Cancelling school bus service in Toronto due to extreme cold weather is very rare and that might explain why the contractors responsible for shuttling students to and from school seem to have been caught off guard for temperatures Monday morning that dipped below -20.
Kevin Hodgkinson, General Manager of the Toronto Student Transportation Group (the consortium that organizes bus service on behalf of Toronto's public and Catholic school boards), says the decision was made to cancel bus service early Monday morning, when mechanics realized that many of the buses that were found seized up were beyond boosting on the spot.
"Sometimes it requires that bus to be hauled into the yard to get up and running," Hodgkinson says.
Only 2-4 percent of the TSTG's 1,800-vehicle fleet was taken out of service by the cold (that's somewhere between 36 and 72 school buses) but Hodgkinson says its enough to wreak havoc on school bus schedules.
He says had service not been cancelled, students could have been waiting outside for extended periods in wind chills that felt below -30 for buses that could have been very late or might not have arrived at all.
Its written in the school boards' agreements with school bus companies that contractors are paid 70 percent of their normal, fixed costs on days that service is cancelled.
School buses in York and Durham Regions were also cancelled on Monday, but buses in Peel Region were operating as normal.
Hodgkinson points out that extreme cold weather is 'very unusual' for Toronto.
"I think this is only the second time we've had a cold-weather (cancellation) in the last 20 years," he says.
As part of their deals to do business with Toronto's school boards, bus contractors have to have protocols in place in case of extreme weather.
Hodgkinson says some companies have 'early rise' procedures to get mechanics and drivers moving earlier than normal to make sure that buses are started and prepared for the road.
Other companies will plug their buses into block heaters the night before they're due on their regular routes.
Hodgkinson says while these failsafes are supposed to ensure contractors fulfil their obligations, he rejects the suggestion that Monday's cancellation was a failure.
"Given the circumstances in student transportation, we just can't deliver the services so as much as the carriers ... would have been ready to go if we had asked, there would have been a number of delays that would have happened."
He says that in order to maximize efficiency, many school buses deployed by TSTG aren't parked on a yard overnight but rather in the parking lot of a mall, or shopping plaza close to where their route starts and ends.
Hodgkinson says that means those vehicles are typically unable to be plugged in when the weather gets cold.
He expects that school buses will be more reliable in extreme cold weather in the future, as contractors switch their fleets from diesel engines to those powered by gasoline.