Electric Buses are awesome

Sometimes the smallest things can have the most noticeable impact

If you follow me on social media, you’ll probably know that I was in Ottawa a few weeks ago to check out progress on Ottawa’s Line 1 East and West expansion projects. But, unexpectedly, one of the highlights of the trip was... getting back on a New Flyer XE40 electric bus (New Flyer has made basically all the electric buses I’ve regularly used in my life, including the E40 and E60 trolleybuses I used when I was living on Fraser St. in Vancouver).

A New Flyer Industries XE40 Electric Bus for OC Transpo (Ottawa Transit).

Now, my initial impression when I saw the electric buses parked outside of Ottawa City Hall was that it felt more like a stage trick or gimmick: “Look, we have e-buses!” And to be fair, from what I’ve heard, the experience with these buses has not been perfectly smooth. That being said, once we were on the bus going down the road, I forgot about all that and just thought, “Wow, this is really comfortable and so quiet!” To some extent, it’s obvious that an electric bus will be much quieter than a diesel bus, but having taken Toronto’s newer Hybrid buses (which are from Novabus and are used in a bunch of North American cities) I was surprised how stark the difference in loudness, vibration and overall ride quality was even compared to them (which are brand new buses)

The Trolley Digression

You may remember if you follow my YouTube channel that I made a video over a year ago about trolleys and some of the issues I had heard from planners and operators who work with them. People seemed to generally read this as trolleybuses are bad, whereas with a lot of my videos, I simply wanted people to question the idea that trolleybuses are an infallible technology — many really strong transit cities do not use them. As much as I like fixed infrastructure, wiring up a bus system feels like it should be low on the priority list if we want to maximize ridership and have money go as far as possible in the immediate future, because buses really do benefit from being able to operate independently of fixed-location power infrastructure. Of course, in-motion charging battery electric buses are seen as a really optimal technology by a lot of people in the transit space, but IMC buses still ideally have a substantial battery and thus benefit from the further development of battery electric buses.

I think more broadly though, the big reason trolleys are something that in large North American cities make less sense than you might think is that transit is just very frequently deeply underdeveloped. When your city is growing quickly (and doubly, when transit ridership is also growing quickly) it probably doesn’t make a ton of sense to invest in a lot of fixed infrastructure when you may need additional capacity soon. You’re going to get a lot more riders moved per dollar with rail and non-trolley bus improvements, which is why I think cities in places with highly developed transit are where trolleys tend to be best implemented, such as Switzerland. If you’re in a relatively slow growing city where you are mainly looking to improve the quality of transit for existing users, then trolleys are a good way to do that — but maybe not for fast expansion and trying to gain new riders.

Of course, that’s not to say we shouldn’t be building trolleys — I just really want us to make sure corridors we build them on make lots of sense in the long term given the high cost of infrastructure and the tendency to neglect state of repair in North America. A good potential combination is IMC buses with transitways or high-quality BRT infrastructure (actual dedicated lanes and stops for most of the route). This way, you can have many bus routes converge on the corridor, and then connect up and charge. Such routes are probably the best starting point for trolleys as they (along with IMC) maximize the use of the transmission infrastructure while requiring the minimum amount of wiring. Ironically, while I think Toronto is really poorly suited to trolleys — bus use is heavy and generally could support higher order transit on the bus grid (which has minimal overlap route to route), Ottawa with its bus transitway corridors seems perfect for it.

Ultimately, I think a maximalist approach is probably best — small, slow growth cities with decent bus networks already and little chance of getting something higher order could benefit the most from trolley infrastructure (since they will inevitably get capital dollars): If 100% of riders will be riding buses for close to 100% of their trips, they might as well be nice. That said, if I look at a city like Toronto, I just don’t see trolleys being a capital investment I’d make any time soon, perhaps because there is so much that we need such significant capital money already (plus, if you’re putting in wires, you might as well put in rails and run streetcars).

Transit agencies actually are quite quickly getting onboard the electric buses trend as well, as they offer a unique opportunity. (For those wondering why transit agencies aren’t more interested in trolleys, I think it comes down to 1) fear of additional infrastructure to build and maintain — which isn’t all bad and 2) marketing that battery electric is the future, and trolleys are an old outdated technology — which is silly). By investing capital money — which usually flows a lot more freely than operating money — into electric bus systems, they can reduce their operation expenditures in the long term. That’s not only really cool because it reduces the cost of operating transit (making running more services with the same budget possible), but it also provides a valuable way of reducing costs in the long term. If you’re wondering how that’s possible, electric vehicles broadly are much simpler, more reliable, more energy efficient, and easier to maintain than diesel counterparts.

Now, you’ve probably heard of numerous transit agencies using electric buses in recent years, but what I’ve found particularly interesting is Toronto’s TTC — probably one of the world’s most intense bus service operators — purchasing one of the largest fleets in North America. The TTC didn’t actually just purchase one model of electric bus, but instead they bought three different models from different manufacturers in order to get a better sense of the performance and common features.

A Proterra Electric Bus for the TTC.

The results of the TTC’s study were insightful to say the least. A number of electric buses from New Flyer (the same as Ottawa’s pictured at the top), Proterra, and BYD were purchased and put into service on hard-running routes. The BYD buses in particular were delivered late and did not perform particularly well, which was also an issue with the Proterra buses. All the buses also struggled with range, but the reliability and still-manageable range of the New Flyer buses seemed up to snuff, and the TTC will now be ordering several hundred of those.

You might have reasonable concerns hearing some of that (as well as for other reasons), so I think now would be a good time to discuss them.

The first obvious one to have is with regard to range, which even the best performing bus model from the TTC had issues with.

Range is an issue, but it should be much less of an issue with time. I’ve followed electric cars for over 10 years, and I think they are in many cases a good way of seeing where technology is going — since automakers have a lot more R&D money than most bus companies (and before you comment: yes, yes, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz exist). When electric cars were first made available, obviously range was much weaker, but things have improved drastically over the years to the point where automakers aren’t spending nearly as much time on capacity as they are on battery cost. The fortunate thing is that buses and other types of heavy electric vehicles can likely benefit from the substantial scale and development that will happen (and has happened) for electric cars, perhaps most importantly for technologies like battery heating and cooling, which will help immensely with longevity and capacity especially in harsh climates. Of course, the nice thing is that since electric motors are already well developed and batteries are unlikely to be the domain of bus companies, time should be able to be reinvested in things like better designs, better technology, and more comfort for riders.

I think another serious consideration for mitigating potential issues with range should be battery swapping. Battery swapping is exactly what it sounds like: you have the ability to easily remove some or all of the onboard vehicle battery and swap in a charged one, sort of like a camera. The process can be automated and often executed in just a few minutes with a specialized machine a vehicle would drive into. This technology has a mixed history with electric cars (Tesla tried it and it turned out to be unpopular, though it seems to be gaining serious steam in China), but it seems to mostly have to do with how you manage the fleet of battery packs and ownership (imagine a driver picks up a brand-new battery pack, a substantial part of a vehicles cost and is the element that depreciates the fastest, how do they return it?). This seems like a place where a transit agency or fleet operator of any kind could really stand to benefit, since they could reasonably buy a fleet of batteries alongside a fleet of vehicles.

Another big concern seems to pertain to vehicle performance and reliability.

Early electric buses have often suffered from poor reliability, and have provided a substandard service. Of course, this issue is chicken and egg — the fact that electric buses (even trolleys to an extent — especially in North America) are not very mass market means manufacturers get little volume to churn through to make improvements, and transit agencies also often have smaller fleets to serve, buy parts for, and teach mechanics on. Furthermore, electric buses have somewhat oddly come along with a number of new manufacturers like BYD and Proterra who simply have less bus building experience and shorter histories than other players. In the long term, as electric buses become more and more commonplace, reliability should shoot up, and it will eventually likely exceed that of diesel buses thanks to simpler and more modular designs. One thing that people often appear skeptical of is vehicle weight, and that is a legitimate problem and one of the biggest benefits of trolleybuses when compared to pure battery electrics. That said, more charging infrastructure (trolley wires in some cases) and better battery chemistries can help reduce the amount of battery buses need to carry with them.

Now, when talking about batteries, there are also important discussions to be had about the environmental issues associated with resource extraction as well as ethical issues with the battery supply chain. The first thing to consider (and it is difficult) is that the status quo is really bad for the environment and we should make sure that electric buses are not just greenwashing and actually do bring measurable improvements. Fortunately, battery materials are very plentiful (so if we are willing, we can choose deposits that require less environmental harm to access) and we have lots of potential and future chemistries to make batteries with. The variety of chemistries is already paying dividends in some areas: the ethical issues with cobalt extraction (a key component of historically popular chemistries) are well known and so production of Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries free of cobalt has exploded in recent years. As future issues are identified, new battery chemistries and technologies akin to LFP can and will be developed to address issues as we identify them.

A BYD Electric Bus for the TTC.

Of course, we should make batteries better and not using battery vehicles on transit because of issues with batteries isn’t going to stop us from needing them for numerous other purposes from industry to transport to consumer electronics, and in fact, even modern metro trains are equipped with batteries so they can keep the lights on and even sometimes make it to the next stop in a power failure event.

Now, a natural question is… “Where does it make sense to use battery electric buses?”

And the answers are complex. Routes with lots of stop and start can help maximize the energy efficiency of an electric bus with regenerative braking, but acceleration and deceleration cycles also use more energy than moving at a stable speed. The optimal route is one with a moderate average speed (higher speeds tend to use a lot of energy) and as few stops as possible, so an off highway express bus is probably a good contender.

Charging can of course also be a major consideration, so it’s worth discussing some of the different ways vehicles can charge.

The first and most obvious way is with a cable in a depot, some buses use multiple chargers to speed up charging, but slow charging tends to be better for vehicle longevity. Cables do have issues though, most notably the fact that they require someone to manually plug and unplug them (as well as lots of thick, often actively-cooled cables), so overhead charging solutions have become more and more popular, especially in purpose-built facilities. Such systems sometimes work with a slot-like overhead power distributor and an arm which raises from the bus, while others use bus mounter rails and an overhead arm which drops down to charge (this is also the type of system that most on route rapid chargers use, at least in North America). In-motion charging is another compelling option, and is probably the nicest as it is the most flexible — you can run on direct power and you have an onboard battery for emergencies.

At the end of the day, the sometimes sad to acknowledge reality is that electric cars seem to be getting a lot more government interest, subsidy, and attention than electric buses. But, better understanding how such vehicles work, and the opportunities and limitations they have can be a good way of taking back the “electric vehicles on rubber tires” space that trolleybuses first captured so long ago.