T
wo boys who live and work at the Alamo-Huecho Ranch in a small village in remote Hidalgo Coun- ty, New Mexico, take a school bus to their school in Animas, which is located some two hours away.
Te school has allowed them to shorten their school week to four days because of the distance.
Te kids sleep on the bus during the morning trip and listen to
country music on the return trip. Tat’s four days a week they are riding a school bus for four hours each day. Te ranch is in one of six counties in New Mexico that is designated as “completely rural” by the U.S. Census Bureau. Te nearly 3,500-square-mile county averages just 1.4 people per square mile. Tat is far fewer than the number of coyotes and tortoises that roam the blazing hot area, the southernmost county in New Mexico with an official population of 4,894. People, that is. Technology using Wi-Fi is, ever so slowly, getting on board school buses. However, there are many challenges along the way, as students in rural regions know very well. Rural areas like Hidalgo County stand to benefit from the emerging new age of electronically-equipped school buses. Tese vanguards of the next-generation school buses are outfitted with high-tech equipment that not only allows students to benefit from an onboard Wi-Fi network with internet and video; there is often much more.
Tat host of other technologies features such hot commodities as GPS, student locators, driver communications, remote engine diagnostics, collision avoidance and other popular capabilities. Tese will not only indirectly benefit students, but they will directly benefit district staff who actively manage their bus fleet and the safety of the students onboard.
THE IOT REVOLUTION: GETTING ON THE BUS? Remote technologies that use wireless networks are being driven by
the advent of the Internet of Tings (IoT)—an emergent technology trend that’s not so new anymore, as the world rapidly adopts the benefits it can provide. Connected devices, such as sensors, cameras, tablets, routers and controllers, collectively transmit information and data from a remote distributed asset to another base location, for processing and monitoring via a wireless network. Tat asset can be a school bus, truck or machine.
Analysts estimate, depending on which study you read, that
there will be between 1.5 and 50 billion connected devices within the next five years, that will be transmitting voluminous data to and from remote locations. Many industrial companies and sites, ranging from plants, hospitals, truck fleets and others, are widely adopting IoT, with volumes of “Big Data” using it for visibility, control and enhanced-quality decision making. Although Wi-Fi and the capability of IoT for many buses are not quite an every day reality for every single school bus on the road just yet, they will be. As new buses are delivered with 5G connectivity capability, the same benefits of IoT that are popu- lating other industries, will soon find their way onto yellow school buses throughout the country. With the average age of a school bus at about 16 years, school
boards and transportation managers will look more carefully at either buying buses with more technology factory-installed, or insuring that the buses they buy or already have, are capable of accommodating more digital technology. “We just announced that electronic stability control will be
standard on all of our school buses, starting with our diesel air-brake bus,” said Trish Reed, VP and general manager of IC Bus, at the STN EXPO Reno in July. “We have technology built in from a
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