City officials seek to triage aging transit fleet with few funds at hand

Edmonton's $240M for light-rail vehicle replacement leaves little to renew buses

The gaping hole in the City of Edmonton's capital renewal budget for new buses has the rough outline of a light-rail vehicle (LRV).

Like cats, it's rare for a bus to make it beyond 20 years — and they get decrepit if they do.

Attendees who stayed till the end of this week's city hall urban planning committee meeting learned Edmonton can only afford to renew a sliver — less than 10 per cent — of its aging buses.

AGING TRANSIT SIDELINES OLD BUSES

The cause is a once-in-a-generation, $240-million replacement of 40-year-old Siemens-Duewag U2 LRVs, known as U2s.

Those 37 U2s make up more than a third of Edmonton Transit Service's LRT fleet of 94 cars. They will be phased out over five years and two financial cycles — in the nick of time, as some will be approaching the age of 50.

The same $240 million for LRT cars would have been earmarked for the needed replacement of 300 diesel buses.

Instead, the city has just enough to replace 22 buses, at a cost of $17.6 million, according to a bus replacement plan.

Over previous budget cycles, the city averaged $48 million a year for “bus renewal.”

“I would say the LRT situation is worse than the bus situation ... We look at prioritizing the work, the LRVs are 46 years old,” said assistant city manager Eddie Robar.

Asked about prospects for clawing back funds devoted to updating long-in-the-tooth LRVs, branch manager for Edmonton Transit Service Carrie Hotton-MacDonald couldn't recommend dividing replacement funds between buses and LRT cars.

“Our poor old train cars are falling apart, I'm not gonna lie,” she said, noting replacing the LRT's U2s differs from doing so for buses, requiring a larger purchase at one point in time, as compared to systematically replacing buses.

Replacing the U2s is a once-in-ageneration kind of big investment that must be top priority, said Hotton-MacDonald, lead manager on the $240-million LRT renewal.

OLDIES BUT GOODIES?

Edmonton is pushing the envelope on how long a bus can be kept in service, said Derek Hanson, director of transit fleet maintenance for the city and project lead for the Alberta zero-emission hydrogen transit committee.

“We're calling it a ` life-extension program.' It's actually a second mid-life (refurb) on the bus,” Hanson said.

Mechanical aptitude extends the life of aging transit buses via life support in the city's 24-7 garages.

“A number of the buses that you're seeing in this presentation will be at 25 years or older by the time we get to 2027, so we're at that point where those buses have already received a mid-life. They're now getting a second mechanical overhaul,” Hanson said.

That doesn't address such things as aging electrical components and fuel tanks, so the twice-refurbed buses aren't good as new, exactly.

FEDS MAY HOLD PURSE STRINGS FOR BUS BAILOUT

Council is hitching its bus to a distant star: the federal government's promised permanent public transit (PPT) funding, touted on the federal government's website, infrastructure.gc.ca, to be up and running in 2026-27.

The site said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's plan to permanently fund public transit will commit $3 billion per year to be divvied up among worthy applicants across the country, for all kinds of transit, at many municipal levels.

Edmonton has its plate out for a piece of that pie, but Hotton-MacDonald's optimism is tempered, even while her fingers are crossed.

“Right now, they don't have official treasury approval. They've been very careful in sharing information with us. It's been a slow trickle, where we thought we would be much further along in the application processes.”

PPT funding is important to the future of Canadian communities, wrote Dominic LeBlanc, federal Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities.

“With stable and predictable funding, we will work closely with provincial, territorial and municipal partners to ensure our investments in public transit also maximize key housing, social, environmental, and economic outcomes.”

A LOT TO ASK OF $ 3 BILLION

“Across the country, it may not be a lot (of money),” said Coun. Keren Tang ( Ward Kihiio). “But every little help matters. So I think we just all have to wait to see what the budget says.”

Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said if the fund is based on ridership, Edmonton's dazzling 28 per cent growth from 2022 to 2023 will give the city a good leg up with PPT.

“If you look at every agency's ridership to COVID-19 and how it got reduced during COVID, we're back to pre-pandemic levels quicker than any other municipality in Canada. We're actually growing now ... at a faster pace than any other municipality,” he said.

“By the end of this year, we will have added close to 120,000 additional hours of service.”

Based on “back-of-the-napkin calculations” of previous ridership data, Sohi projects up to $200 million a year is possible for Edmonton's share.

OTHER ROUTES

Even a portion of the planned federal PPT program would enable the city to get into the partnership category of debt and potentially get more partner funding from the province, if the federal government is coming to the table.

In the meantime, Sohi suggested an example from the past as a possible way forward.

“When gas-tax funding was made available to municipalities in 2008-09, we leveraged that ongoing, predictable funding source to build the south extension of the LRT to Century Park. Then it becomes a self-sustaining debt, instead of tax levy supporting that.”

ELECTRIC PAIN

Sixty electric buses represent a painful six per cent of the city's fleet.

In 2020, then-mayor Don Iveson led the charge past cautionary voices into the deep end: a $60 million investment on an electric fleet — which turned into a belly flop after newbie U.S. bus producer Proterra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, leaving the city holding the bag and trailing the creditor list with an unsecured $8 million claim.

Now hobbled for challenges securing parts and dealing with Edmonton's winter deep freeze, almost half the electrics are garaged at any given time.

Sohi wasn't on council when that decision to go with that vendor was made, but he and other newer council members live with it.

“I think that was a wrong decision. Now we're facing the complications around it. I am absolutely disappointed in that decision,” he said. “Not only that we lost $60 million of taxpayers' money, we ended up buying buses that are not as efficient as we thought they would be.”

Whatever the fuel, the city doesn't look for significant cash from selling worn vehicles: buses are a buy-high, sell-low proposition.

They'll be marketed to other municipalities at prices in the low thousands range.

Council will expect a detailed briefing of options from city administration in May.

We're back to pre-pandemic levels quicker than any other municipality in Canada. We're actually growing now ... at a faster pace than any other municipality.