WoodenYouKnowIt
Senior Member
I drove a school bus as my secular work for a while. It was the best job I ever hated! That's a different subject.
I see a lot of people talking about converting skoolies on this forum but very few talk about how to actually DRIVE the darned things. I think that this must surely be due to there being very few school bus drivers that want to convert a skoolie and very few skoolie nuts who ever drove one for a living. As a general rule, people who get paid to drive school buses everyday, taking the world's most precious cargo to and from school, are not the sharpest tools in the shed. And there are virtually none who make the transition to a forum like this one. This is because they are not the sort of people who would ever dream of converting one into something like what all of you fine folks are doing. As a general rule, the professional school bus driver is an automoton with zero imagination and is really just looking for the easiest way to get through each day with the least amount of effort. (Of course, the school system's managers are barely one step above.)
There are several rules of thumb that any good school bus driver has to remember each and everyday - EVERYTIME- s/he gets behind the wheel. At the risk of stating something that so many people may take for granted, please let me say a couple of rules that the school system hammered at us constantly and these are not in any particular order because they are all important:
How many people remember the two-second rule when it comes to driving?
This is that rule that says that, when you are following another vehicle, you allow two seconds between yourself and the vehicle in front. The car in front passes a mailbox and you begin to count: "One one thousand, two one thousand" and if you've already past that mailbox by the time you finish, "two one thousand," you're following too closely.
With a school bus, you need to at least double that amount. It is now the FOUR second rule. Much like OTR trucks, skoolies do not stop on a dime. Also, most of them have drum brakes. They are good brakes but prone to fade much sooner than discs would. All this means that if you are following traffic at the two-second rule that works fine for cars, sooner of later, YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A CRASH! PERIOD! It's only a matter of time. I've now warned you.
When making turns, the rule is for you to Square Your Corners.
This means that, when you approach an intersection where you intend to turn, you keep the nose of that bus pointed straight down the road until your rear axle is even with the inside curb of the cross street. Then, while moving the bus very slowly, you spin that steering wheel as fast as you can in the direction of your turn. You keep one eye on the rear axle and use the mirrors to help you guide that rear wheel around the turn. For the casual observer, it looks as though you weren't going to make a turn at all when you first entered the intersection. It is called "squaring the corners" because it is the opposite of the standard arc that most people perform when they're driving their cars. Squaring the corner is especially important when making a right hand turn. At the school system during training, if you hopped the curb with your inside wheel, the instructor would start yelling:
"YOU JUST KILLED A CHILD! YOU JUST KILLED A CHILD!"
And he did this to drive home the point of just how important it is not to allow your wheels to hop the curb.
I wish I could explain this in a way that is more clear. But I would beg any person that reads this and is converting a skoolie, to please become aware of how these big yellow boxes move through traffic.
I see a lot of people talking about converting skoolies on this forum but very few talk about how to actually DRIVE the darned things. I think that this must surely be due to there being very few school bus drivers that want to convert a skoolie and very few skoolie nuts who ever drove one for a living. As a general rule, people who get paid to drive school buses everyday, taking the world's most precious cargo to and from school, are not the sharpest tools in the shed. And there are virtually none who make the transition to a forum like this one. This is because they are not the sort of people who would ever dream of converting one into something like what all of you fine folks are doing. As a general rule, the professional school bus driver is an automoton with zero imagination and is really just looking for the easiest way to get through each day with the least amount of effort. (Of course, the school system's managers are barely one step above.)
There are several rules of thumb that any good school bus driver has to remember each and everyday - EVERYTIME- s/he gets behind the wheel. At the risk of stating something that so many people may take for granted, please let me say a couple of rules that the school system hammered at us constantly and these are not in any particular order because they are all important:
How many people remember the two-second rule when it comes to driving?
This is that rule that says that, when you are following another vehicle, you allow two seconds between yourself and the vehicle in front. The car in front passes a mailbox and you begin to count: "One one thousand, two one thousand" and if you've already past that mailbox by the time you finish, "two one thousand," you're following too closely.
With a school bus, you need to at least double that amount. It is now the FOUR second rule. Much like OTR trucks, skoolies do not stop on a dime. Also, most of them have drum brakes. They are good brakes but prone to fade much sooner than discs would. All this means that if you are following traffic at the two-second rule that works fine for cars, sooner of later, YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A CRASH! PERIOD! It's only a matter of time. I've now warned you.
When making turns, the rule is for you to Square Your Corners.
This means that, when you approach an intersection where you intend to turn, you keep the nose of that bus pointed straight down the road until your rear axle is even with the inside curb of the cross street. Then, while moving the bus very slowly, you spin that steering wheel as fast as you can in the direction of your turn. You keep one eye on the rear axle and use the mirrors to help you guide that rear wheel around the turn. For the casual observer, it looks as though you weren't going to make a turn at all when you first entered the intersection. It is called "squaring the corners" because it is the opposite of the standard arc that most people perform when they're driving their cars. Squaring the corner is especially important when making a right hand turn. At the school system during training, if you hopped the curb with your inside wheel, the instructor would start yelling:
"YOU JUST KILLED A CHILD! YOU JUST KILLED A CHILD!"
And he did this to drive home the point of just how important it is not to allow your wheels to hop the curb.
I wish I could explain this in a way that is more clear. But I would beg any person that reads this and is converting a skoolie, to please become aware of how these big yellow boxes move through traffic.
