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A brand new electric bus made its first trip through 14th Street Sunday morning. It’s one of 15 all-electric articulated buses added to the M14 route.
“Today is a milestone in our Fast Forward Plan,” said Andy Byford, the NYC Transit president and CEO.
It’s part of the agency’s move to modernize the bus fleet and its commitment to an all-electric fleet by 2040.
The agency says each bus costs $1.4 million and will save an estimated eight-thousand gallons of fuel per year.
“It’s the right thing to do and it’s our demonstration, our commitment to the environment and to New Yorkers across all five boroughs with state of the art vehicles to cut our carbon footprint still further,” Byford said.
The all-electric articulated buses, which are buses connected in the middle with a joint, are added to 10 standard all-electric buses the MTA leases as part of a three-year pilot program launched in 2018 to test the all-electric technology.
Next, the agency plans to spend $1.4 billion from the 2020-2024 capital plan to purchase 500 electric buses. The goal is to purchase only electric buses by 2029.
The MTA, which is bleeding money, is buying millions of dollars worth of electric busses to perform the same task a clean burning diesel bus can do just to appease the public who thinks that the MTA mis-manages their money already...
The MTA, which is bleeding money, is buying millions of dollars worth of electric busses to perform the same task a clean burning diesel bus can do just to appease the public who thinks that the MTA mis-manages their money already...
Buses and trains have to be periodically replaced. Nothing lasts forever.
And yes technology changes and you have to adapt with the times.
The MTA, which is bleeding money, is buying millions of dollars worth of electric busses to perform the same task a clean burning diesel bus can do just to appease the public who thinks that the MTA mis-manages their money already...
Electric buses have higher upfront costs, but lower lifetime costs due to lowering refueling and maintenance costs. It’s the economically more prudent move. City bus routes make a lot of sense for electrification, because the fixed route means there’s a dependable ceiling on the necessary range, and the stop-and-go traffic patterns are especially well-suited for regenerative braking. There was the risk that the technology was too early, but MTA is not an early adopter, and it has buses that need to be replaced as the age of some of its fleet makes them increasingly unreliable and costly to maintain.
But how? Less than 1% of NYS’s electricity generation is from coal or oil. Are they going to build a coal-production plant for MTA’s bus fleet? Where did you get that from?
Do people even know how much energy and disgusting emissions it takes to make these batteries at the factory?
Electric is about a $250,000+ Premium over a clean burning diesel bus. Now add in the cost for infrastructure to charge these buses and also add in the cost of these buses sitting for 8-10 hours NOT MAKING MONEY to fully charge every night. Add in the cost of re-training mechanics to safely work on these new buses. Add in the cost at the end to properly dispose of these batteries when they need to be swapped out (They die after a set amount of charges and fill up landfills or recycling facilities)
I'm sure I missed a few things, but there is a BIG PICTURE to look at when you look at how much is costs to run these things. Batteries are not as GREEN as people think when you think of the environmental impact in making and disposing of batteries.
But hey, it makes the non-informed environmental loving "New Yorkers" feel "good" so I guess there's that.
Do people even know how much energy and disgusting emissions it takes to make these batteries at the factory?
Electric is about a $250,000+ Premium over a clean burning diesel bus. Now add in the cost for infrastructure to charge these buses and also add in the cost of these buses sitting for 8-10 hours NOT MAKING MONEY to fully charge every night. Add in the cost of re-training mechanics to safely work on these new buses. Add in the cost at the end to properly dispose of these batteries when they need to be swapped out (They die after a set amount of charges and fill up landfills or recycling facilities)
I'm sure I missed a few things, but there is a BIG PICTURE to look at when you look at how much is costs to run these things. Batteries are not as GREEN as people think when you think of the environmental impact in making and disposing of batteries.
But hey, it makes the non-informed environmental loving "New Yorkers" feel "good" so I guess there's that.
I do decently well. They are fairly power intensive to create, but you have to amortize it over at least the life cycle of the vehicle. On top of that, there’s a large second-use market for electric vehicle batteries for stationary storage. Even though the batteries end up slowly losing more of their rated capacity over a long period of time, the energy capacity to weight ratio, and therefore effective range of these batteries will eventually be unsuitable for electric vehicle use, the effective charge capacity on the batteries is still useful for purposes where the energy density isn’t as important when you no longer need to account for the weight of moving around the battery as in a stationary storage application. Finally, the materials aren’t destroyed in the use of the battery, and especially in a bus, are in such high concentrations that it makes recycling them a viable proposition.
I think it’s smart to point out that none of this is truly zero emissions, because a life cycle emissions for production and operation (i.e. the generation of the electricity) makes sense, but if you’re weighing it against another option like diesel, then the apples to apples comparison would also be the cost and emissions of extraction, refinement, and distribution of diesel which is neither free in cost nor in emissions. You are missing a large part of the big picture if you’re trying to go for a full accounting of costs and emissions for one, but not the other.
The not making money part is weird, because it’s not like MTA puts out its full fleet 24 hours a day nor is this a full conversion of the entire bus fleet immediately—they rightfully shelve a lot of its bus fleet during late nights. There are certainly larger upfront costs today to using electric buses, but over the course of operations, the EV bus fleets elsewhere save more than the upfront costs over the course of a several years which should be longer than the lifetime use of these buses since neither MTA, nor almost any transit agency, shelve their buses after just several years of use. It's also a pretty small part of the fleet, so it's not like MTA is going whole hog on this anytime soon. It’s funny that you want to argue that pushing this is for the non-informed when you seemed to not have actually researched the topic. I like the irony here.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 12-16-2019 at 09:33 AM..
I wonder how often they're going to exceed their range, run out of juice, and have to be towed back in? They need to put chargers at the layover points so they recharge at least somewhat between runs. I assume they'll all have to go back to the barn periodically for a full charge.
I wonder how often they're going to exceed their range, run out of juice, and have to be towed back in? They need to put chargers at the layover points so they recharge at least somewhat between runs. I assume they'll all have to go back to the barn periodically for a full charge.
There’s a pilot end-of-route charger of sorts for one of the bus lines that’s being tested out, though I haven’t kept up with how that’s going. Essentially, there’s a turnaround time for the bus schedule anyhow and the idea is that using that time if only for tens of minutes is enough. For these articulated buses, it’s probably starting the peak period with a full charge, and then either going straight through the day or an off-peak bump.
I think with buses, mechanized modular battery switching can make sense if only there was an industrial standard.
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