With the introduction of electric school buses across the US, recent research indicates that modernising your district’s fleet may have advantages besides producing zero emissions, such as increased attendance.
Over 25 million kids are picked up by school buses annually, which log about 5.7 billion miles. Many such buses had diesel engines until recently.
With over 40 toxic air pollutants, carcinogens, and other dangerous fine particle matter, diesel exhaust has been found to represent a serious risk to the children riding the buses, the drivers, the personnel, and the communities they operate in.
According to some research, exposure to pollutants inside a bus may potentially be up to ten times higher, particularly if the bus is frequently running to pick up kids.
When inhaled, diesel exhaust can have a major negative impact on health, leading to conditions like asthma, strokes, heart attacks, cancer, as well as early death.
The EPA has allocated monies to assist school districts in replacing their vehicles with cleaner alternatives as a means of resolving issue. Between 2012 and 2017, the EPA distributed more than $7 million to districts to modernise their fleets.
According to a recent study, electrified school buses increase attendance
A recent study that looked at EPA data and published its results in Nature Sustainability found that switching out old diesel-powered vehicles with electric or other cleaner options can result in noticeably higher attendance.
According to the report, the school districts which were awarded EPA assistance saw an increase of almost 350,000 added student days of attendance.
In addition, the study discovered that, in the year that followed after the lottery, districts that were awarded cash had six more pupils show up for class every day for every 10,000 students.
According to Dr. Lisa Patel, a representative of the American Academy of Paediatrics on the Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change:
Everyone knows that those gases can make people ill, I believe. This study made a very distinct link between getting exposed to the contaminants and its effects on kids.
The study’s results are in line with recent research demonstrating that using clean or electric school buses can lessen lung inflammation in passengers as well as decrease the number of at-risk populations’ community-wide hospitalisations for bronchitis, asthma, and pneumonia.
According to study researchers, the US could gain approximately 1.3 million additional attendance days if every school bus constructed before year 2000 were replaced with electric or cleaner models.
E Auto Arena’s Opinion
Switching to electric school buses has advantages beyond merely lowering pollution. The benefits of electric school buses for children, drivers, staff members, and the communities that they serve are continually being demonstrated by new research.
The newly approved Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes more than $5 billion in financing for the clean school bus programme, which will be used to replace the nation’s fleet over the following five years.
Districts can get up to $375,000 through the programme to replace ageing diesel buses by electric models. Additionally, districts are eligible for a subsidy of $20,000 per car for recharging infrastructure. In order to replace more than 3,400 clean school buses, the administration awarded 289 districts throughout the US with roughly $1 billion in October.
The switch to electric school buses is anticipated to go more quickly as a result of the updated EPA emission regulations unveiled this week. By 2032, the government now anticipates that 50% of “vocational vehicles,” such as dump trucks, school buses, and delivery trucks, would be electric.
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