Electric Buses Not a Panacea
Heartland Author
August 15, 2024
By The Antiplanner
Last week, the city of Seneca, South Carolina decided to shut down the Clemson Area Transit System, which served Seneca and nearby Clemson University. Once touted as owning the world’s first all-electric bus fleet, just a few years later two thirds of its expensive electric buses had broken down, the company that made them went bankrupt, parts were no longer available, and the city can’t afford to buy replacement buses.
Seneca is not exactly a major metropolis. But Clemson Area Transit isn’t the only transit agency to have trouble with electric buses. Just the day before Seneca decided to shut down its transit system, Austin’s Capital Metro announced that it was giving up on its plan to electrify its bus fleet by 2030. Electric bus technology, said the agency, simply hasn’t progressed far enough to replace Diesels.
California’s Foothill Transit, one of the first agencies to use rapid-charge electric buses in 2010, has also had problems. Like Austin, the agency had hoped to completely electrify by 2030. Instead, by 2020 most of the electric buses in its fleet were out of service. In 2021, the agency decided to return the buses even though doing so would require it to pay a $5 million penalty to the Federal Transit Administration, whose grant initially paid most of the cost.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/08/electric-buses-not-a-panacea/
