I was lucky enough to participate in an engineering tour of Park City's new Electric Express route between Park City and Kimball Junction. It did not disappoint.
This route is the most heavily utilized fully-electric bus route in the United States, by a long shot. Buses leave every 15 minutes from transit centers on both ends of the line and only make two intermediate stops - one at the Canyons Resort, and one on Main Street in Park City. At Kimball Junction you can connect to UTA, via the Park City SLC Connect route, which runs more frequently than it used to but is still put to absolute shame by the Park City electric buses.
The electric buses are from Proterra, which is the bus featured in this video I linked to before:
• Video Link
Here is the bus in person:
While the front of the bus kneels, the back does not. It is a pretty tall step, and seems to be screaming for a BRT-style platform.
These buses can make two full round trips on a single charge. When they do need a charge, they pull under an overhead charger, which is a pretty massive piece of infrastructure:
The bus driver pulls forward until a wireless connection is established between the bus and the charger. The bus enters a sort of 'autopilot' mode and pulls forward on its own until the bus and the cables lowered from the charger lock in place. The charge rate is something ridiculous, like 400 kilowatts (a Tesla Supercharger does only 120), so it doesn't take long to charge from a complete flat battery. However, in order to keep station stops to about 5 minutes on each end, the buses charge whenever they can and 'top off' the battery, ensuring it is always full.
At both Kimball Junction and Park City the bus stops at transit centers that have very impressive amenities, like bathrooms, waiting rooms, wifi, and pianos. Here is the inside of the brand-new Kimball Junction transit center:
The interior of the bus does not look very different than a regular bus except that it has a back window, which really helps the bus feel less closed in and claustrophobic. The driver's console looks like this:
I honestly don't know what the farebox with the dollar in it is for, because - and did I ever mention this before? -
The entire Park City bus system is free to use!
The the loudest thing on the bus is wind noise, as the bus itself is very quiet when it moves. It isn't silent, as there is still lots of air conditioning and motor hum, but compared to the diesel buses it was night and day. We were able to talk to each other without shouting, and the acceleration from stops and traffic lights felt just like TRAX.
I was totally in love, guys. It was a dream come true.
But now onto the best part - Finances!
Park City did not buy the whole bus - only the bus shell, which is everything except the battery packs. Apparently the buses have eight packs, each capable of 100 kwh. The battery packs are leased directly from Proterra at a monthly rate. This is super important because it solves the purchasing paradigm problem, which is that an electric bus is much more expensive to buy but much cheaper to run. Many transit agencies aren't able to change their budgets around very much, either by law or by bureaucracy; they are stuck with a lower purchasing budget and a large operating budget.
So along comes Proterra, who are offering to sell you a bus shell cheaper than what a brand-new diesel bus will cost, because the shell doesn't have an engine. Then, you will lease the battery pack as part of your operating costs - and by the way, your operating costs will be less too, since the cost of electricity plus the cost of the battery lease is still (*slightly*) cheaper than the cost of buying diesel fuel. For the six buses used on the Electric Express route, the park city folks estimated they would usually spend $20,000 a month in fuel costs. They wouldn't tell me what they were paying for the lease+electricity costs, but they did assure me it was less.
Then there is the cost of maintenance, which is insanely cheap compared to a diesel bus since there aren't as many moving parts. Brakes don't need to be changed as much because an electric bus uses its motor to brake, which harvests kinetic energy into electric-potential energy. The bus driver I spoke with said if he leaves Park City with a full charge he can get nearly to the end of the route at Kimball Junction without loosing a single mile of range because of the dynamic braking.
It was also mentioned that replacing parts is really easy to do. Swiching out an engine is a process that takes a week in the garage - but switching an electric motor can be done in an afternoon. The time savings alone save many hundreds of dollars in wages and mean that fewer buses are needed in a fleet because the 'down-time' of the buses will be far less.
So all of this put together means that we're already there guys - electric buses are cheaper than diesel buses, from purchasing to operating and maintaining!
There is only one concern left with switching to electric buses, and that is the large overhead chargers. Right now Park City has two of the chargers, and each of them costs a half million dollars each. They realized that this is unsustainable, so their next order of buses is for buses with a longer range.
Their current fleet of short-range buses consists of 6 buses, 4 of which are in service during of-peaks and five during the peaks, with one bus on standby. In a typical 18-hour day each bus travels 320 miles. The new buses park city has ordered will be able to travel 250 miles on a charge, meaning that they will be able to travel for most of the day without needing to be 'topped off'. The two standby buses will be able to rotate into and out of service as needed. All charging will be done at the maintenance garage using conventional high-voltage cables, not super-expensive overhead chargers. Rocky Mountain Power is eager to install these conventional chargers, and will pay 75% of the installation costs. Apparently this is a general offer - if your office would like to install electric vehicle charging stations, Rocky Mountain Power will pay a fair chunk of the installation costs, since they know full well that you will be paying them for the electricity coming out of the chargers.
My last piece of info comes from the UTA folks who were invited to the event as well - They said that they've got some Proterra buses on order too, and that they will study them for future full-fleet adoption. The last electric buses they tried on the Provo-Orem BRT route - the New Flyer and BYD models - didn't have strong enough motors to handle a full load going up University Parkway or 900 East in Provo, so they are skeptical that the Proterra buses will be any different. The Park City folks really let them have it, saying if an electric bus could go up Park City hills it could do anything in the valleys. It was a joy to listen to that exchange.
Anyway, it sounds like the electric revolution is happening quickly here in Utah. UTA is an above-average transit agency in their progressive planning, but Park City is absolutely amazing. It is astounding what can happen when a small community of millionaires prices out the lower classes and creates a transit system.
They really are leading the way in a lot of areas, and I think they are dragging UTA along behind them at a reasonable rate. Let's hope that UTA loves their electric buses as much as Park City loves theirs.
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