Keeping Up with the Joneses

Latest mirror offerings, promise of increased viewing drive school bus wish lists

With all major school bus mirror manufacturers touting new and improved products, how is a school district or transportation company to decide what to buy?

All mirrors on the market must meet FMVSS 111 to allow bus drivers the maximum amount of vision to see students in and around the loading/unloading zone. And at least two companies manufacture to ISO 9001-2000 certification. But beyond that companies take diverging paths. For school bus decision makers that means weighing the available options and innovations.

"A lot of times we will be looking at other things because maybe it's new and improved," said Ralph Knight, director of transportation at Napa Valley Unified School District to the north of San Francisco. "Mirrors are your livelihood out there. Anything that can improve this helps."

In August prior to the start of the 2005-2006 school year, Napa Valley ordered and tested a few new Rosco AccuStyle, IntegraStyle and Hawkeye cross view mirrors. Since then his department has ordered a half-dozen more.

"We try to use original equipment if it is available and worked well when the bus was delivered," said Charlie Ott, director of transportation at Yuba City Unified School District, located a couple of hundred miles to the northwest near the Pacific Ocean. "In some cases the original equipment mirrors were not acceptable as they did not give the driver acceptable view, so we shopped through other companies to find mirrors that gave us a better view."

George R. Sontag, transportation director at Centerville City Schools outside of Dayton, Ohio, said innovations also drive his mirror selection process. The district's Thomas Built Buses are equipped with Zomir's cross view mirrors, which he said show a larger viewing area and don't distort as much as other products the district has used. He added that he would use Zomir on all his 105 buses if each manufacturer supported them.

Every Laidlaw school bus since 1997, of which there are over 39,000 in operation nationwide, or about 9 percent of the United States fleet, comes standard with the Rosco EuroStyle or AviaStyle remote control mirror systems, said the contractor's spokesperson Tiffini Bloniarz. The mirror is heated for districts residing in colder states.

Rosco and Laidlaw performed field tests a decade ago in Bridgeport, Conn., and at Rosco headquarters in Jamaica, N.Y., to evaluate field of view and reflective imagery, said Ben Englander, vice president of engineering at Rosco, from whence the partnership was born.

Meanwhile, most states have testing procedures in place to gauge effectiveness and/or set specifications. At this writing Washington state was reviewing its mirror specs for the 2006-2007 school year. But the requirements must be ready by when school bus bid season begins in June.

"One of the things we're continuing to look at is how to avoid the blind spot," said Allan J. Jones, the state's director of pupil transportation. "That's a big concern for us."

The Colorado School Pupil Transportation Association Technician's Committee meets once a month with representatives from the state department of education to review and test new products like mirrors. The 25-member committee is currently defining the state's new minimum school bus standards.

Committee chair David Anderson, also the fleet manager at Adams 12 Five Star Schools in Thornton, said new mirror styles affect those standards and directly affect the job of every service technician throughout the state. Currently the group is testing the Mirror Lite Solar Eclipse and the Mirror Lite Junior Solar Eclipse.

"Our group acts as guinea pigs," said Anderson. "If a new product comes out, we put them on our own buses."

Theresa Anderson, the transportation director at Jefferson County Public Schools and David's spouse, said most state school districts look to the committee for guidance. After reviewing the recommendations, her department demos the mirrors on buses to gather both male and female feedback as reflective angles can differ greatly based on the driver's size.

"What's great for some might not work for others," said the former CSPTA president and current trustee. "The least complaints win."

New Products

Mirror Lite is gearing up to begin production of its High Definition Safety Cross mirror sometime this spring. The company said the new product with increased curvature will result in a wider reflective image, maintain a field of view that offers visibility of all 16 FMVSS 111 test cylinders and reduce the size of the reflected image of the school bus.

"The purpose of cross view mirrors is for visibility of the 'danger zone'," said Dan Swain, Mirror Lite's national sales manager. "The warning lights, the windshield, the driver and the sun at 10 in the morning are not located in the danger zone and anything that is visible in the mirror that is not located in the danger zone is a potential visual distraction."

He added that design for the new cross view mirror lens began with the development of a virtual school bus on a virtual FMVSS 111 test grid. The company believes this next generation cross view mirror lens is the first and only CAD-generated mirror lens designed not simply to meet but to maximize the FMVSS 111 school bus requirements.

For example, all nine of the cylinders across the front of the bus are clearly visible in the High Definition mirror, whereas only seven are fully visible in the regular Safety Cross.

Rosco recently introduced its Accustyle® line of exterior rearview mirrors, similar in size to the Eurostyle® line. But the Accustyle has a unique, patent-pending aerodynamic shape the company says is proven to be more efficient than other designs on the market, thanks to a 2004 wind tunnel experiment conducted by Rosco's design team and engineers at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's space propulsion research lab in West Palm Beach, Fla., as part of NASA's Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program.

"For us it was unique; we wouldn't have otherwise had the in-house capabilities to do such an analysis," said Julian Serer, Rosco's engineering manager. "Drag adds to fuel consumption by association and is quite an issue in the school bus industry. If you save even 5 percent of fuel annually that's huge."

He pointed out that mirrors are but one factor among many that affect fuel consumption.

An AccuStyle mirror and that of a competitor was affixed to a specially-constructed carrier that allowed researches to replicate school bus mounting - testing on an actual school bus was unfeasible due to its large size, said Serrer, who with Rosco's design team compared the results with the company's own computer simulations and redesigned accordingly.

Reduced mirror vibration translates to safer operation, Englander added, because drivers can more clearly see areas around the bus during operation and in the loading/unloading zone.

Rosco also introduced the Bell SnapT cross view mirror mounting system that Englander said reduces vibration found in most traditional mirror mounts and damage to the bus body by older tri-pods.

Tiger Mirror, which prides itself on the uniqueness of its products, is concentrating on improved clarity. Offering the market's only tempered glass cross-view mirror, the company's new TigerEye consists of a press-bent, uniformly-radiused lens that promises clearer reflected images than those of typical acrylic lenses. The tempered glass lens is coated with front surface chromium the company says will not black edge, pit or distort when exposed to heat from defrosting elements. It is available in two versions, one for retrofitting onto competitor-supplied brackets or as a part of a complete TigerEye cross-view mirror system featuring new rubber-insulated fender pods.

"Our TigerEye mirror mounting pods also have no equal in the market," said company president Tony Pietrowski. "To our knowledge, no one has identified or solved the real and currently expensive situation/problem created from inadequately mounted cross-view mirrors. Our TigerEye mirror mounting pods provide insurance against the high cost connected with repairing fiberglass bus fenders."

Inside the bus, Tiger's new 6-inch tall by 24-inch wide sun visor with molded plastic head provides the driver with impact protection. The see-thru tinted plastic is molded in a unique profile complete with a blunt rounded perimeter edge to protect the bus driver in the case of a collision. This new product retains the same TigerEye universally adjustable sliding bracket mount as previously available, which allows the bus driver to position the visor almost anywhere to shade his eyes from the sun.

Zomir says its new Model 330A cross view mirror offer an expanded view combined with weight reduction to enhance stability, a benchmark of its entire remote and manual product line.

"The Model 330A cross view mirror system once properly installed provides a clear view of the loading area that does not require readjustment for different height drivers ensuring that the danger zone area is seen by all drivers," said Chris Albers, CEO at Zomir. "Our different styles of driving mirrors offer both standard and expanded views."