drivers, Strohecker said they’re training to get used to something else that’s mostly a good thing — but is still a difference: buses that brake more like electric cars or even golf carts than like diesel-powered school buses or traditional cars. She showed how when she takes her foot off the accelerator, the bus slows significantly more before she has to tap the brakes than would be the case with other buses.
“The engine’s doing a lot of the braking for us,” she said. “So there’s minimal use of the brakes.”
With once-frenetic consumer demand for electric cars cooling for now, Matthews said school bus procurement isn’t affected by the “range anxiety” that has some individuals thinking twice about all-electric cars, because of predictable school bus routes.
“School buses are ideally suited for electrification,” Matthews said. “We know how much we’re going to run in the morning. We know how much we’re going to run in the afternoon. And so we can design the batteries to accommodate specifically that route.”
He said nationally, electric buses have performed well in temperatures as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit and as cold as negative 30.
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