There are currently more than half a million diesel school buses rumbling and coughing along America's roadways in 2024, carrying around 24 million students to public and private schools alike. The EPA estimates that about 40% of that fleet is now more than 11 years old, which is the driving reason behind the agency's Clean School Bus Program, with $5 billion in funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. On Monday, a trio of Harvard health and environmental scientists found that school districts would save an average of $247,600 in costs for every one of the roughly 200,000 high-emission heavy duty vehicles they replace with an electric bus.
In an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that lowering the number of emissions-driven deaths and childhood asthma cases — not to mention reducing negative climate impacts — by replacing old diesel buses with new electric ones via EPA funding would save about "$207,200 per bus and $40,400 per bus, respectively." The totals accounted for a vehicle benefit of $84,200 per bus, $43,800 in health benefits and $40,400 in climate benefits. The study's authors found that if the entire fleet of U.S. school buses had been replaced in 2017 with EVs, emissions-related deaths would have been reduced by around 24 times, and new childhood asthma cases would have been reduced by around 23-fold.
