School bus

   

A yellow school bus.
Enlarge
A yellow school bus.
An old school bus rusting away.
Enlarge
An old school bus rusting away.

A school bus (plural, school buses) are motor vehicles used to transport students to and from school. In Canada and the United States they are almost uniformly painted a bright yellow color (often referred to as "school bus yellow") for purposes of visibility and safety. Most used in recent years have been diesel-powered. Full-size school buses can seat forty-five to seventy passengers or even more, but in many districts smaller vehicles are used as well. Some U.S. school districts purchase the buses and hire their own drivers, while others engage the service of contractors to form this function. School buses in the UK in almost all cases are contracted out to local bus companies.

History of school buses in US

Wayne Works, predecessor of Wayne Corporation, was founded in the United States of America in 1837. By 1886, and possibly earlier, it is known that Wayne Works was making horse-drawn school carriages which many people referred to as "school hacks," "school cars," "school trucks," or "kid hacks."

In 1914, Wayne Works dropped a wooden kid hack onto an automobile chassis, creating a predecessor to the modern motor school bus. In the bodies for school transportation the company produced through this era, passengers sat on perimeter seating, facing the sides rather than the front of the bus. Entry and egress was through a door at the rear, a design begun in non-motorized days to help avoiding starting the horses. This was possibly a precursor to the modern rear emergency door commonly found on modern school buses.

In 1927, Blue Bird Body Company began building all-steel bus bodies, followed by others by 1935. In the 1930s, the school bus bodies of Wayne Works began to include a group of heavy-duty "collision rails" or "guard rails" as an added safety feature.

Early school buses primarily served rural areas where it was deemed impractical for the young students to walk the distances necessary to get back and for from school on their own, and were sometimes no more than a truck with perhaps a tarpaulin stretched over the truck bed.

Wayne Works was one of the earliest school bus companies to offer glass in place of the standard canvas curtains in the passenger area long before many "school" bus companies did in the early 1930s.

Wayne Works and other school bus body companies manufactured some transit-style school buses, that is types with a more or less flat front-end design in the 1930s. In 1950, Albert Luce, founder of the Blue Bird Body Company, developed a transit style design which evolved into the Blue Bird All-American, generally considered the first successful transit design for school buses in the US. However, the "conventional" design, with a truck type hood and front-end (known as type C on modern school buses) was to continue to dominate US school bus manufacturing through the end of the 20th century.

Most school buses turned the now familiar yellow in 1939. In April of that year, Frank W. Cyr, a professor at Teachers College in New York who became known as the "Father of the Yellow School Bus," organized a conference that established national school-bus construction standards, including the standard color of yellow for the school bus. It became known officially as "National School Bus Chrome." The color was selected because black lettering on that hue was easiest to see in the semi-darkness of early morning and late afternoon.

The conference met for seven days and the attendees created a total of 44 standards, including specifications regarding body length, ceiling height and aisle width. Cyr's conference, funded by a $5,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, was also a landmark event inasmuch as it included transportation officials from each of the then 48 states, as well as specialists from school-bus manufacturing and paint companies. The conference approach to school bus safety, as well as the yellow color, has endured into the 21st century.

Following World War II, there was a nationwide movement in the U.S. to consolidate schools into fewer and larger ones. This meant that fewer students were attending school in their immediate neighborhood, particularly as they progressed into high school. This led in turn to a large increase in the demand for school buses.

By the mid 1940s, most states had laws requiring motorists to stop for school buses while children were loading or unloading. standardized yellow color helped and warning lettering was painted in large letters on school buses, but many tragic accidents occurred when traffic was not aware that the hazard existed, and children on foot were hit by other vehicles. Several devices were under development to help school bus drivers warn other motorists.

Around 1946, one of the early (and possibly the first) systems of alternating traffic warning lights on school buses was used in Virginia. In those days before plastic lens technology had advanced, and transistors had yet to be invented, an alternating system was created by using sealed beam headlight bulbs with the lenses colored red, and a mechanical motor and solenoids to alternate the high and low beam filaments in the single bulb fixtures mounted at the front and rear of the bus. School children and drivers were subjected to a loud tick-tock noise from the flasher motor as it was operating. Activation was through a mechanical switch attached to the door control.

Around this time, some states began specifying a mechanical stop arm which the driver could activate to swing out from the left side of the bus to warn traffic. The portion of the stop arm protruding in front of traffic had a sign bearing a warning message.

In later years, flashing lights were added to the stop arms, mechanical flasher devices were replaced by electronic ones, and the front and rear warning lights were increased from two to four and eventually eight (in most states). Plastic lenses were developed in the 1950s which offered greater visibility and significantly lower costs than the early systems which used colored headlight bulbs. Crossing gates, reflective striping, LED and strobe lights were added in the 1980s and 1990s.

Modern school buses are often well equipped with amenities lacking only a few years ago such as air conditioning, two-way radios, and wheelchair lifts (typically those with lifts are shorter than their counterparts and are sometimes exclusively assigned to carry disabled children). Very few school buses have seat belts, a standard safety feature in almost every other form of motorized transit. In 1977, the Federal government required passive restraint and structural integrity standards for school buses in lieu of lap seat belts. In the 1980s, some districts in the US tried lap belts and removed them, claiming operational and passenger behavior problems. Whether lap belts should be required remains very controversial. Testing was underway in 2004 for special seating and restraints which would include the upper body, to provide better functional benefits than that afforded by lap seat belts.

School busing for racial purposes

In the southern U.S. especially, school buses were used during the era of segregation to transport Black students to all-Black schools, which were often in only one or two locations within a county or other school district.

After the United States Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that school and other segregation was tantamount to an unconstitutional violation of rights granted to all citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, school buses were often used to transport students reassigned to different schools to promote racial desegregation. Opponents of this concept began to decry the practice as "forced busing".

See Also

External links



Retrieved from "http://www.mywiseowl.com/articles/School_bus"

This page has been accessed 148 times. This page was last modified 16:13, 23 Nov 2004. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).