Category Archives: safety

Backup Camera, batteries, camera, Electrics, safety, school bus RV, Skoolie

Testing out the Backup Camera(s) (Part I, The Parts)

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So, with all the cold weather and lack of being able to work on the bus, I pulled out the backup cameras and screen, to test them out.  I had had these for a while, but they were still in the boxes, and I wasn’t sure how and where I’d be installing things.  I ordered all these from Amazon last winter and just never got around to them.

 

So, here are the parts, all expanded out of their boxes:

Here is a relatively cheap back-up camera that had decent reviews, and I thought I’d give it a try, or keep it as a spare if the other camera ended up not working or burning out too soon.  It attaches by way of a hollow, threaded post through which the wiring goes.  It has a small plug/socket set to connect the camera to the DC power/return and the 25′ long RCA cable (which will be a little short for the bus).

There had been some complaints about it not being really waterproof, but it looks good to me, given that the lens and body are all nicely molded together, and the back (with the post) is screwed into it with four small screws, meaning that the only place for water to get in is at the back, which you should be sealing up anyhow.

They included a little pieces of what seems to be a 1/16″~2mm foam tape (which somehow escaped my picture) to put on it, but I’ll use a thin bead of butyl rubber when I go to attach it.

Night Vision Parking Car Rear View Wide Angle LED Reversing CMOS Camera

Night Vision Parking Car Rear View Wide Angle LED Reversing CMOS Camera

This was the ‘fancy’ back-up camera that I opted for.  It’s ‘fancy’ because it has the IR LEDS that kick on when it gets dark enough.  I had figured that this would be the main back-up camera for the bus.

It attaches to the vehicle by the side-flanges, and the wires come off the back.  It has separate plugs for a rather standard ‘+ in’ 12 VDC plug (the red one in the picture) and a female RCA jack for the video.  The camera came with 25′ of RCA cable, but I have a run of 50′ that I’ll use instead.

Like the cheaper camera, the body and lens are all together in one nicely molded piece, with a ‘hatch’ that’s screwed down on the top.  Again, I’m figuring on using some butyl rubber sealant around the seam there to try and keep out water, which I expect to be a bigger deal with this camera, since the opening is up and there’s a bigger hatch.

One of the major complaints in the Amazon reviews about both of these cameras is that the image is backward, and you can’t change it, or that it’s been built wrong.  However, these are really back-up cameras, designed to be installed in a particular way so to give an image that’s going to give the driver a familiar view of a rear-view mirror. And they do that just fine, so I think a lot of the issues in those comments is that people didn’t understand what they were buying.

Lilliput Eby701-np/c/t

Lilliput Eby701-np/c/t

The Lilliput screen is a 7″ touchscreen with a VGA input as well as two RCA inputs and a reverse-sensor that automatically changes the input to a camera’s input when the transmission is shifted into reverse. It had some good reviews as being a reliable and visible screen for vehicle use, able to interface with a vehicle-based computer (which I’m planning on installing).  It runs on 12 VDC, but also came with an AC adapter (which made testing a whole lot easier).

It also turned out to have TWO RCA inputs (Video 2 is the one activated by the reverse sensor), so I’m likely to install both back-up cameras and have them each on separate channels (more on this in Part II). The cables that came were actually in two parts, perhaps in case one didn’t have an on-board computer.  The first connects to the screen and includes the power jack (black), RCA jacks (yellow), reverse sensor (green wire), an audio input (white), and the screw-on secured connector for the other wire which connects to the VGA jack and a USB connector for the touchscreen.

Armed with these bits (and a 12 VDC power source from a USB IDE hard drive connector), I got into actually testing the system.

(Continued in Part II …)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bus Driver, driving, learning, safety, School Bus

On The Road – Road Rage

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Recently, we’ve had more road-rage on our area roads, the latest being this one, caught on camera on the NY I-290.  This might seem tame, a pick-up all but forcing a sedan off the road, then the driver getting out to throw rocks at the leaving sedan, but for our area that’s pretty bad.

See, a whole lot of the highway system in and around Buffalo was designed in the 1950’s as part of the New York State Thruway System, and at that time, Buffalo had nearly 900,000 people in it’s metropolitan area, and was expected to continue to grow.  These roadways were designed to be forward-thinking, looking toward that expansion, but with the decline of manufacturing and the change in shipping that the Welland Canal (in Ontario) made allowing ocean-going ships to bypass Buffalo’s harbor and continue from Lake Ontario straight on to Erie and the rest of the Great Lakes, the population growth was no-where near expected (and for the city itself, a decline), meaning that our roadways are (generally speaking) overbuilt for the traffic they get.  Our ‘rush hour’ might delay you all of 5 minutes – maybe 30 if there’s a bad accident.

As a school bus driver, you really have to be good about keeping yourself calm.  School buses can clog up traffic, being the only vehicles that can stop ALL traffic (that’s right, ambulances, fire trucks, and police emergency vehicles have to stop for a school bus’ red flashing lights), and on narrow, tight streets being wider than cars, their very presence can make a road impassible for other vehicles.  We got a lot of ‘three lane’ roads (two-lanes of traffic, one of parked cars) that became ‘one-lane’ roads with the parked cars and snowbanks over this winter.

And over this past year of driving I have had numerous people bitching at me/my bus when I needed to make a turn onto a street they were on, and I had to wait for them before I could go, or when there was a ‘one-lane’ street where my bus was already moving in the one lane and they had to pull over into the parked cars on their side and wait for my bus to pass, or where I blocked up the road to wait for my 30 seconds at the stop where there was no student out and waiting for the bus.  And some of these people have cut around me really unsafely, slammed on their brakes in front of my bus, or not moved when a light turned green ahead of me, all while watching for my reactions, (I’m guessing) because they wanted to make sure that they were annoying me as much as I apparently annoyed them.

But, as a professional driver, you have to let that stuff go.  You have to recognize that sometimes the safest thing to do is let these idiots have space, and get out their aggression without reacting to their provocations.  And sometimes it isn’t easy.

Here are some sites that give advice on how to avoid road rage in yourself and your driving, and also avoiding being the victim of road rage:

And a lot of what they have to say boils down to a couple of important things:

  • Drive Safe: Don’t engage in dangerous driving yourself.  Leave space between you and other drivers, don’t speed or go overly slowly if you don’t need to.
  • Help other drivers out: If someone really wants to get around you and go speeding in a place you’re not, let them.  Try and pull over, or give them an opportunity to pass (though you might want to keep an eye on them ahead of you in case they’re really unsafe).
  • Don’t Engage:  Avoid direct eye contact, if you’re going to give them a gesture, make it a placating or ‘I’m sorry’ gesture rather than one that escalates things and makes them more angry.
  • Keep Your Own Calm:  Whatever troubles these other drivers have, don’t let them affect you personally.  If you are driving safely, and being reasonably aware of and kind to other drivers and someone gets upset with that, that’s their problem, not yours.

And while a lot of this sounds simple, it often isn’t.  School bus drivers want to keep to their schedules, especially if they have to do runs for multiple schools. My morning run includes two schools, and some at my terminal have three schools.  A 20 minute delay on my first school means that I’ll be 10-15 minutes late for all the pick-ups for my second school, for example.  And one of the things a school bus driver has to come to terms with is that if you’re safely driving your bus, you won’t make up time.  That said, some drivers fall prey to trying to get back on schedule and thus drop some of the safety.

For most drivers, this is akin to your being on time for getting to work, or to pick up your kids, or make that date.  Speeding on highways CAN make your trip faster over hundreds of miles.  Speeding on city streets generally doesn’t pay off, as stop signs and stop lights break down what you might gain, and, of course, your stopping time/distance grows as your speed does.

I think that driving a school bus and being forced to be so safety conscious and aware of how much space my vehicle is taking up on the road and where it is has made me not only a better driver, but a much calmer one.  I watch other people struggle and jockey for position on the road and let them at it.

The bottom line, if being safe makes me late, then I’ll be late.  If I’m going to be throwing rocks at a vehicle, it’ll be for a good reason like this:  Daring rescue saves driver of burning truck.

Update 03/22/15: They’ve caught the driver of the pick-up in the video above, and are charging him with first degree reckless endangerment, a class D felony.  It’s no joke!

 

mileage, safety, school bus RV, Skoolie

Buses and fuel

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  On a bus-conversion board, I found a discussion on fuel tanks. Some buses have one, and reports of size varied from 40-100 gallons. Some buses come with two (seemingly of the same size) which vary from 30-100 gallons.  (It would be awesome to have two 100 gallon tanks … As it is, we have a 60 gallon tank.)  But perhaps more important for how far you can get on your tank(s) of fuel is your miles per gallon (mpg).
  As for mpg, actual mileage of fully converted buses (that people have reported) go from 3-16 or so (diesel).  Much of this seems to hinge on gearing and travel speed, but some is in the styles of buses, with ‘conventional’ or ‘long-nose’ chassis get better mpg than the ‘pushers’, which isn’t a surprise, as the nose is more aerodynamic than the ‘flat wall’ of the buses with the rear engine.  Even with the aerodynamic issues, buses lose out in mpg because, as Mr. Jake von Slattso nicely puts it, they’re steel skin over steel supports with more steel inside, all mounted on a true medium truck chassis. Plenty heavy, but plenty safe , and with lots of space. Ours, even with the low amount of travel it gets and the much higher amount of idling is getting about 12 mpg.
  In comparison, while most factory-made RVs are on lowered chassis to optimize head-space, and are built of wood, fiberglass, aluminum, and sometimes steel in order to reduce weight, they still seem to get between 2-16 mpg (diesel), with some of the newer hybrid engines hitting on that upper range.  But the structural stability of these is nowhere near that of a bus, and that is not even factoring in the large slide-outs that compromise the structure as well.
  So, when asked about (or confronted with a) “well, wouldn’t it make more sense to just buy an RV for better mileage?” or “don’t forget that all that weight you’re adding in tanks/walls/appliances/frippery will take away from your mileage!”, I have to take a deep breath and re-iterate that school buses are about the safest vehicles on the road.  And yes, while a lightly (or under-) loaded vehicle is likely to get better mileage than one that’s fully loaded, buses with air brakes stop better when loaded, and most buses are geared low enough that the added weight really doesn’t stress the engine too much. (One guy on the Skoolie board commented that he built Jacuzzis into his buses and the mileage didn’t vary at all whether the 8/10-person Jacuzzis were full of water or empty.
  We’re been exploring WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil) as a fuel source, in order to make the project more efficient in its mileage. Why WVO, you might ask? Well, most diesel engines will run on it with -no- modifications whatsoever (Apparently, there’s a type of fuel-lubricated rotary fuel pump on some engines that has an issue because the WVO is more viscous than diesel fuel). Major costs involved in the conversion are auxiliary fuel tanks, a fuel tank heater (WVO needs to be at about 160 degrees to flow like cold diesel), a flow switch/ electric valve and possibly new, corrosion-resistant fuel lines.
  There is a filtering/ settling process to actually get the WVO to be usable (though some don’t worry about this – which may or may not damage the injectors), but you end up with a cleaner burning fuel that smells like french fries (or probably in our case, wings).  There’s an outfit in Mississauga, Ontario that makes in-line pressure-driven centrifuges that would take water and particulates out of the WVO.
  I’ve asked on another board how the mileage with WVO compares with diesel, and it seems like WVO should give about 80% the power of diesel.  I’ve been toying with getting another tank to get 50-100 gallons worth of travel of our trips for just the labor and filters of processing out the sludge from the WVO – which will likely be well worth the savings at the pump, since many restaurants have to -pay- to have the stuff disposed of …