Antelope Valley showing way in adopting electric bus fleet
If you live near a bus stop, you’ll hear one lumber by roughly every 10 to 15 minutes. This public transit is necessary to curb the miles we drive.
But most of these buses still burn natural gas or diesel for fuel, which releases smog-forming air pollution and planet-warming carbon dioxide.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent trip to China, aimed in part at advancing clean energy partnerships, was a good chance to dig a little deeper into California’s goals for electric buses.
Newsom visited a bus depot in Shenzhen, which in 2018 became the first city in the world with an all-electric bus fleet.
Newsom walked inside several electric bus models parked at the depot and marveled at the long row of charging stations that spanned the parking lot.
“We’re here because of the scale and scope,” Newsom said to the Chinese and U.S. media that gathered around him at the bus depot. “You guys are doing things at a level that is not being done anywhere else on the globe.”
California is working on shifting public transit fleets to zero-emission buses by 2040. Although some agencies have had success transitioning their fleets, others are lagging behind due to hefty price tags attached to electric buses.
“We need to move fast, and we need to move at scale,” Newsom said in Shenzhen. “I’m here because that’s what you do best.”
Last year, the Antelope Valley Transit Authority, an agency that serves 450,000 residents in northern Los Angeles and southeastern Kern counties, followed Shenzhen to become the first agency in North America to go all-electric.
After conducting a pilot program to verify if electric buses could withstand the harsh conditions of the high desert, Antelope Valley transitioned its entire fleet of 86 buses in five years.
The agency accomplished this remarkable transition 28 years ahead of the Biden administration’s goal of 2050 and 18 years ahead of California’s 2040 target.
The transition to electric buses, the agency said, has provided economic and public health benefits.
So far, Antelope Valley’s zero-emissions fleet has traveled over 7 million miles and avoided burning 1.75 million gallons of diesel fuel. As a result, it has reduced its carbon emissions by 41.58 million pounds and released 130,900 pounds less lung-aggravating particulate matter.
Shenzen and Antelope Valley — two communities continents apart — shared at least one thing in common. Both had help from a local business.
BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, is headquartered in Shenzhen. Lancaster, Antelope Valley’s largest city, is home to a 550,000-squarefoot BYD manufacturing plant.
In a region that has been known as a bastion of Republican votes, the transit agency’s decision to purchase electric buses enjoyed bipartisan support because it also supported local jobs, according to environmental advocates.
“Sometimes we view these electric transportation issues as partisan, and they’re not,” said Adrian Martinez, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco.
“In California, our leading transit agency [Antelope Valley] isn’t a bastion of liberal politics; it’s a relatively conservative community in the high desert,” he said.
“So I think what it shows is electric buses are quiet, they’re clean, they save money. Those are values that don’t have a political party.”
There are 200 public transit agencies in California. They collectively operate roughly 12,000 buses statewide.
By gradually transitioning these fleets to zero-emission buses, air regulators have estimated the state can reduce 19 million metric tons of carbon emissions — roughly the same as five coal-fired power plants operated for one year.
Although these emissions pale in comparison to heavy-duty trucks, environmental advocates argue bus fleets will probably pave the way for that transition.
“Throughout the history of cleaner vehicles, transit buses have often been kind of tip of the spear for technological breakthroughs in larger vehicles,” Martinez said. “A lot of the cleaner engine technologies we see in trucks today, those were first pioneered and developed in transit buses.”
And because these transit agencies are public, this information will probably be shared more openly to others that may want to replicate these emissions reductions.
“FedEx, UPS and other trucking companies are going benefit from what Antelope Valley’s done and what L.A. Metro’s doing on the electrification of its fleet,” Martinez said.
Three major Southern California transit agencies remain committed to having an all-electric fleet by 2030, a decade earlier than the state requirement. Here’s how they are progressing.
• Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus service has 19 electric GILLIG buses in a 195bus fleet.
• Long Beach Transit has 44 battery-electric buses, a mix of BYD and New Flyer models, in a fleet of 250.
• Los Angeles Department of Transportation has 48 electric buses, made by Proterra and BYD, in a fleet of about 400 buses.
Foothill Transit, which serves 22 cities in the San Gabriel and Pomona valleys, has retracted its commitment to go all-electric by 2030. But agency officials say they remain committed to meeting the state’s 2040 requirement. L.A. Metro is “currently reviewing” the agency’s 2030 goal, which was contingent on cost and performance. The agency has 45 electric buses in service, a combination of New Flyer and BYD buses.
This column was originally published in Boiling Point, an email newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West.