Both NYTimes and LATimes cover the matter of electric school busses in rural America

Last December, Hailey Branson-Potts wrote this LA Times story about electric school busses in far northern California,  The dateline was Susanville, population 17,000, county seat of Lsssen County, which is about the size of Delaware, with a population density of 7.2 persons per square mile. The headline is "California is pumped about electric buses.  Rural schools say they're a pain." (The alternative headline is "California rural schools say electric buses won't work."

Dionne Searcey wrote this NY Times story about electric school busses in Nebraska, published just this week.  Her story is out of her hometown of Wymore in Gage County, population 21,000, in the more populous eastern part of the state.  Because Searcey is writing about her hometown, she frequently mentions having been in school with several of the men featured in the story.  Her headline is "A Brand New Electric Bus, No Charge. (That Was One Problem)."  The subhead is "In tiny Wymore, Neb., a sleek new battery-powered school bus became a Rorschach test for the future."

As reflected in their respective headlines, both of these stories engage the politics of the rural-urban divide, as well as the practical challenges of traversing the long distances associated with rural living and doing so with little charging infrastructure.  Here's a representative paragraph from the NYT story:

[T]he electric bus became a surrogate for far bigger issues this quiet corner of the nation is facing. In conversations in the school boardroom, at the volunteer fire hall and at the American Legion bar, the bus exposed fears of an unwelcome future, one where wind turbines tower across the flatlands, power generated by Nebraska solar farms is sent out of state and electric cars strand drivers on lonesome gravel roads.

Both pieces are well worth a read.  Here's a prior post I wrote about the federal program supplying the electric buses--and how it was playing in my hometown. 

For contrast, here's a Los Angeles Times story on the uber-urban Oakland (California) School District going all electric with its school bus fleet.