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-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email 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. Rel.

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