Successful Electric Bus Deployment Strategies

This transcript was generated by computer recognition software. Although largely accurate, please excuse any unanticipated grammatical, syntax, homophone, and other interpretive errors that may have been inadvertently transcribed.

Jenna McDavid: 

Good morning or afternoon to everyone, depending where you are welcome to our webinar on electric buses. My name is Jenna McDavid. I’ve been working in clean energy and clean transportation for more than 21 years and the past seven years or so, I’ve focused on strategy and planning to accelerate the transition to zero emission vehicles. My focus has been on EV charging infrastructure, rollout strategies and roadmaps to decarbonize transportation for fleets, regional governments and private clients. And that’s the focus of my practice here at Kimley-Horn. Kimley-Horn is one of the top planning and design consultancies in the U.S. We have more than 5,000 professionals in a range of disciplines across more than a hundred offices. And we’re proud to be named one of fortunes, 100 best places to work for the last 15 years running. One of LinkedIn’s top 50 companies to grow your career. And now in the top 10 of engineering news records, rankings of us design firms.

But that is enough about me. We are here today to talk with some experts about battery electric buses. And before we get started, just a couple of housekeeping items participants will notice that they’re all muted and your cameras are all off, but we still encourage your engagement and ask that you use the Q and A function to ask questions. We’ll get to these after some of the initial remarks, but you can enter your questions at any time and we’ll keep track of them for you.

And finally, this webinar is being recorded. We will distribute a link of the recording via email after the webinar. So I think that’s it for housekeeping. We will get into the good stuff.

So earlier this year, a report from Cal start suggested that the number of battery electric buses currently on order or operating in the us grew by 112% between 2018 and 2021. 

And we all know that those numbers are continuing to grow. In the US the unprecedented infrastructure funding act that passed last year includes substantial allocations for the federal transit. Administration’s lower no emission vehicle grant program and for the buses and bus facilities program that supports transit agencies with zero emissions bus procurement. Similarly, last year in Canada, the federal government announced a multi-billion-dollar investment in public transit. That includes funding to support transit agencies in integrating zero emissions buses into their fleets. This increased funding is fantastic, but the transition from fossil fuel buses to electric buses is not always easy. Agencies may need to change their operations and schedules to accommodate range, limitations, and charging requirements, and may need to adjust maintenance schedules and operator training protocols. And despite this surge in funding there can be some substantial financial considerations. So, this is complex, but it’s accomplishable and many agencies have taken the plunge here at Kimley-Horn. 

We support our transit clients with planning to integrate electric buses into their fleets, with understanding funding availability and completing grant applications, designing the target stations, designing the transit facilities, and then in deploying the buses. But the planning portion of this work in particular is critical. And many agencies are piloting these new technologies with small quantities of buses. And this initial experience provides a testing ground that can support later deployments at scale. And so that’s what we’re here to talk about today. And we’ll hear from three experts who have first-hand experience with electric bus rollouts at their agencies, both from the policy and planning side, as well as from the implementation side. We’ll hear from Ralf Nielsen, director of enterprise sustainability at TransLink and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We’ll hear from Chris Lubbers, the transit director for summit county, Colorado, and from Steve Schupak, EV program manager for Los Angeles county metropolitan transportation authority, also known as LA Metro. 

These gentlemen represent a range of operational conditions in their fleets, a range of fleet sizes and very different local contexts. So I’m excited for today’s discussion. Each speaker will start with a brief intro to themselves and to their agencies with a little bit of background, they’ll share the motivations for electrification within their agencies and the path that they took to incorporate battery electric buses into their fleets. And then we’ll share some lessons learned and then we’ll have plenty of time for conversation and discussion toward the end. So, without further ado, I am absolutely delighted to introduce Ralf Nielsen from TransLink. 

Ralf Nielsen: 

All right. Thank you very much, Jenna. Yeah. I’m director of enterprise sustainability at TransLink. We are both a transit provider and transportation authority in Metro Vancouver, which is a part of the BC lower mainland and the province of British Columbia and Canada. I’ve been in the sustainability field since the early 1990s, before I joined TransLink last year, I was with Collier as the real estate firm doing infrastructure and financial advisory. But then as sustainability consultant for many year new years before that before I get started, Jen, I just want to acknowledge that I’m participating in this webinar from the unseated territories of the slavery tooth, the Squamish, which are the first nations in the BC lower mainland that our office is currently located on. So with that being said maybe a little bit of a background in terms of our, our fleet. 

So TransLink from the transit and transportation regulator and planning side serves a region of about two and a half million people. It serves 21 cities and municipalities first nations and electoral areas. So it’s a very broad geographic area. It has various topography, so there’s the flat lowlands of Delta and the city of Richmond, as well as Langley. And then on the north shore mountains, the topography is very hilly. So we’ve got lots of challenges with re respect to various topography. We have a fleet that is multimodal. So, we have a light rail fleet, which is our sky train, which was built for the world expo in 1986. We’ve continued to expand that rail system. Most of it is overhead above on a guideway some particular tunnels in the region as well. We have 262 electric trolley buses. 

So, we’ve held onto an electric trolley fleet for many, many years, and we’re very grateful that we have held onto that particular fleet. We have 950 diesel buses, most of which are, are hybrid diesels. We have 299 compressed natural gas buses, the majority of which run on renewable natural gas. And then we have about 550 smaller community shuttles and handy darts as well as four Marine vessels, which serve between downtown Vancouver and north Vancouver on the north shore. And then we have six heavy duty locomotives, which run a more of a heavy duty passenger fleet that runs out into the BC lower mainland into the Fraser valley, into downtown Vancouver and which has 44 cars. So that’s a bit of the background on, on TransLink, transportation and transit fleet in terms of our pathway to electrification. It really goes to the back to, to the foundations of, of trends link as an organization. 

So, we have our roots back to 1890 where the Vancouver electric railway and light company founded the establishment of an electric trolley system. And in 1948, that trolley system work transitioned from a rail base to road base. So we, we retained a battery or no electric trolley fleet. So we still have the overhead Ary. It runs probably the, some of the busiest route in Vancouver and the city of Burnaby. And so our, our pathway for electrification started from the origins of the overall organization. I would say that we’re still in the early days of battery electric buses and deployment for the last three years, we’ve been running a pilot together with the Canadian urban transit innovation center. And we are still learning what battery electric buses do, how they perform, how they fit into our overall fleet mix. 

We’re currently running four on a particular route by the end of the year, that particular route will have an additional 15 buses. So the whole route will be electrified, but I would say that, you know transitioning to a net zero fleet, which has really been the motivation for adopting battery electric buses started in 2018 where the organization the organization’s board together with the board of Metro Vancouver. So we have a joint board which relates to the governance of our organization and transportation planning and, and transit. They adopted very aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets. Those targets have since been refined in December of last year. So now we’re on a pathway to get to net zero by 2050 with a 45% reduction by 2030 based on 2010 levels. So our current outlook in terms of the future for the decade is really to get more than 462 battery electric buses deployed by the end of the decade. 

We’re electrifying one of our major new transit centers. We’re going to be electrifying the next major transit center by the end of the decade. We’re building out and, and modifying another transit center to have part of their fleet running battery electric buses. We’re using primarily Depot charging as the solution, but we do have, we have identified specific route that will require on route charging. But battery electric buses are not our only pathway to get to net zero. So we’re a heavy investor in our natural gas fleet. By the end of 2024, we’ll have a hundred percent of that natural gas fleet being run by renewable natural gas. And so we do see the need for other types of technologies and fuels to get to our, to get to our goals. In terms of our lessons learned I would say there’s probably four key ones, which we can get into the discussion later, Jenna, which is one, is interoperability between the, the, the bus, the battery electric bus and the charging stations is really, really critical figuring out the right technologies, the right communications protocols, the right combination between the power of the charger and the size of the battery is really, really critically important. 

So, we’ve learned a lot around in our, in our short pilot, how, what is the right ideal combination and how to work with the industry to make sure that the, the protocols and the technology work quite well together? Second of all, is tech support. You know, this is, this is, these are heavily digitized new technologies that are hitting the road. There is digital infrastructure in the charging infrastructure as well. And so, having tech support in this transition has been really, really important with our partners, both on the, on the fleet side and the, and the charging infrastructure side. And so that’s number two. Number three would be we, we purchased the four battery electric buses a few years ago. We now know that there’s much newer technology out there, but we purchased them as add-ons to our existing fleet. We didn’t purchase them as replacements. 

And what that did though, is that at times staff were reluctant to put those extra vehicles in service. So we, I, I would say that’s not one specific thing, but it’s the overall change management that’s required with respect to getting staff at the operational level at the maintenance level, well educated about what’s coming and making sure that ongoing daily scheduling and operational practices are well in place before the fleet is actually deployed. And I would say the, the last aspect is, you know, educating our policy makers and our stakeholders and our mayor’s council and their staff. There’s a critical part of when we shift towards battery electric buses that, you know, there’s lots of infrastructure involved, right? So infrastructure means capital projects, capital projects mean long timelines. And that also means timelines for approvals and permits and working with our municipal stakeholders to make sure that projects actually get executed in a timely manner. 

So, one of the things that we’re working on actively right now is, is making sure that we can keep the project timelines as they are, despite the fact that these are new technologies, that the folks that are reviewing projects that the municipal side or permits or designs are well aware of what this technology is, how it functions, where the standards are. So making sure that we have good capital project deployment to ensure that the charging infrastructure is done on time. So that, that would, that’s a very brief, quick overview. Jenna. I hope that fits with respect to setting the stage. 

Jenna McDavid: 

No, I think that’s great. And I think there’s a lot of fodder there for discussion, but I’m going to resist my urge to dive into questions for you straight away. And then instead turn the floor over to Chris Lubbers, the transit director for summit county, Colorado to share some similar information. So thanks for that. 

Chris Lubbers: 

Outstanding. Thank you, Jenna. My name’s Chris Lubbers. I’ve spent most of my career in the private sector resort transit ski resort in particular. So I think of me as kind of a ski bump, which I’ve done most of my life. I did move into public sector in the, in the last 10 years, small regional transit resort counties, such as Eagle county veil, beaver Creek ski resort, summit county, Breckenridge, Keystone ski resorts. Hopefully you’ve all had a chance to, to visit those resorts. Currently I, I am in summit county taking care of their regional transportation. You know, feel free to reach out to me for anything soup to nuts. I’ve had my hands on grant writing, procurement installation bringing electric buses online and all the operational issues that go with them being a very small agency I get to have experience with all those things.<