Electric Schoolbuses, Part 2: A Small Transit Agency’s Early Foray into Electric Buses

Rhode Island, with a statewide transit system (Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority, or RIPTA) and only one major city (Providence), would seem like a good place to begin experimenting with electric transit buses. Midpoint in its early development of this technology, the State has learned much. And there is much the rest of us can learn from both the State’s experiences and RIPTA’s.

As I warned readers in Part 1 of this series, the road to success in electric bus development is riddled with bumps and dips. And that road is interdisciplinary, to put it mildly.

Dipping One’s Toes in the Water

No, I am not talking about Newport, Narragansett, Watch Hill Beach (parking is $50/car), Misquamicut or many of the other beautiful beaches that dot Rhode Island’s 400-mile coastline. I am talking about its overly cautious initial foray into the electric bus world. This foray only became possible when the State decided to devote a portion of the $14.4 million it obtained from the Volkswagen emissions cheating settlement to the development of an electric bus network. (Remember some of the hints about international events that crisscrossed domestic electric vehicle development from the first installment in this series?). Proceeding cautiously with these limited funds, RIPTA spent $2.5M leasing three electric buses from California manufacturer Protera.

RIPTA initially tried to deploy one bus each on three routes – but was forced to abandon this approach because the 40-foot buses could not make tight turns on the streets first selected for this service. (One has to marvel at the knuckleheads who failed to deploy them on existing routes where the turning capabilities had been proven by conventional buses of the same length, with similar wheelbases.) As a consequence, RIPTA re-deployed all three on its most-heavily-traveled R Line (9,000 riders a day). According to former RIPTA CEO Scott Avedisian, “That would allow us at the end of this year to say that 20 percent of all our passengers are riding electric buses.” (The Providence Journal, April 8, 2022). Whether this meant 20 percent of the R-line’s riders or 20 of the State’s total transit ridership is not clear from this statement.

Each vehicle’s range was purported to be about 300 miles per charge. But in reality, especially in cold weather, the range was a little over 100 miles per charge. So choosing to deploy them on the R line made sense after all, since on that line, the vehicles could move the most passengers per charge. (To up the ridership, RIPTA offered free fares to those passengers boarding in Central Falls.)?

Water up to one’s Ankles

This iffy start did not scare RIPTA away. Instead, the transit agency is now awaiting delivery of 14 New Flyer Excelsior charter battery buses. And it is also installing one route charger to extend the range of the new buses. (Information about the end-of-the-route or mid-route charging time was unavailable.) According to former CEO Avedisian, the cost of electric buses has come down since 2018, which should allow the R Line to run entirely with these buses (hyping the State’s and transit agencies ridership claims substantially). Of course, to anyone mildly familiar with transit, this claim is preposterous since no transit line in all of America, as far as I know, covers its costs from the farebox. Never mind that the FTA pays for 80 percent of the vehicles, and thus the State of Rhode Island’s costs for buying these buses is only slightly higher than it would be for conventional buses.

Regarding the Protera experiment, RIPTA claimed that the Protera pilot project was not a failure. Former CEO Avedisian claimed, instead, that, “The pilot has taught us a lot.” Among the lessons: Do not buy buses that were designed for another transit company, because they all [RIPTA’s leased Proteras] had to be retrofitted, and that added to some of the problems. This in itself is an issue with electric buses that no one seems to talk about, since it is not known to be an issue with diesel buses (except perhaps those deployed in extreme operating environments).

Knee Deep in the Undertow

With who-knows-what tugging away at the State’s revenue, RIPTA’s next plans were not simply to deploy more electric buses on more routes. This intelligentsia of a transit agency decided to combine its expansion with a transit-adjacent real estate project – effectively creating a combined bus hub and apartment complex in downtown Providence that would allow RIPTA to move buses out of Kennedy Plaza – a 2.5-acre public square that has served as a combined civic and transportation hub since the mid-19th Century. But in order to do so, the State must seek statutory permission to allow it to borrow money for such a development. As legislation has progressed, RIPTA engaged a consultant to plan, promote, design and arrange financing for and build the hub in a location it would help determine.

Before the political haggling was completed, the former CEO resigned – as a consequence of his involvement as a motorist in a hit-and-run accident – hardly a role model for the CEO of a transit agency. The State’s I-195 Redevelopment Commission has suggested putting the hub on land it controls near interstate 95 (The Providence Journal, April 16, 2024). An idea backed by Governor Dan McKee and RIPA chairman Peter Alviti, Jr. (also the Director of the State DOT) would allow RIPTA to float a series of 40-year bonds, instead of the usual 30-year bonds – and create rules preventing the agency from borrowing more than 80 percent of its revenue. This solution would let RIPSA enter its “progressive design build” contracts with bidders.?

Pulled out to Sea in the Undertow

Many transit advocates are skeptical of both the new bus hub plan and the idea of RIPTA going deeper into debt to pay for it. (Of course, RIPTA could have done the same thing with conventional buses; its leaders simply never thought of it.) The Kennedy Plaza Resilience Coalition testified to the House Finance committee that, “It [RIPTA] has no credit rating and is struggling for funding…so if the Providence hub relocation project goes bad [sic], taxpayers will be asked to bear the burden, which is likely to be in the tens and hundreds of millions.” One has to ask what could go this bad for the State’s largest bus stop on a route that provides only 9000 trips a day. Opposition did not stop here:

·???????? The GrowSmart RI and RI Transit Riders opposed mass transit dollars going to the bus hub while the state has not fully funded RIPTA’s operating budget or the system’s Transit Master Plan.” (This comment reminds me of Los Angeles County going $7B into debt to build the first three unneeded lines of it subway system 35 years ago – at the cost of scavenging its bus system to the point where the judge presiding over a class action lawsuit (BRU v. LACMTA, CA, 1999) ordered the transit system to purchase 3200 additional buses [roughly an expenditure of $100M]).

·???????? The Conversation Law Foundation Senior Attorney wrote that his group “implores you to stop listening to the needs of bid developers and address the needs of the many.”

·???????? At a hearing recently [early April, 2024, South Kingstown Democratic Representative Teresa Tanzi asked RIPTA CEO Christopher Durand [the third RIPTA CEO in this short time span] why the bus system would want to borrow money with interest rates so high. (Interest rates to build the Tidewater professional soccer stadium are 8.24 percent.)

Either in response to such criticisms of to circumvent them, new RIPTA CEO Durant noted his hope to borrow funds through a new federal program that provides financing for transit-oriented developments at lower rates than treasury bonds. In a statement whose logic is hard to follow, Mr. Durant stated that, “Housing is obviously a priority, and I think growing transit is also a priority and the collating of those two things would help us grow ridership, but also provide much needed housing.” More housing may clearly lead to the need for more buses. But it is hard to see how more transit – much less a reconfiguration of the same level of transit. much less around a land use that contained no housing and had no room for it -- could lead to more housing. This conundrum illustrates my general point about the interdisciplinary nature of transit development. The reader should also note that, as the complexities piled up, the issues grew further and further away from the fuel source of the vehicles involved.?

Out to Sea

Despite this chaos only months before, RIPTA recently celebrated the opening of its first charging station on July 2, 2024 (NBC News, July 2, 2024).?

Putting costs in perspective of what they can accomplish, while 36% of all the carbon emissions in Rhode Island originate from the transportation sector (which includes single occupancy automobiles, trucks, schoolbuses and other vehicles), RIPTA’s emissions account for only an estimated .1 percent of the State’s total emissions (“Zero Emissions Fleet Transition: RIPTA’s path to fleet electrification,” (RIPTA R-Line PR document). Frankly, with the “clean diesel engines in modern buses, and a statewide fleet of 229 full-size buses, I cannot fathom RIPTA’s emissions being remotely this high. Despite these statistics (valid or otherwise) – stated in this same document – RIPTA followed it up with the statement that, “…riding with RIPTA, whether by bus, vanpool, carpool or bicycles, is one of the best ways to make a substantial positive impact on the environment.” As patently unsupportable as this statement is, readers should know that RIPTA provides no vanpools, carpools or bicycles – and all three operate in competition with transit, not to complement it (save a handful of bicycles temporarily placed on bus windshields during the cyclists’ rides). Of course, it took a handful of You-Tube hits to provide the hard costs associated with these pipedreams and misrepresentations. Among them:

·???????? The total cost for the first charging station in Cranston was $22M, and is being funded through a combination of Federal and state sources – including allocated monies from the Volkswagen Settlement Trust Fund, and matching state funds.

·???????? The next major step in the project – the Newport Electrification – is a “step” toward a broader statewide fleet transition, and involves the Aquidneck Island fleet and support operations – which will accommodate the deployment of 24 battery-electric buses deployed on routes 63, 64, 67, 68 and 69. This project’s total cost is estimated to be $47.76M, again funded through a combination of federal and state sources.?

Drowning in Reality?

Setting assigns the claims, valid and otherwise, the sums of money involved seem quite a lot for a transit system that delivers only 45,000 trips a day, statewide, and accounts for a mere alleged .1 percent of the State’s pollution – which, as noted, is malarkey. One should know, if one does not, that Rhode Island provides roughly 23 percent of its energy needs from wind turbines.?

These figures document one point I have been making for years: U.S. transit systems are in total collapse. Ridership covers only a small fraction of operating costs. Rhode Island is so far off the charts that it is hard to find a figure for it – although, in perspective, two years before COVID, when ridership, nationwide, began declining by about 10 percent a year, the highest “operating ratio” in the country was found in New York City – which was 35 percent. While Rhode Island actually has the highest population density in the country (due largely to its size), much, if not most, of its area is rural. So how high can its operating ratio be (with 229 buses)? In 2018, it was only nine percent in Los Angeles, which is almost totally suburban. By comparison, it is 160 percent in Japan, and 90 percent in Turkey.?

Converting the nation’s personal vehicle fleet to electric is a worthwhile venture despite its costs, since personal vehicles and trucks contribute a significant two-digit percentage of carbon dioxide emissions – not as high as cow flatulence, but still significant in a world where more and more things are melting and burning, where 30 percent of our coral is dead, hurricanes and tornadoes increase quantitatively and qualitatively every year, and more and more of our continental coastlines are sliding underwater. But for every bus, there are hundreds of cars (or thousands in Rhode Island). So spending enormous amounts of money electrifying buses in the United States may make sense in only a few places. It may make sense in none.?

Rhode Island’s story is noteworthy for a number of reasons:?

·???????? This state has just begun to squander huge sums of money on this goose chase. So it provides a valuable insight to most U.S. communities that have not yet begun this journey.

·???????? With so few vehicles and riders, such a small percentage of pollution caused by buses, and such enormous outlays of cash to convert a small fleet to electric vehicles, it is easy for readers and decision-makers to see how obscenely out-of-scale these outlays of cash are for such small gains. (In much larger cities, with larger numbers of everything, it is far more difficult to calculate these differences.)

·???????? With only a handful of institutional players involved, it is easy to observe the interdisciplinary nature of doing almost anything in transit – particularly when its innovative. But Rhode Island’s experiences – with fewer institutional players than all or most state -- provide a unique insight into this: As one begins to focus on the conflicts, the issue of conversing diesel vehicles to electric-battery vehicles almost gets lost in the clutter of issues surrounding it.

Otherwise, there are a plethora of unique circumstances in this state too minor to devote a paragraph to. For one, noted briefly, the state has only one major city. But with a lot of rural land, it is also full of medium-sized cities – too large to be ignored but too small to support any type of fixed route bus network. At the other end of the spectrum, wind turbine development near the shoreline – where the turbine footings are easier and cheaper to install – had to be interrupted for weeks or months, twice a year, during construction because one of the two remaining schools of right whales in the world swim up and, later, down the Atlantic coastline, close to the shore, every year. During these times, some of the operable, fully developed turbines must be shut off -- because the sounds disorient the whales and they disburse from the herd, sometimes never finding their way back. (They cannot survive away from the herd).?

When it comes to most things, environments are not snowflakes. Everyone uses toothpaste and most need gasoline. But in other areas, each city is its own snowflake. This is not only true of transit in general. But it is particularly true when considering whether it makes sense to convert buses from diesel to electric-battery power. While this and the past century’s carbon dioxide, has overpowered the flora and fauna environment that formerly absorbed it, we may be able to eventually put a lid on this overflow (although I doubt it). But if we can, the carbon dioxide emissions from a few technologies like buses may not matter very much – particularly if we can electrify cars and buildings – although we will not be able to fully solve the problem until we find acceptable substitutes for meat and dairy products. Both transitions will be fraught with resistance.