| City buses in many districts are tied to their operator's licenses, displayed somewhere in the buses; same with taxis in most places I've been (prior to proliferation of ride shares). Not that they need to be tied to a vehicle necessarily, but I don't see why you think school bus drivers wouldn't be capable of getting into correct vehicles nor why that should be how a district picks a fleet of buses. Also, for the SFMTA[0] as an example, different routes use different vehicles depending on the size & route & electrification. It doesn't have to be air travel to want a few varieties to fit all the needs. Here are some stats[1, page 3]: An average school bus route is 32 miles, with max observed being 127 miles (and this is most likely a very rural route, not like the Oakland example here; in fact, here's an average of student distances for Oakland[2]). Given such a long time period between school start and end times, I expect most of these to be able to be charged between the two shifts with the exception of some field trips. If you look at the Zum website, their buses are capable of 155 miles[3]. I suspect this was designed to fit the highest range case described in the paper, but almost 5x the average route distance. For most non-rural school districts, even if you account for some detours and faulty charging even, x2 (or x3, sure) seems reasonable to keep as the majority of the fleet. And perhaps you can keep a few of the largest range ones if the school regularly has field trips in that range. For what it's worth, ETOPS regulations are interesting look for how aviation deals with failure modes for range/routing. Assuming failures are rare, the idea is to ensure the planes have enough to get to safety, not just put as much range as possible on all the planes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Municipal_Railwa...
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60068.pdf
[2] https://gopublicschoolsoakland.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...
[3] https://www.ridezum.com/blog/electric-school-buses-the-benef... |