Wissahickon transportation information.
The Wissahickon School District has about 74 school buses of varying
sizes and ages. These vehicles make about 350 runs a day and transport
more than 4,000 students. The buses are used to transport students
to school, on field trips, to sporting events and band events.
Most of the district's buses travel at least 30 miles a day, but some
may cover as many as 100 miles. Last year the school district estimated
its bus fleet covered more than 900,000 miles according to Leona Flood,
its director of transportation.
Why are school bus engines left on while the buses idle outside
the school?
We've all seen the lines of buses parked outside the school waiting
to pick up kids at the end of the day and wondered about why these
vehicles aren't shut down. Joe Malseed, who's been working on diesels
for 25 years, provided some answers:
"A diesel engine functions best at its working temperature,"
he said. "They can also be very tough to start in cold weather.
"When they come in from their earlier runs, if you shut them
down, they get cold. Then you steam them up from all that warm breath
from the students, so the windows fog up. So then you have to idle
them anyway until the windows defog because it's not safe to drive
them with fogged windows.
"Plus, when you start them back up, there's a big cloud of
black smoke that comes out, so you're actually worse off."
|
