I share an interest with you in Oregon pupil transportation and school buses. We may have met, including at the recent OPTA conference in Bend, or the OPTA board meeting in May 2019.
I respect pupil transportation work deeply. I know of no work more important than providing access to education, i.e. getting students to school safely every morning. Pupil transportation supports social equity, since many students could not get to school without it, and also strong graduation rates. And as you know, U.S. school buses are the safest form of transportation in the world.
Moreover, I’ve never seen so much heart, humor and sense of community at a conference as I did last month at OPTA in Bend. (Given I am 58, that is saying a lot). The raffle awards after the Thursday night backyard barbeque dinner put me in stitches, and the awards session the next day brought tears to my eyes (as I think it did to a certain OPTA president). You guys are great!
I’m a volunteer advocate for electric school buses. (Just to clarify, I don’t sell anything.) I’ve been in transportation since 2006, worked in the Public Transit Division of the Oregon Department of Transportation from 2008-2017, and have advocated for electric public transit buses since 2016. I’ve woken up to the fact that school buses vastly outnumber public transit buses and supply more than twice the passenger rides they do, and am now engaging with both bus worlds.
This newsletter’s purpose is to share information on electric school buses, and build a learning community around it in Oregon with others who might be interested. I anticipate sending it out once or twice a month. If you’re not interested, please opt out at the bottom of the letter. Or, please forward to an appropriate colleague.
“But electric school buses are too expensive!” I hear this a lot, and I agree. The purchase cost (about 2.5x the diesel bus purchase cost) needs to come down. Fuel and maintenance savings, though, offset the purchase cost. In the near future, so can vehicle to grid energy sales when buses sit idle in the summer.
The school bus dealers state that electric buses are the future of the industry. The five-person panel of the fuels session at the OPTA conference agreed on this, also on the sharp learning curve involved. (Hence the need for a learning community, I would add.)
Why am I doing this? And for free?
- I’m worried as hell about climate change
- I hate that climate change, and diesel emissions, hurt the most vulnerable people the worst
- I’m a person of faith who feels a moral responsibility to do this work
- Community health is improved by replacing diesel with electric
- I hope to eventually find paid work advocating for electric buses
- This is fun!
Alison Wiley (she/her/hers)
I am on the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Chinook and Cowlitz peoples.
Whose land are you on?