Health, economic, and environmental impacts of electric school bus adoption: A scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children riding diesel school buses are exposed to diesel pollutants, and diesel emissions have been shown to impact cognitive development and lung function. School bus electrification efforts are in the early stages in high-income countries, with various funding programs and initiatives targeting the adoption of electric buses. As these new buses hit the roads, it is imperative that their effectiveness in reducing air pollution exposure be evaluated. This review is the first of its kind, analyzing recent case studies of early electric school bus adoption, assessing the air pollution, climate, and health benefits of converting to electric school buses, and exploring the current state of the literature on this topic. Following PRISMA guidelines, our search strategy yielded 167 studies, of which 13 met our selection criteria and were considered for the final analysis. This review establishes that emission reductions, potential health benefits, and economic savings are possible when electric school buses are adopted compared to diesel school buses. We have highlighted the importance of external funding programs, and the logistical and mechanical challenges. The geographical disparities highlight the need for electrification efforts that target marginalized and low-income communities. Significant knowledge gaps remain regarding children's health outcomes and exposure to in-cabin air pollutant levels after electrification. Case studies outside North America are lacking, and are crucial to inform policy and guide future funding efforts. We have provided a crucial analysis of current literature and produced an overview of the essential knowledge gaps that need to be addressed in future research. • Electrical school buses reduce children's exposure to toxic air pollutants. • This review identifies air quality and health benefits from early electric bus adoption. • Equity, logistics and funding gaps challenge electrical school bus adoption. • Long-term savings offset the high initial cost of adopting electric school buses. • Knowledge gaps on children's exposure to in-cabin pollutants after electrification
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".