It was seven years ago that Matthew Belasco started worrying about the health of students riding the bus at Pittsburg Unified in California. As he watched hundreds of youth pile onto the big yellow vehicles each day, his eyes focused on the black plume of diesel smoke belching from the tailpipe.
“I knew that couldn’t be good,” said Belasco, the school district’s director of maintenance, operations and transportation.
The fleet of 30 diesel buses was outdated and spitting out high levels of toxic pollution. So he started researching a solution—and landed on electric school buses.
