School Bus

Over two dozen school districts across the country have equipped school buses with AutoNet mobile WiFi routers allowing students to access the 'Net on the go. The Autonet system is a basic wireless router like the ones that hundreds of millions of people use at home, but with an integrated EVDO cellular modem to keep connected on the go.

Photo by Kevindooley. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.

My wife and I thoroughly trained our oldest daughter on seat belt safety, and it got to the point where she would scream at the top of her lungs if one of us didn't buckle our belts. When she first stepped foot on a school bus, she was terrified to learn that there were no seat belts and didn't understand how school buses were the exception to the seat belt rule. After many years of extensive study, however, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is changing that, at least for buses

It's no secret to the majority of our readers that it is possible to run many older diesel engines on nothing more than straight vegetable oil. In fact, the first diesel engine, invented by Rudolph Diesel, ran on peanut oil. This fact is also well known by the students at the Michigan Technical Academy who have converted their own school buses to run on waste vegetable oil. Garden Fresh Foods in Ferndale, Michigan is providing used veggie oil that was first

Last week the Napa Unified School District in California received its first plug-in hybrid school bus. The bus was built by IC Corporation which is a subsidiary of Navistar and a major producer of school buses. The bus uses a parallel hybrid diesel electric powertrain produced by Enova. The electric motor is integrated into the transmission and is designed as a drop-in system that can be easily installed either by the bus manufacturer on the original assembly or retrofitted to existing buses.

In an article which discusses an invention that could be described as thrifty, useful or just crazy, depending on your point of view, Forbes highlights Jewish Rabbi Aaron Winternitz's conversion of an old school bus into an oven for cooking matzos for the upcoming Passover celebration. Officials were responding to reports of smoke when they located the bus/oven around 3 am. This would have been the second year that the Rabbi

Two of the first 19 hybrid school buses have just been delivered to Manatee County, Florida as part of the Plug-In Hybrid Electric School Bus Project. Designed to test the viability of the new buses, a hybrid and a control bus will travel the same route, alternating every two weeks, for a period of two years which should equate to more than a million miles of service each.

School buses idle for thousands of hours a year, spewing diesel fumes into schoolyards across the country. But a project called Improving Kids' Environment (IKE) based in Indianapolis, Ind. is working to educate school officials on how the practice affects students with their "Smart Schools Don't Idle" campaign. IKE was awarded a $15,729 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 on Friday. IKE and nine other organizations were awarded $187,200 in grant money from the EPA Regio

If running even the biggest SUV or farm tractor on biofuel isn't a large enough vehicle for you, then perhaps you'd be interested in converting an old school bus to use biodiesel. If so, there is a Yahoo! group you'll want to check out: the Skoolie Conversions group. This group isn't dedicated exclusively to biofuels but instead to converting old busses into RVs. Still, biofuel discussions are not unknown, as this post at G