Blue Bird Corporation, in conjunction with its dealer Anderson Blue Bird Bus Sales of New England, has delivered its first batch of 20 electric school buses to Boston Public Schools. School officials and local government leaders recognized the pilot program as the largest electric school bus deployment in the Northeast, according to the company.
Boston Public Schools recently put 20 advanced Blue Bird Vision electric buses into service. The school buses can carry a maximum of 71 students for up to 120 miles on a single charge, and according to Blue Bird, the vehicles take approximately four hours to charge from 0% to 100% based on BPS’s Level III ICE 30 kW fast chargers installed at the Readville, MA bus depot. Blue Bird notes that its zero-emission buses are now transporting over 2,500 students to and from 42 local-area schools every day.
Boston Public Schools maintains a fleet of nearly 750 buses, approximately a third of which are diesel-powered. Boston Public Schools says it anticipates benefiting from “significant cost-saving opportunities by reducing or eliminating the fuel and maintenance costs tied to traditional diesel-powered vehicles.” According to the recent press release, some Blue Bird customers even reported fuel costs of an average 14 cents per mile in energy costs for electric buses.
