Dump Belching School Buses

Motorists who have sat behind a belching yellow school bus, and parents with children riding in one, will cheer any regulation that helps replace the polluter with cleaner technology. The South Coast Air Quality Management District has a chance to impose such a rule Friday, finishing the job it began last year: cutting cancer-causing diesel emissions. The move toward cleaner-running school buses is the most controversial one in the fight against the diesel problem, but the AQMD’s board should strongly embrace it.

Rule 1195, likely to come up for a vote Friday morning, requires school districts in the AQMD’s four-county Southern California area to buy natural gas buses when they replace worn-out diesel buses. The rule closely parallels those already in place requiring local governments to gradually move toward natural gas trash trucks, transit buses and street sweepers.

Collectively, these efforts will help cut the noxious gases and microscopic particles emitted from diesel engines, a big contributor to smog. The move is necessary for the region to meet federal clean air standards and, even more important, to safeguard the health of residents, including children traveling to and from school on old and heavily polluting buses. This very focused endeavor is unrelated to the AQMD’s broad industrial pollution credit trading program, which was reported this week to be lagging badly in reaching its 10-year goals.

Because of the chronic fiscal squeeze in which school districts find themselves, the proposed bus rule has generated more resistance than did earlier rules governing city trucks and buses. Some school officials, though by no means all, fear they’ll be saddled with additional long-term costs to repair and fuel natural gas buses. The school bus rule, like the AQMD’s previous natural gas rules, is attached to an $11-million local fund, $25 million statewide, to subsidize both the costlier buses and the new equipment that districts will need to fuel them. That’s why many districts, including Los Angeles Unified, Monrovia and Santa Monica, have endorsed the measure.

The rule would inevitably pose difficult choices: Even with a generous fund, regulators would have to ensure that the money went where it would do the most good. That might mean targeting the smoggiest districts, often those with the tightest budgets.

So long as it doesn’t force school districts to choose between books and buses, Rule 1195 is a key step toward protecting the health of schoolchildren and cleaning the air we all breathe.