california laws?

[wordsauce]

I recently purchased my first short bus and i want to convert it into a tour bus for my band. I got stopped yesterday by a friendly police officer telling me he thinks i need to paint it a different color and remove the red flashing lights but wasn't sure of the laws himself. I looked all over the internet and cant the laws anywhere. Does anybody have a link they could post to help me out? I am super stoked about my bus and will be posting pictures of my conversion soon

 

[dgorila1-SKO]

I don't know the cali laws, but I do know you need to at least disable, remove or cover the original warning lights, signs, etc. Might be a good idea to remove the "School Bus" lettering to keep them from hassling you. As far as the paint color do some searching on here. It's a hotly debated subject in the communist state of cali.

 

[wtd]

From another thread here -

27603. When a motor vehicle formerly used as a schoolbus is sold to any person and is used exclusively for purposes other than the transportation of pupils pursuant to Article 3 (commencing with Section 39830) of Chapter 5 of Part 23 of the Education Code, it shall be painted by the purchaser a color different than that prescribed by the Department of the California Highway Patrol for schoolbuses before it is operated on any street or highway other than to have the vehicle painted or moved to a place of storage.

http://www.skoolie.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6030

 

[wanderingturtl]

I was told that you just have to paint a percentage of the bus another color. I cannot find any detailed information about that. Does anyone know for sure?

 

[Albatross]

I was told that you just have to paint a percentage of the bus another color. I cannot find any detailed information about that. Does anyone know for sure?

It would be in codes for your state; which you can find on your government's website. Technically, the only codes which matter are the codes for the state the bus is registered in, since registration of anything actually cedes proper ownership to that state.


Paint 51% with a rattle can in such a way that it is clearly not an official bus anymore, and you should be alright. Use black and paint down the stripe to cover the lettering decals and/or where they were, as well as the "school bus" text top and bottom, and maybe some scribbles along the side, and you should be good for transport to a location to work on the thing.



Then, once you have it where you want it, you can take the proper time to do a proper paint job, or figure out where you want to take it to get painted and/or wrapped.

 

[s2mikon]

If you read the law CVC 27603 it doesn't say anything about only painting a percentage of it another color. Looks pretty simple to me. Paint the whole damn thing.

 

[Tin Roadtube Vagrant]

Yup, what he said. The great State of Wisconsin states it as follows.......

"Repaint the entire vehicle to a color other than national school bus glossy yellow or any color commonly referred to as yellow"

 

[AlphaHare]

School MFSAB 'activity busses' are usually painted white and generally don't have flashers or stop signs. So as not to confuse them with pupil transport? IDK why....

 

[nikitis]

Just tell the officer it's banana yellow not school bus yellow. He might be colorblind and let you go.

 

[Albatross]

I recently purchased my first short bus and i want to convert it into a tour bus for my band. I got stopped yesterday by a friendly police officer telling me he thinks i need to paint it a different color and remove the red flashing lights but wasn't sure of the laws himself. I looked all over the internet and cant the laws anywhere. Does anybody have a link they could post to help me out? I am super stoked about my bus and will be posting pictures of my conversion soon

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-27603/


California Code, Vehicle Code - VEH § 27603
Current as of January 01, 2023

When a motor vehicle formerly used as a schoolbus is sold to any person and is used exclusively for purposes other than the transportation of pupils pursuant to Article 3 (commencing with Section 39830) of Chapter 5 of Part 23 of the Education Code, it shall be painted by the purchaser a color different than that prescribed by the Department of the California Highway Patrol for schoolbuses before it is operated on any street or highway other than to have the vehicle painted or moved to a place of storage.

The provisions of this section shall not apply where the ownership of a schoolbus is transferred to a nonprofit organization under a contractual arrangement under which the ownership is required to be retransferred to the original owner within 90 days of the date of the original transfer.

 

[Albatross]

I was told that you just have to paint a percentage of the bus another color. I cannot find any detailed information about that. Does anyone know for sure?

This is different in every state.



In some states, all you really need to do is black-out any official lettering and you're good.
In others, they generally want 51% of it painted some other color.
And some states don't want any of the original color to remain, as it is actually a federally-designated and federally-pushed color that has an actual meaning to it.


Generally-speaking, though, so long as you don't have seats in it, don't have visible (official) lettering on it, and you're not hanging around schools or shopping malls you won't get hassled that much by cops. Worst-case, they stop you and tell you to paint it, and then you can ask them what the regs are. I would bet on most of them not actually knowing it, but some of them might make something up.


If it looks like you're making an attempt, that is usually good enough provided that you're not trying to use it for a daily-driver. Although I've actually seen a couple out locally being used with only blacked-out lettering by a river-tubing company, with something like half a dozen seats left in it to fetch floaters and their tubes out of the river at a certain pickup point.

 

[cadillackid]

This is different in every state.



In some states, all you really need to do is black-out any official lettering and you're good.
In others, they generally want 51% of it painted some other color.
And some states don't want any of the original color to remain, as it is actually a federally-designated and federally-pushed color that has an actual meaning to it.


Generally-speaking, though, so long as you don't have seats in it, don't have visible (official) lettering on it, and you're not hanging around schools or shopping malls you won't get hassled that much by cops. Worst-case, they stop you and tell you to paint it, and then you can ask them what the regs are. I would bet on most of them not actually knowing it, but some of them might make something up.


If it looks like you're making an attempt, that is usually good enough provided that you're not trying to use it for a daily-driver. Although I've actually seen a couple out locally being used with only blacked-out lettering by a river-tubing company, with something like half a dozen seats left in it to fetch floaters and their tubes out of the river at a certain pickup point.

whats interesting is in my work with the Bus restoration museum and group in.. busses without seats get more attention than ones with.. yellow busses with seats tend to just blend into the traffic.. while its technically Illegal to drive a fully marked school bus down the highway, the ones with an attempt to cover it up tend to get followed by police more than our busses which are all original..

 

[s2mikon]

One of the big things I see is keeping your chance of interaction with law enforcement to a bare minimum. The last thing you need is to have officer friendly walk up to your bus during a traffic stop and say "I smell pot". The truth of the matter is you just finished roasting some green chill's. But it won't matter to him. Then we have a Terry search "for officer safety" and then it just goes down hill from there. If he is in a bad mood for some reason like his girlfriend left him for a hippy looking dude with a school bus, it only gets worse.

 

[nikitis]

whats interesting is in my work with the Bus restoration museum and group in.. busses without seats get more attention than ones with.. yellow busses with seats tend to just blend into the traffic.. while its technically Illegal to drive a fully marked school bus down the highway, the ones with an attempt to cover it up tend to get followed by police more than our busses which are all original..

How are you getting around the requirements with a Bus restoration efforts. Do any of your buses keep the "School Bus" message or are they being restored but not to school bus yellow?

 

[Iceni John]

Most of the members of the Crown bus group in CA have their Crowns still painted NSBY, but AFAIK nobody has been pulled over for that (at least, nobody on the forum has said they've been ticketed for that). If someone were cited for that, having Historical plates may be a way to stay legal, maybe? Most of the group's Crowns still have all their seats and their flashing lights etc, so apart from not having the school district's name on the sides they're almost indistinguishable from "real" school buses (except they're all decades older than any current buses!). I guess that as long as you don't drive like a hoon, LEOs have better things to do than cite you for a law whose number they may not even know. So saying, I repainted my bus so the only parts of it still NSBY are the wheels, but I'll repaint them soon or buy some Alcoas.

My suggestion is to paint the bus, all of it, ASAP into some non-Look-At-Me color so you don't stick out like some 40'-long bright yellow sore thumb.

John

 

[Malevolence4845]

School MFSAB 'activity busses' are usually painted white and generally don't have flashers or stop signs. So as not to confuse them with pupil transport? IDK why....

North Carolina (and maybe south I can't remember) Has a law, ordnance, statute etc etc, that says you cannot take students on a field trip or sporting event in a Yellow School bus. It must be a purpose built white activity bus. I don't know why either but there must be some substance to it somewhere.

 

[Kentucky Dreaming]

North Carolina (and maybe south I can't remember) Has a law, ordnance, statute etc etc, that says you cannot take students on a field trip or sporting event in a Yellow School bus. It must be a purpose built white activity bus. I don't know why either but there must be some substance to it somewhere.

Every field trip I ever went on here in Kentucky was on a regular yellow bus. All sports teams rode regular yellow buses. But you gotta remember, we are a backwards hillbilly state and it's been 44 years since I was on a school bus.

Point is, laws are different in every state. Yellow is OK here. May not be where y'all is.

 

[nikitis]

North Carolina (and maybe south I can't remember) Has a law, ordnance, statute etc etc, that says you cannot take students on a field trip or sporting event in a Yellow School bus. It must be a purpose built white activity bus. I don't know why either but there must be some substance to it somewhere.

Probably only North Carolina. I grew up in SC and we used yellow buses for field trips but that was 25 years ago. It could have changed.

 

[Albatross]

Where I grew up, yellow school buses were used for everything except for overnight trips, or trips out of state, where they would normally charter a bus.



And the only buses that you would see that are plain white were either a church bus--usually with the church's name on it somewhere--or a prison bus.