Edgerton Bus Garage 2026

Nine bays, and the way buses actually move

Bay count is arithmetic: count the buses, add the one you expect to buy, size the building. The hard part is not how many buses fit under a roof; it is how they get in and out of it twice a day, in the dark, in a fixed order, with a turning radius that does not forgive a tight approach.

That is what set this footprint. The garage sits on the east side of the existing campus near the wrestling building, paired with a new asphalt drive off the north side of the school that lets buses travel from behind the building to the garage and from the garage out to the street. Buses enter from campus and leave toward the road. Nothing backs across a lane anything else is using, and no part of the route crosses the drop-off loop or the staff lot at the hour when both are full.

Nine doors with openers face that drive, with an eight-foot concrete apron in front of them. The apron is the item questioned in value engineering and should not be: it takes wheel loads at the sharpest angle, when a bus pivots to line up on its door, and asphalt in that position ruts within a few seasons. Behind it the drive is built at a full section — eight compacted inches of gravel, three of base course asphalt, two and a half of surface. That is a road section, because a bus route through a campus is a road.

One of the nine bays is the maintenance bay, and where it sits in the row matters as much as that it exists. It holds a bus going nowhere that morning while eight others leave around it. Two man doors serve it, one from outside and one through to the storage bays, so a mechanic moves between the work in progress and the rest of the fleet without walking a bus lane. The old concrete pad west of the wrestling building comes out and is graded and seeded: a demolition line that is really a circulation line, because the space a bus needs to swing has to be clear.

Running services to a building on the edge of a campus

A detached building at the boundary of a campus gets compared, in the budget conversation, to a building attached to something. Per square foot the two look close. They are not, and the whole difference is what has to be brought out to it.

The garage takes a new electrical service of its own. Borrowing a feed off the school's existing panel is the first thing anyone suggests and the thing that fails on the first cold morning, because every stored bus wants a block heater circuit at the same hour. That load has nothing to do with the square footage of the building; it is a function of the fleet. The contract carries dedicated circuits and receptacles for bus engine block heaters, general-use receptacles in the maintenance bay, and LED lighting throughout the garage and on the drive side of the building, so drivers can see the apron they are lining up on.

Plumbing goes only where it earns its cost. Water service and a water heater serve the maintenance bay; the eight storage bays get none. With the water comes the oil interceptor and floor drain, the line a facilities director should look at hardest. It is the difference between a bay that can be washed down and a bay where fluids go wherever the floor happens to slope.

Mechanical follows the same rule: heating and ventilation in the maintenance bay, ventilation only in the eight storage bays, no cooling. Buses do not need to be warm, they need to start, and the block heater circuits do that for a fraction of what heating nine bays would cost to build and run.

None of this appears in a per-square-foot comparison, and that is the point for a treasurer. The new service, the water run, the interceptor and the drive that reaches the building are priced against one building's floor area, but they are bought once for a site.