Little cars aren’t the only ones getting in on the electric vehicle action. This fall, Proterra, an electric bus maker that’s become one of the most recognizable names in zero-emission bus design, will release its latest model, the E2 Max. According to Electrek, the E2 Max was designed to handle the “daily mileage needs of nearly every U.S. mass transit route on a single charge,” which means these buses can be implemented even in the busiest cities where buses trek many miles back and forth on a single route. The newly designed battery pack in this model can store between… Read more »
Have you ever driven past a parking lot full of old school buses and wondered what becomes of them in their old age? Well, they don’t just sit around in a junkyard forever. You might be interested to learn about what Guatemalans call “chicken buses.” Once an American school bus has been shuttling kids around from home to school to soccer games for about ten years, or when they reach about 150,000 miles on their odometers, they’re resold to places like Guatemala where they’re prepared for their “second lives.” After some engine rebuilds, seating reconfigurations, and some seriously cool paint jobs,… Read more »
With summer vacation over and buses hitting the roads again to shuttle kids back to school, here at Las Vegas Bus Sales we thought it might be a good idea to go over some safety tips for sharing the road with school buses. Safety Starts With Preparedness When you’re sharing the road with a school bus, you should always be prepared to make sudden stops and turns. Make sure to give the bus plenty of space; increase your normal following distance significantly, and pay attention to the bus’s turn signals. When you see a bus unload kids, take your time… Read more »
In recent years, transit companies all across the country have begun installing a variety of amenities such as Wi-Fi routers and charging stations in buses to try to incentivize ridership. It’s a strategy that makes sense in theory, given our ever-increasing dependence on handheld electronics and Internet connectivity. In practice however, it may not be as effective as transit services would hope. According to a new report from research group TransitCenter, Wi-Fi routers might be nice frills, but it’s fast, reliable service that riders really want. The researchers surveyed more than 3,000 respondents from 17 regions throughout the country about… Read more »
Even luxury automakers are taking a stab at the autonomous vehicle market these days. Mercedes-Benz is the latest to throw their hat in the ring with an eye-catching design appropriately named “Future Bus.” Featuring sleek lines and expansive window panes, the design truly does look like the bus of tomorrow. Leave it to Mercedes to make a great-looking vehicle. But the Future Bus is about more than just aesthetics; it’s built to be uncommonly efficient as well. The Future Bus uses Mercedes’ proprietary CityPilot technology that was originally introduced two years ago for the company’s self-driving Actros truck. CityPilot is… Read more »
In addition to their applications in gaming, virtual reality platforms have gained a lot of interest from the educational community in recent years. Imagine teaching engineering students how to work on complex equipment in a virtual laboratory, for example. Or teaching history students about the Civil Rights Movement by allowing them to sit in on the court cases where landmark decisions were made. The only trouble with virtual reality experiences is that they’re usually limited to one person wearing a headset. That’s why Generation Beyond, an educational subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, has turned a school bus into a huge, mobile… Read more »
While transit officials in the Washington, D.C. have been working overtime to repair the city’s aging subway system, a new kind of bus with some serious personality is making its debut in the nation’s capital. It’s called Olli, and it’s got the brain of IBM’s Watson computing system. Olli might be smaller than other buses in the city, but it’s a whole lot smarter. So smart, in fact, that it doesn’t need a human driver. Passengers can hail the little bus from an app similar to Uber or Lyft. Once Olli picks them up, they simply ask the bus to… Read more »
In the first half of the 20th century, Detroit was one of the foremost hubs of industry and engineering in the United States. For decades, the Motor City manufactured millions of automobiles for drivers all over the world. Then, the energy crisis of the 1970s forced American automakers to scale back their operations, and the city fell on hard times. Since then, Detroit has struggled to curb an economic collapse that left the city in bankruptcy in 2013. City planners in Detroit have long identified a slow, fragmented public transit system as one of the chief obstacles to the city’s… Read more »
Long, tall buses might be ideal for carrying large groups of people, but they’re not known for having great visibility. Broad body panels can make it difficult for drivers to spot people and objects around the sides and rear ends of buses in particular. Large mirrors can help, but they often don’t completely eliminate blind spots. Thanks to mobile video surveillance and fleet management company Seon, however, blind spots in buses could soon be a thing of the past. Recently, Seon released the inView 360 Around Vehicle Monitoring (AVM) System which uses a series of four cameras to provide drivers… Read more »
Municipal bus systems in America aren’t known for being especially fast. They’re inexpensive and reliable, but if you need a fast mode of transport they’re typically not your best option. In any case, rapid is not an adjective most Americans would be likely to apply to their city’s buses. In other parts of the world however, bus transit is actually quite speedy. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems were first developed in Brazil, and have since been adopted in many other countries in South America, Europe and Asia. So what differentiates a BRT line from the bus transit systems we’re familiar… Read more »
