Why U.S. Cities Aren’t Using More Electric Buses
citylab.com
citylab.com
The reasons electric buses arent seen more often are many, and they arent political at all.
- Tooling. Fleets generally maintain all the tooling necessary for specific make model and design of a vehicle. if that fleet gets large enough, they get a seat at the manufacturers table to help steer development and ensure a sustainable product that doesnt increase rider cost or decrease economy/comfort. Battery fleets would mean having to outfit shops with new training for high voltage, arc/flash suits, hot-sticks and other tools. Youre likely going to need to hire a few electricians to train and oversee people as well.
- lifecycle maintenance. As a fleet mechanic I know down to the day, minute, and hour when my motors are clapped out and when everything needs to be replaced. Diesel engines can run for several million miles if well maintained, but the lifecycle on a fleet electric vehicle is quite a bit more limited. A Cushman or Toyota fork lift for example is often entirely electric and sees a similar duty cycle (high tork, long service, low speed.) Replacement batteries are provided from a third party every year or two. Fleet operators in most US cities havent the slightest idea what the real-world operations lifecycle is for an electric bus. Its likely going to be pretty poor if youre operating these busses in places like Wisconsin winters or Arizona summers.
- Again, Tooling. If you told me I was in charge of a fleet of electric buses id probably quit. Youre talking about 50-60 busses for a small city, so youll need a set of substations dedicated for high speed charging. youll need your own PPD (Physical Plant maintenance) to handle generators during power outages, cooling during summer, and general repair. Your existing diesel fleet just requires a fuel dump and an apprentice mechanic. Youre also going to need to understand how to dispose of something that can, if punctured, explode into flames. Most oil recyclers in fleet operations pay you for the oil you give them and grant a discount on the new stuff. Ive never seen a fleet battery contractor for forklifts that has ever done more than pickup, drop off, and fees.
EV buses will not be using lead acid and will use longer life battery tech (e.g. Li-ion), so your reason #2 will not be as big of an issue.
I guarantee you when we really start feeling the effects of climate change and the politics on this turns, cities will be adopting electric bus fleets seemingly overnight.
FYI, mining trucks and equipment are almost all electric. So are locomotives...even if that power comes from a diesel generator. One of the largest trucks in the WORLD is electric
But the overall message is sound: you have to commit to a very different infrastructure if you want to make the change. Cities with an aging and/or poorly maintained diesel fleet are going to be better suited to making a 'clean break'.
China is pushing it through because it's a long-term investment. That makes sense for them. That doesn't mean that bus electrification is going to happen rapidly in the US.
The question is why it'd be a good investment for china, but not for the US?
In my country you also get at 10% discount if you turn in your used car battery when getting a replacement. They need to recycle a used battery for every new one sold.
I don't think moaning about having to get new tools or training is particularly helpful in the grand scheme of things. If you are going to spend money on new buses, spending money on new tools is a given.
Buses seem like such a no-brainer for electrification, I'd hate to think that we're carrying on with diesel polluting our air and killing us just because the mechanics are losing their shit over having to do something new. Please wake up.
Except that's not how it went. In many cities, it went from horse-drawn to electric to internal combustion.
In any technological sea change there are winners and losers. Winners sense the wind changing, adjust their sails, and charge bravely ahead. Losers linger adrift in denial, refusing to adapt until the maelstrom inevitably takes them. Hint: be a winner.
The root cause is indeed political.
I thinnk you should probably grab it with both hands. You appear to have a good grasp of some of the problems - and it's likely to be the future.
In today's world, a diesel bus is able to run for an entire day, doing route(s) back and forth without going back to the depot for refueling and charging. This can be true for an electric bus, but in general the range is not longer, and depends on stuff like
- elevation changes in the route
- climate; not only do batteries perform worse in cold weather, but heating and cooling makes up a significant amount of energy draw. In an ICE bus usually the ICE itself generates waste heat.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/electric-bus-...
> Similarly, the Minnesota source claimed that over the three-week trial, electricity consumption was 70 percent heating and only 30 percent motion.
> Wright said (as of early fall) that Moscow’s trial routes for BEBs—trolleybus Routes 73, 76, 80, and 83—have had to use more buses just to run the same service, pointing to before and after slides. The four routes appear to have gone from 46 trolleybuses to 82 BEBs without any increase in service frequency, presumably because BEBs have considerable down time for midday charging.
That incurs a lot of additional costs:
- buses not in service while driving to and from charging points are personnel and vehicle hours that cost money, especially if after charging you need to be able to place the driver in a bus actually going into service
- you are maintaining and storing a much larger fleet of buses now
Until an electric bus can be made that can run a full day without charging, costs will rise for electric bus adopters.
Heating should not really be a problem. You should use some open flame heater with e.g. gas, wood spill etc for that not high quality electricity or gasoline.
(Sorry swedish but look at the picture of the setup) https://www.bussmagasinet.se/2018/03/premiardags-i-ostersund...
Also, if as another poster says 70% of the energy goes to heating then why replace this with a very dirty energy source? Kinda defeats the purpose.
Having a auxiliary diesel burner with water as medium is standard practice in the area. The buses have so large windows that the heating power is quite ridiculous. Maybe EV-buses need smaller windows? I tried to figure out how the buses and the article are heated and another article states electricity and oil burner when it's quite cold. (https://www.jamtkraft.se/om-jamtkraft/nyhetsrum/stadsbussar-...)
I don't think it's reasonable to heat them only with electricity in that climate. Maybe a wood pellet burner could be used if one is made for automotive use? I wonder if the pellets would bounce around too much ... probably only good enough in rural areas where there would be no smog problems.
The specification demands on heating oil is lower, so you could make it from only tall oil (tree oil). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_oil
Doing so at traffic light is probably better place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_(transport)
Though for ground-leven / "third rail" conductors, a sliding shoe is more appropriate.
It seems to be this one: https://www.oppcharge.org/
New Flyer, a major bus maker, is based out of Winnipeg, Canada, and is developing e-buses:
Little things may also improve bus uptake, like the lack of noise pollution.
That's not really a reason to switch on its own. But if electric buses get close, it's an additional point in the balance.
Admittedly, my building is at the first traffic light of the straight part of the (one-way) Main St. Potential plans to restore two-way flow to such a street might lessen that somewhat, but I assume random idiots with what look like clear streets will continue to love showing off how loud their ICE engines get doing stupid stunts.
My girlfriend suffer from hyperacusis. Loud ICE vehicles, especially two-wheeled one (there are a lot where we live) cause her physical pain. It's a relief when a vehicle starts and there is almost no noise.
We really wish the emissions and noise would go inside the rider lungs and ears. People would be much faster to make the switch to cleaner, less noisy vehicles.
They're experimenting with an electric bus right now - but so far it's been a nightmare. Range is the primary problem, lasting less than a full route, sometimes not even lasting over an hour after a full charge. This has resulted in having to tow the bus back to the shop several times.
Even with removable batteries, you'd have to have a lot of these lying around, and a lot more buses running shorter routes, to compensate. Their CNG buses just don't have this problem, and produce largely water vapor as their combustion bi-product.
I think the problem is the terrain, distance in the routes, and expected load.
"Out of the box" it looks like they're capable of 100-150 miles, but from what he said, they weren't getting those numbers even on a good day.
From that experience, and from his attitude towards them. I doubt they'll be eager to try out the full sized versions.
The CNG buses they currently run are pretty darn clean, and cheap to operate as it is. So electric will have to be quite a bit better in order to convince them to switch.
It's like the difference between using the trial period for some new SaaS product, vs. actually buying it and putting it into limited production - you'll find all sorts of things you didn't run into before.
You must also consider the scale they operate at - buying 6 for testing probably isn't too big of a deal if they don't work out long term.
Routes and service varies a lot from one fleet to another and route to another. That effects the type of bus you want. Maybe you have a school bus in San Diego. Drives flat and a couple of hours day. Or maybe it's bus in the Sierras and has to climb 2500 feet up a steep grade in 100 degree weather at 7000 feet.
The other thing I think is routes are currently designed around diesel buses. Natively replacing them with electric is likely to be sub optimal.
Yes, it depends on a lot of factors, but stoplights exist almost everywhere and should be considered standard; if that halves your range to 20 miles, you should probably advertise it as "10-20 miles range depending on terrain" instead of "40 miles".
A standardized environment for testing is fine but it should emulate some set of realistic conditions if you intend to use numbers from it for advertising, e.g. stop-and-go every 100 meters, uphill 2% for 1/3, 0% for 1/3, downhill -2% for 1/3, or something like that.
That is not to say that there would not need to be investment in the utilities infrastructure, but it would pay out in spades over time. OTOH I can also see an argument to be made that the utilities may not want to see this happen everywhere, especially in highly populated areas and areas that see power supply issues in general.
Since the bus is already parked somewhere during the day, couldn't you charge it then? From what I've seen there's usually a gigantic parking lot somewhere in the city where all the buses go to sleep. Would the parking lot need to be much larger to accommodate charging stations? I assume it's already got a diesel pump of some sort to feed the buses since you don't exactly see city buses at normal gas stations.
For example: https://www.oppcharge.org/ https://www.heliox.nl/
What I would really like to see are small self-driving battery powered trams. (Seems like large "bi-mode" human operated ones already exists).
That setup (charging where the buses go at the end of the day) requires the buses have enough battery to go their entire day on one charge. But then, that restricts the ability to take a just-now-ending-service bus that's out on the road, and redeploy it to fill in for a bus that is running late, or a bus that has broken down.
(I have seen this happen: I have seen a VTA "Rapid" 522 bus, just about to go in-service at the start of its route, switch to "Not in Service" and leave without picking anyone up. When I called in to report the weirdness, the agent on the other end checked and told me that an Express bus nearby had broken down. That was the right call: The Raid bus was closer, and the Rapid schedule frequent enough to absorb the loss.)
So ideally, you would want charging points to be available where buses sit during the day. That is at least at one end of the route. It can be done, it just takes more infrastructure.
> I assume it's already got a diesel pump of some sort to feed the buses since you don't exactly see city buses at normal gas stations.
While I was an undergrad at Ohio State, I drove 35- and 40-foot buses for CABS (the campus bus service). We did indeed have a diesel tank and pump on-site. But occasionally it would break down. When that happened, we would indeed use a normal gas station! All of the nearby gas stations with diesel pumps were evaluated for bus access.
Also the article mentioned $1.5million for infrastructure to charge 20 buses. Ideally you'd want that running 24/7, not lying dormant for 16 hours a day.
And lastly, you're adding a massive single point of failure. What if the power goes out overnight? Suddenly you don't have any buses the next day.
Ps I like the idea of buses going to sleep at night :)
Don't forget, once you've added an extra tonne of batteries your suspension and chassis need upgrading (ie get heavier) to compensate, so you need to add more batteries to compensate....
> Consequently, powering a full-size bus would require a battery pack that is unacceptably large and heavy, as well as too costly to make a battery-electric bus commercially competitive.
Of course, the energy density of lithium may change things!
Also, keep in mind you don't just need very robust electrical quick-connects, you also need fluid quick-connects for the heating/cooling. As well as a system to bleed air from the loops inside the bus.
Let's say the bus needs 50 miles of range, and it runs at 2 kWH per mile, so it needs a 100 kWH battery. Assuming 200Wh/kg density, the battery will be at minimum 500kg.
OTOH, a few charging spots might be cheaper/more flexible if you've got a wide variety of routes.
The new trolley buses have the ability to run off-wire for 3 miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Seattle#Recomm...
King County metro (includes Seattle) is one of the agencies that's made major investments in trolley buses.
2011 study: https://metro.kingcounty.gov/up/projects/trolleyevaluation.h... (recommended trolleys with batteries for off-wire capability)
2015 press release on arrival of new trolley wire/battery backup buses: https://kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/news/re...
Battery only bus tech is also growing. I don't think it's viable for large scale usage yet, but KC Metro has been working on and piloting it seriously for a few years. It's possible that by the time more places would look into trolley buses during fleet replacement, battery ones will be ready.
The buses in Lausanne when I lived there were on overhead electric when in the city center and switched back to diesel when they came off the wires. The same was true in a number of other Swiss cities. So I would hardly call it "not in wide use." Just not in the USA.
"retaining the ability to drive disconnected from the wires and constantly charge when in an area with the wires"
Seemed to refer to trolley buses with rechargeable battery backups, which are much less common. Admittedly, I don't have non-US stats, just that there are only a handful of cities in the US that use them.
Metro and sound transit has also invested in a lot of hybrids. The most recent fleet is pretty interesting (they also have a few battery-only electrics, but these seem more like testing).
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2018/06/26/do-londoners-dre...
I think that series hybrid buses would be better: battery runs e-motor, and have a range extender (generator) that kicks in when needed.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vehicle_drivetrain#Seri...
China has the same problem in Shanghai. The solution they use is overhead wires to charge busses while they are driving for parts of downtown that busses can connect to and disconnect from at will.
With a self powered bus (any technology) running on standard streets you can have it go anywhere. If the route you choose is wrong most of the costs were the bus so you can start a different route in a different area until you get people riding. If there is a popular event one weekend you can shift buses to serve that event for just that weekend. If the needs change you shift routes to match instead of sticking with routes that no longer make sense.
Don't get me wrong, advantages of fixed wires and rails (note the and!) make it worthwhile to put in a trolley system on your busiest routes. However the advantage of a bus that can go anywhere means that in general no you can't/shouldn't.
It is an idea that seems sound, but fails because of reality.
As far as I can tell they have a mixed fleet. Electric for ones that are downtown enough to charge and natural gas for busses that are mainly outside the city.
Things change rapidly so this may no longer be true.
Of course part of the advantage of flexible routes is we assume car infrastructure is in place. While that isn't entirely desirable, it is reality: anyone fighting it directly is ignoring reality. Better to fight it indirectly which means making public transit better and better until people decide on their own to get rid of their car - only when few people use a car regularly can getting rid of roads be realistic.
Build it and they will come doesn't always work.
But if we could get rid of cars, we could make the roads a lot narrower.
buses have fixed routes, known depots, and in many cases, share larger stations as destinations for transit to other buses or other forms of transpiration. all are suitable for charging buses.
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/munis-electric-tro...
But don't forget particulate emissions: I believe that's the primary motivation for electric bus conversion. Buses are a significant portion of particulates in many cities, and particulates kill people.
Honda used to sell a natural gas civic and you could buy a home fill station, in the late 2000s it probably made a lot sense. But now, you'd be better off getting an electric vehicle and a home charger.
I think LPG is interesting, but if you're going to deal with speciality fuel/fueling, you can just get a hydrogen or battery electric vehicle and enjoy the benefits of an electrified powertrain. LPG powertrains retain the complexity and service costs of gas powertrains with pretty marginal benefits. Electrification has its own costs but unique advantages.
Not universally true. In Italy, where regular gas prices are stellar, LPG is a relatively common thing. Not common enough, but the infrastructure is "there" (although not as capillary as regular gas) and it's advertised as a consumer option.
When oil became cheap again, the government stopped the subsidies and it was back to petrol. The tanks and the pumps at the services stations were ripped out and sold to the Indians, Eastern Europeans and the Chinese.
http://www.meca.org/regulation/us-epa-20072010-heavyduty-eng...
I think the situation is a little more complicated than that. Electricity is a much cheaper fuel than diesel, and maintenance costs are lower for electric vehicles too, so in the long term electric buses may end up saving more money than they cost.
Add to that the fact that interest rates are very low right now, and it may even turn out that financing the electric buses and charging systems could allow cities to save money from day one, though I haven't crunched any numbers so this is admittedly just speculation on my part.
I think there is a <citation needed> here. Do ICE drivetrains really constitute a large fraction of the maintenance costs on cars and buses? In my experience, suspension and steering, and auxiliaries, are the things that break.
Compare that with Brakes, Oil changes, Transmission service, DPF + DEF and the host of other things you get with a diesel engine + transmission.
We've got a diesel truck, diesel tractor and EV, it's pretty easy to see the maintenance differences between the three of them over the years(the tractor being the highest with the added complexity of a hydraulic system).
You can't do this with ICE, if you put diesel fumes in a compression chamber and pump the cylinders up and down, it doesn't turn back into diesel fuel, combustion isn't symmetric, so you need to actually have brakes.
The answer is probably easier: a Prius is 3300 lbs and a Dodge Ram is 6600 lbs and carries much, much more if working. Those truck brakes are going to be thrashed much harder.
It really does come down to the fact that you brake in the 5-10mph range on the EV(or not at all in stop/go traffic).
All that happens is you cut power to the motor but leave the wheels attached to the motor. This is the same as "engine braking" on a manual. The wheels turn the motor, which steals kinetic energy from the car and charges the battery.
There's no extra bits or anything. It's all in the drivetrain that's there already.
>more things that can go wrong. Eddy Current Brakes are a passive system with an extremely high safety track record. If you ignore the bearing that holds the wheel/motor in place there are no moving mechanical parts. I couldn't think of a safer way to stop moving objects.
Electric motors will need their bearings replacing eventually, but they have no transmission fluids, no circulating oil picking up combustion products, and regenerative braking removes a huge amount of wear on brake pads.
I have a plug-in hybrid (EV infrastructure isn't great where I live) and after 2500km the brakes still stick like new. They've barely been used.
NOx promotes low level ozone, which is an irritant, but I thought by far not the differentially harmful portion of diesel exhaust.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-co2-emissi...
https://blog.mybacharach.com/articles/sources-nox-emissions/
I know your feelings is as good as data but still.
Seems rather obvious
The 7 out of the top 10 CO2 emission sources in Europe are coal power plants. Their production is blown by the wind to populated areas. Some of coal power plant production ends up different countries as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/15/european...
EV buses allow you to wean off carbon power sources in many stages.
We must move to electrification if we want to save our lungs and our planet. No amount of dirtiest diesel is going to save us.
Maybe[1], but still less so than the equivalent emissions from the dozen or so passenger vehicles that bus replaced.
The upthread point (which is correct) is that the environmental gains from bus transportation are concentrated in the efficiency gains of shared vehicles and that the relative impact of the fuel used is fairly minor. Get people on buses, then optimize. The linked article is worrying about things in the wrong order.
[1] I mean, no, not really. Diesel exhaust stinks, it's not particularly "toxic".
You might know your body well enough to be able to tell that it is not particularly toxic to you personally, but please consider the possibility others are more vulnerable it (because for example their bodies have more chronic inflammation than yours does).
The URL below goes to an article not about diesel exhaust or pollution, but about chronic inflammation, entitled "Understanding inflammation". Here is all the advice near the end of the article on how a reader might reduce inflammation. Emphasis mine.
>“Losing weight can have profound effects on lowering inflammation,” says Brown, who adds that eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low in fats, processed foods, and sugars is generally a good idea, though more study needs to be done to determine how it might affect inflammation. Exercising, which causes an acute inflammatory response in the short term, but an anti-inflammatory one when we regularly get moving, is another strong step to take, he adds. Other researchers advise getting plenty of sleep, lowering stress levels, and seeking out treatment for inflammation-inducing culprits, such as gum disease and high cholesterol levels. Avoid contact with heavy metals such as mercury, which is found in dangerous amounts in some large fish, and limit exposure to substances, such as diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke, that can set off the immune system.
https://www.johnshopkinshealthreview.com/issues/spring-summe...
My point was that, on balance, riding in a bike behind a diesel bus is less toxic than riding behind the train of 10+ cars it replaced (or really that riding in a city filled with single passenger vehicles is less healthy than one inhabited by diesel bus riders.
Get folks out of their cars. Then worry about what kind of buses they ride.
(In California, where I live, the vast majority of cars are gasoline / petrol cars.)
It's terrible stuff!
You can argue that it's benign in the middle of nowhere, where the concentration drops to nothing quickly. But not in the city!
The long-term plan is to electrify both the buses and the cars, and also the trucks, and to do that in a reasonable amount of time, you need to work from now on at all of them at once.
What's your long-term plan?
And by the way, most of these cities already have a big diesel network. But let me ask again, what is your long-term plan?
Around here the buses run pretty empty. Sometimes they are literally empty. They take longer routes than cars, with each passenger going a longer distance because the bus route is not what they really want. It would be far better if the passengers had cars.
The bus just isn't going to take people point-to-point. It will go to a hub, and then people will change buses, and then another bus will go out. Point-to-point service is personal transportation. Shared transportation fundamentally can't be optimized to individual needs.
So the buses drive longer distances, and they have to drive even when empty.
BTW, bus usage can seem better than it really is. You are likely to go on the popular parts of the routes, so you see the buses being fuller than they usually are.
(It would not be better if all the passengers had cars, because then it would lead to greater congestion and it would take everyone 2 hours to go 10 miles.)
Not for particulates. Even a clean diesel bus is going to be dirtier in particulates vs. gasoline. Its the nature of the fuel (i.e. not the thermo cycle used).
ON the other hand, converting to CNG eliminates particulates completely (you use the same engine, just feed it CH4)
This is true: more public transport should be the n.1 priority, even if it's diesel.
However you are creating a false dichotomy: electric VS diesel.
We can have more public transport and electric transport at the same time. Less cars, thanks.
As for the size of transit budgets, and how incompetent most American transit agencies are, that's another orthogonal issue.
And Megawatt peak power isn't much, either. A decent Tesla has half a megawatt peak power. A bus on hilly routes or for highway speeds could and maybe should have double that.
Charging infrastructure needs to be done right, though. To make >1 Megawatt charging work well takes some careful thought. But it's not ultimately harder than a few fast DC chargers ganged together (probably need battery backing to make the peak charging cost lower, but ultimately, if you have lots of buses charging a lot, it's not super surprising if you need a good grid connection... but that's half of why you pay for electricity, so that's ultimately not a problem, either). That's actually a valid option.
30% social/recreational
19% to/from work
16% other family/personal errands
14% shopping
6% work-related business
6% school/church
9% other
https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/transportation_stat...
Electric busses are just a (tiny) extension of that question.
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/transportation/201...
They are facing problems though with the range etc. So be interesting to see the long term result of this project and I'm hoping for the best. This area desperately needs better public transportation.
[1]https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july...