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Next to the capital cost of a school bus, fleets spend most of their budget on fueling costs. When upgrading your fleet, consider an alternative fuel such as propane or compressed natural gas. The fuel savings alone will decrease your total cost of ownership, in addition to lowering maintenance costs and gaining the satisfaction of running a cleaner vehicle.
Route optimization is an essential part of every school year. But did you know it can save you quite a bit of money? By truly optimizing your routes, you can determine the shortest, fastest and safest routes for your students and buses. And, by consolidating bus stops and reducing mileage, you may potentially require fewer buses, which means less fuel and lower maintenance costs. If you are able to optimize your routes enough to decrease the number of buses in use, be sure to run the buses with the lowest total cost of ownership to keep your fuel and maintenance costs even lower.
As the school year comes to an end, be sure to perform a thorough bus inspection. Inspect the entire bus and note any necessary repairs or replacement parts needed.
Proactively maintaining worn parts will save you money down the road and keep your buses out of the shop longer when the school year starts next fall.
A properly-maintained bus is safer, lasts longer and saves you money on every mile it travels. It’s one of the key factors to lowering the Total Cost of Ownership for each bus in your fleet.
So how do you make sure your in-house maintenance team is doing things right? Let Thomas Built educate them. At the Thomas Built Buses Technician Institute we can equip your technicians with the skills needed to keep your fleet running more efficiently. They’ll get hands-on training and up to 28 credit hours in less than a week! Register by April 11 to participate in our May session.