It’s been said many times already but cities really need to get their public transit in order so they can fix traffic congestation and improve the lives of their residents but I still have some questions about some ideas I had.
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How much would it cost for a city to electrify their entire bus fleet? Yes, people taking the bus is still a good thing but a lot buses still run on some fossil fuel.
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How much would it cost a city with no rail/metro infrastructure to create it from scratch?
Busses are replaced regularly anyway. An average bus in Germany for example is 8 years old, so 6-7% of all busses are replaced every year. Just buy electric busses when replacing the old ones instead of throwing out perfectly new combustion engine models. That’s also more environmentally friendly, as a large part of its lifecycle pollution happens during the construction of a vehicle.
The other question is obviously highly dependent on the city (size, density, geology etc.) and the type of transit you’re building (underground vs overground, separate rails vs. tram on streets etc). As a current example Hamburg is building a new subway line that’ll go through the entire city (25km, 24 Stations, almost completely underground) is estimated to cost 15 billion €. So, depending on how mucch your city needs it could be anywhere between 10 and 100bn for a subway net. However, the national accounting will benefit 1.28€ for every 1.00€ that’s spent, due to savings in travel times, fuel, cost for accidents and road maintenance, freed up real estate in the city etc. according to the calculations.
As soon as you add one electric vehicle, you also need to deploy your entire electric vehicle infrastructure. Generation, charging, maintenance, vendors, etc. Then until you retire your last legacy vehicle, you have to maintain your entire legacy infrastructure.
I think “entire” is too strong a word.
Yes, you need charging, maintenance, supply chain, etc. but in very limited quantities at first. Usually, pilots are started with a limited number vehicles, staff, routes, and infrastructure. Similarly old vehicles are often phased out with as the depots, maintenance facilities, etc. are converted to support the new vehicles.
This is not only economically and environmentally efficient, but also operationally efficient. If you simply switch from one technology to another over a short period of time, you’re opening yourself to minor issues causing major havoc.
For a reasonably sized transport association it will be outright impossible to electrify an entire fleet at once:
- Where do you get all the buses? For Hamburg alone, you’d need to buy 2600 new vehicles, which would be half of all buses sold in all of Germany in a year.
- Where do you park those 2600 new vehicles until you’ve sold the old ones? For some transition period you’d have twice the number of vehicles while at the same time…
- You’d need to overhaul all your bus depots at once, which adds to the parking problems. In Hamburg we have more than a dozen bus depots, where do you find all the construction workers to upgrade them all at the same time? Where do you get all the architects, planners etc?
- You’d need to get a lot of electricity to your depots in a short period of time. Your local power company might be able to build a new substation for one depot a year, but 10? Probably not.
- Where do you educate hundreds of mechanics on the new technology? And who’s maintaining your buses while all your mechanics are at the training?
You don’t need too much infrastructure to start transitioning: You can add charging infrastructure to on one or two terminal stops, upgrade one bus depot, educate 10% of your mechanics and start by upgrading all the lines going to these terminal stop. In the next year you upgrade the next terminals, the next depot and train another 10% of your mechanics. After a decade you’re fully electric without a big hassle.
Buses = 🚌 🚌 🚌 Busses = 💋 💋 💋
English is such a weird language. 💋 EDIT: According to Meriam-Webster and OED both spellings are allowed (at least in US-English)
Note that buses do last a lot longer than 8 years, some of the ones in NZ were probably imported second hand from Germany 😅
If the average bus is 8 years old, that means that buses are replaced approximately after 16 years. According to this source, the average bus in New Zealand is more like 16 years old, so they’re actually running for 32 years 😱
In nz they import quite a few of them second hand, so the median bus age will be closer to the average here.
But yeah they might last a bit longer here too if they’re putting less mileage on them as our busses are not very frequent…
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Approximately $500k-1.1M per bus if you buy from New Flyer. https://www.masstransitmag.com/bus/vehicles/hybrid-hydrogen-electric-vehicles/press-release/21212587/niagara-frontier-transportation-authority-nfta-nfta-approves-electric-bus-purchase-from-new-flyer
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Depends on where you live. Start from $100M per kilometre.
- If you are in North America, multiply by 3.
- If you have to go through dense city, multiply by 3.
- If you need to build bridges over a river, multiply by 3, or tunnel under a mountain, multiply by 5 for those sections.
- If your city is full of NIMBYs, multiply by the number of groups that would put forward a stupid reason with the aim to kill the project.
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Two recent examples from Finland, just numbers, you decide if it’s a little or a lot.
When phase 1 of the “Länsimetro” subway extension from Helsinki city center to adjascent area and to the nearby suburbs was completed in 2018, it had cost 1188M€ for a 13.5 km route in challenging terrain, and 8 stations. To the best I could find, phase 2 completed in 2023 with 7.5km more route and 5 more stations, and cost 1070M€. This includes the infrastructure, not the vehicles.
The Tampere tram system (started from scratch) opened in 2021. Phase 1 route length was 15 km and 23 pairs of stops, as well as 10 new bridges and such, and cost 274M€+82M€ for the vehicles. Phase 2 is 95% done and 92% paid for, and currently the 7km, 9 stop(pairs) project is estimated to come to a total of 100M€+39M€ for the vehicles.
https://www.lansimetro.fi/kustannukset/ https://yle.fi/a/3-8727469 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Länsimetro https://www.tampereenratikka.fi/tampereen-ratikka/ratikan-kustannukset/
My independent research says they could pay for it, but the government doesn’t allow it
Cities with leftist presence however have more public transport
This means that this is an issue with the AKP party
H…mmmmmm…
replacing an existing fleet of diesel transit buses with all EV literally pays for itself in lower maintenance and operating costs, even though the vehicles themselves cost as much as 50% more.
a couple of cost examples: the 15 mile extension (to the southwest burbs) of the LRT line that connects the downtowns of minneapolis and saint paul will end up with a final cost of around $200 million per mile. new underground subway lines/extensions in nyc have been built at costs over $1-2 billion per mile.
I think battery buses require extra road maintenance because they’re so heavy. They’d be required to use truck routes or their roads would have to be updated to handle those weights.
Also EV charging infrastructure is not nothing.
In general, trolleybuses are probably the best electrification method, but people get mad about catenary.
Its also easier to give priority to a trolley because it is on rails and far more predictable.
Regarding 1 - data is hard to find, apparently electric busses are 50-100% more expensive, but with lower operating costs. How much is uncertain. (requires digging into agency reports in languages I don’t understand)
The good thing is that you don’t have to throw good busses away in order to switch. Busses have a relatively short lifespan, about 15 years. They naturally come up for replacement anyway, and then you can buy electric ones instead.
