Buses will electrify urban public transportation

Buses are set to play a key role in urban public transportation, and electric technology will power them. The state of California, as part of its objective of using only 100% clean energy by 2045, has approved legislation preventing its towns and cities from buying diesel or gasoline buses between now and 2029 and instead requiring them to run their fleets on clean energy by then.

But California’s worthy intentions pale in comparison to Shenzhen’s, the Chinese mega-city whose technology sector rivals that of Silicon Valley, and which has just completed a seven-year-long process to convert its 16,000 buses to electricity. To put things in context, the largest bus fleet in the United States, in New York, has 5,800 vehicles, while the Spanish capital of Madrid has 2,050. The provider of 80% of the buses in Shenzhen is a company based there called BYD (Build Your Dreams), which currently sells its vehicles in more than 50 countries and in 2016 overtook Tesla as the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles in the world.

Electric buses are much cheaper to operate and maintain than those powered by internal combustion engines, so they are not only cleaner, but quieter. In short, the electric bus is increasingly the future for public transportation operators. And as battery prices fall, their cost does too: by 80% since 2010, showing how important it is to choose the right technology. In the United States, only 300 buses out of a total fleet of 65,000 vehicles are electric, while in a city like Madrid, the erroneous decision to convert most of its fleet to LPG (62.58%) has delayed the acquisition of electric buses, which currently represent only 1.76% of the total. According to many of transportation agencies, the rapid drop in the cost of electric buses, coupled with the fact that their technology has not been tested on a large scale, delayed purchasing decisions in the hope that prices would fall in the years to come.

If you have any doubts about the future of transport, look around: it will be electric or nothing.

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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