pre-2020 me: STRONG AGREE
post-2020 me: ARE YOU CRAZY?
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If you’re talking about the hot cocoa, he brought extra cups. We didn’t all drink out of the same thermos. Even back then…ew. The boys had cooties, after all. 
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You forgot overly long opening intro video, self-introduction, and initial shout out to sponsors as a preamble to “Minutes 1-6”.
Then in “Minutes 1-6” you also have “historical context of The Question which is basically a restatement of some text from Wikipedia”
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2020 has changed a lot of things, as evidenced in this thread.
Kids starting fires at bus stops:
Kids sharing a thermos of cocoa:
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Normally here for smaller town also take some windowed vans, put in smaller sars, paint them yellow and call it a day.
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… and UPS trucks.
… or taxis in Japan.
They seem to be vestigial remains frozen from a certain era, because of legislation or convenience.
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Yeah buses sucked. Still remember the horror of first day of 7th grade. Our route was weird, grade school and high school were lumped together on one bus (which actually works ok as no respectable high school bully would bother with a grade schooler, and grade schoolers know better than to take on someone that much older). Junior high was it’s own with a longer route that was much more packed with kids, and junior high kids take their bullying seriously.
Then there was the Valentine’s Day in 3rd grade when a kid decided to eat all the candy, and we had to get off and wait a half hour while they aired the bus out from the kid’s stinky vomit. Good times.
Then again when everybody would forget the pecking order and just start stomping and clapping singing “We Will Rock You” it was pretty awesome. But maybe that dates me.
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I like his hat. Go Eagles!
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I’m not putting my figli on a bus with SARS in it no matter how small.
Came here to either read or say this and was not disappoint.
As soon as I hear "Hey guys; today we’re gonna … " I shut the video off.
And sometimes get annoyed if the info purportedly contained within would have been interesting or useful.
This school bus video, luckily, was as quick as opening a link to read the info so I avoided getting huffy this evening.
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“…snark, snark, snark.” There, now you don’t need to read the comments. 
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8 ft. sections of school bus rub rail can be purchased new for $92 or less.
Maybe the $3,000 is for body repair and paint?
(Or, I suppose, the OEM rails could be more expensive? Dunno.)
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I knew because my mom told me. My mom knew because every August the school district sent her a letter saying when and where. The letter always claimed the bus stop was at an intersection about a quarter mile away, and that it would arrive almost an hour before school started (even when school was only a mile away). I imagine most kids were never aware of that process, they just got told where to go by their parents.
Then my mom would call the district and remind them that 1) our neighborhood had very narrow roads with no sidewalks and poor visibility, and no safe place to stand once I got there, 2) for most of the year that was before sunrise, 3) there were no other kids I could walk or wait with even if she’d been okay with me walking there myself, 4) because of the layout of streets the bus had to drive past our house anyway to turn around and avoid a dead end, and 5) every year the actual pickup time always ended up being about half an hour later than that. So I always got picked up right in front of my house.
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Some cities here in the US do make use of normal buses, and offer subsidized bus passes for students. But, most cities and towns have essentially no public transit infrastructure, and/or what they do have is basically useless for getting most places.
I’m not sure what you mean about mail trucks? Is it the fact that mail trucks have the steering wheel on the opposite side? They started that so that in rural areas where houses are far apart and people have mail boxes right on the side of the road, they don’t have to get out at every single house, and they can fit more houses on a single route. Why they use them everywhere else, especially in places where busier roads make being on the wrong side of the vehicle more of an issue, I’d assume is just because it lets them get the trucks cheaper to only have one kind, and lets them move assets from place to place more easily when they need to.
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I see I wasn’t being as clear as I thought I was: we do use dedicated school buses (at least in rural areas), the kids don’t just get on public transport that is running anyway (though that is also happening of course, especially in cities with good public transport). The point I was making is that there is no special type of vehicle that is being built exclusively to serve as a school bus. School buses here are just normal city bus models. The only difference is that they say school bus on their electronic announcement boards.
It’s the same for mail delivery vehicles.
It’s just strange to me that there is a need to build a special model of vehicle for a purpose that can just as well be served by a normal multi-purpose one, which can then be sourced from different manufacturers and resold at the end of its working life.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see anything wrong with that, it’s just culturally unfamiliar to me.
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Ah, yes, ok, got it.
In that case I’ve assumed it’s because we coddle our kids as special snowflakes whom we also don’t trust at all to be able to learn to do anything safely, so we make special vehicles with special rules about how all other drivers have to stop for them so kids can cross roads, things like that.
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I think our school buses fit way more people than a similar-size “regular” passenger bus could fit, due to the smaller leg room and bench seats in the school buses.
It might not be an issue on every route, but it comes in handy when using them for field trips and sports events.
Also, the seating is made from this industrial plastic that can be easily cleaned.
But you make good points about sourcing and overall lifetime uses. It’d be interesting to see if any districts have done a thorough comparison.
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yeah my reaction was, no way that bit of steel costs 3k. Now maybe the cost for replacing one with labor to remove the old one, put the new one on and make it pretty costs 3k.
For field trips and such schools here usually just hire coaches and drivers from a coach company. They don’t maintain their own fleet of vehicles. The normal school routes are being serviced by subcontracted bus companies.
There isn’t exactly a vehicle. There is a set of features and design rules that can be met by a bunch of different manufacturers. Those manufacturers are sometimes subsidiaries of the usual bus makers. They are frequently resold to groups with similar needs.
The postal truck example is a little different. That’s just a question of efficiencies of scale for a massive buyer. The vehicle fleet for USPS is huge. There are about 140,000 LLVs in use. That is almost as much as the three largest private vehicle fleets in the US combined. The small savings it allows in labor, the streamlining of maintenance, and a few other upsides multiply out to be enough to be worth the development cost. In places where the LLV wasn’t suitable they still use standard commercial vehicles with a few modifications.
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