School Buses

In the United States, school buses are the default form of transportation for public school students in most districts. (At least for grades one through 12; because of their young age, in many places kindergarten students may be driven to school by their parents or a car pool, especially in districts where the kindergarten is not integrated with the elementary school.) The major exceptions are urban school districts where children take ordinary public transportation or live close enough to walk. In exurban and rural districts, walking may be permitted (or required) of students who live within a given radius of their school, and driving may be required of students who live outside a second radius, a factor that has to be considered when building new housing developments or residential streets.

Originally, students were expected to walk to school, and buses were introduced in rural areas for the sake of students on far-flung farms and ranches. The earliest buses were horse-drawn carriages called “school trucks,” and were equipped with a rear door for entry so that boarding students would not upset the horses (intentionally or otherwise). The first buses with engines retained this rear door, which today is used as an emergency exit. The modern school bus originates in the 1930s and 1940s, when “school bus yellow” was introduced as a standardized bus color. Believed to be the easiest color to see in dark or winter twilight conditions, school bus yellow is officially called National School Bus Glossy Yellow in the United States. Though not mandated federally, and a small share of school districts use other colors, most districts and manufacturers have used National School Bus Glossy Yellow for decades.

Around the same time that school bus yellow was introduced, most of the country adopted—often as part of a new wave of traffic laws, reflecting the increasing role driving played in American life—new laws requiring traffic to stop while children are boarding or disembarking from a school bus. Many also require drivers to maintain a greater than normal distance from school buses in front of them, for a number of reasons: it keeps the car out of the bus driver's blind zones, it reduces the odds of a rear-end collision, and it provides additional braking time in the unlikely event that a child manages to open the rear emergency exit.

The three most common types of school buses are deployed for varying purposes. The conventional school bus design, Type C, uses a truck chassis, resembling an elongated truck cab with modified doors and windows. This has remained the most popular school bus type in the country for [Page 1207]default school transportation. In some districts, the more recent transit-style or Type D of school bus, which has a flat front like a motorcoach or public transit bus, has become more popular, in particular on the West Coast where the first popular model thereof was developed, in the 1950s. Type D buses have a larger passenger capacity than the conventional bus and so are more likely to be deployed in densely populated districts or those with rapidly expanding populations. Smaller school buses based on the chassis of a van (Type A buses) or step van (Type B buses, rarely manufactured today but still in use in some fleets) are often used for specialized low-ridership purposes like the transportation of disabled students, magnet school routes, or special occasion travel such as field trips.

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