Healthy Air, Healthier Pocketbook
Anthony Jackson (left), director of transportation for Bibb County Schools in Georgia and Steven Whaley the alternative fuels manager for Blue Bird, discuss the benefits of propane at ACT Expo last month.
While many school districts have cited a desire to improve air quality with cleaner school buses, from the start Bibb County Schools in Georgia focused on an improved bottom line. Anthony Jackson, director of transportation for Bibb County and a Georgia Association for Pupil Transportation board member, said the decision to begin implementing propane school buses in 2014 centered on cost savings. “Although we recognize the health benefits as a huge [benefit] for this alternative fuel journey, we really started out looking for more efficiencies along our routes and for the potential cost savings,” said Jackson last month on the School Transportation Nation podcast. “What I mean by efficiency is amongst our routes with some of the cleaner diesel engines that were in operation at the time, we were experiencing a lot of issues on route with the diesel particulate filters clogging, buses de rating, just a myriad of issues. I learned over the years with that application is that those DPF filters function a lot better in a different application, where you can really get extremely high temperatures for a longer period of time to kind of keep those filters cleaned out. And that wasn’t the case with the routes that we were running in Bibb County.” The school district didn’t have to look far for a solution. Blue
Bird’s manufacturing plant is about a half hour southwest in Fort Valley, Georgia. Two years earlier, the OEM had launched its next-generation propane school bus with ROUSH CleanTech. Bibb County started with 30 propane school buses and hasn’t looked back. Propane now accounts for 71 percent of the district’s 213 school buses, displacing all but about a dozen diesel school buses. The fleet also includes about 20 gasoline
school buses, Jackson said, noting they were added to increase fuel flexibility plus 15 electric school buses awarded last year via the EPA Clean School Bus Program. “Five years from now, I think we would be more of an 80-20 split, but that the 20 percent will be a combination of EV and unleaded fuel, but I definitely think propane [will be] at least 80 percent if not more,” Jackson prognosticated on Episode 306. The reason for being so bullish on propane? Bibb County has
realized savings of nearly $3 million over the last three school years by primarily using propane rather than diesel. Jackson said fuel costs alone have decreased 30 percent, to $0.27 per mile with propane compared to $0.39 per mile with diesel. The maintenance savings were even better at a nearly 49-percent reduction, to $0.23 per mile with propane from $0.45 per mile with diesel. That equates to an average of about $6,600 saved by each
propane bus based on 15,000 miles traveled a year. Jackson has a healthier budget, certainly. He said during last
month’s ACT Expo in Las Vegas his savings have helped the school district weather the current storm of increased diesel and gasoline prices. But propane is also cleaning the area air. Bibb County has yet to compile data on air quality or
improvements in student attendance based on propane usage, but the positive impacts remain evident. “There are times when I have to remind the guys in the
shop to put the exhaust hose on the back of the bus when the propane are running because, number one, they’re a lot quieter than the diesels,” he added. “You don’t have that noise pollution that you had in the past, and then you don’t have that diesel smell filling up the shop as soon as you start a vehicle up.”
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PHOTO COURTESY OF TRC COMPANIES/ACT EXPO
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