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Huh. I kind of thought that batteries had comprehensively won in this market, tbh. I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker

Huh. I kind of thought that batteries had comprehensively won in this market, tbh. I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment; it is unnatural for them to move around more or less silently.

bombcar 2y ago
Batteries have won this so hard (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") - because even when they hadn't won it, you just needed more busses. Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem. Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases. That said, current electric buses have sufficient range that this mostly isn't an issue. The unnervingly silent double-deckers I mention have a claimed range of 320km, which, at least here, is sufficient. The big problem with Dublin's electric buses, ridiculously, was that the operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    This depends a lot on local climate and topography. Seattle has kind of been a bust with them because the hills really reduce the amount of charge, and on top of that the existing bus depots are already full, so switching to electric only would mean having to find and locate space for more bus depots, which is quite difficult.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Seattle also has (or had) trolley busses which fixed that problem. Everything is cost, it's all cost, not the ability to actually solve the problem.
      - KeplerBoy 2y ago
        I wonder if trolley busses will make a great comeback now. Seems so obvious to just put the overhead lines near a few central bus hubs, so buses can recharge during the shift.
        bobthepanda 2y ago
        The main issue with trolleybuses is that they are subject to a lot of NIMBYism, so you'll run into issues siting trolley hubs.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      Hills should never reduce the range, because the energy lost during climbing up is recovered when going downhill. This is one of the great advantages of electric vehicles with batteries, when properly designed. Electric buses with batteries are even more suitable for cities with hills than for cities without hills, because they provide greater energy savings over buses with ICEs. While I have never used buses with batteries, I have lived in cities with electric trolley buses. Even with the primitive technology of many decades ago, they were doing great in cities with hills, recovering most of the energy when going downhill, unlike the buses with ICEs, which had excessive fuel consumption because of the hills.
      - datadrivenangel 2y ago
        Regenerative breaking is not perfectly efficient, so you may loose a significant portion of the additional energy needed. Better EV systems are what, 70-80% efficient on the breaking efficiency?
        2y ago
  - tanewishly 2y ago
    > Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases. Alternatively, you could add charging infrastructure in more places. Eg, partially have trolley-like lines on the route to "top up". This could make sense on dedicated buslanes, especially when multiple lines use that stretch (eg near central stop).
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  The stop-start nature of city busses makes them a real low hanging fruit for battery electrification, benefiting from instant torque to start and regen to stop and, as you say, fixed known routes within larger fleets. The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.
  - busthrowaway23 2y ago
    (At least in King County Metro) the newer diesel-electric buses are series hybrids that use electric motors for traction, and diesel generators to power a small battery. So the low hanging fruit of electric traction was already “picked”. You can look up the bus model online - New Flyer XDE class
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    For the same reason the electric mail trucks are a good idea. You can probably expect UPS and FedEx to start replacing their fleets over time as the existing vehicles age out, now that all electric vans are starting to become available.
    - adrianN 2y ago
      DHL is already using many electric vans.
    - jimnotgym 2y ago
      Where I live a parcel delivery round can be hundreds of miles, so let's not over generalise
      - nine_k 2y ago
        But most deliveries take place in cities and in suburban areas, just because more people live there.
      - 6SixTy 2y ago
- xattt 2y ago
  CNG buses were about a 10-year experiment in Toronto. There were a number of bus terminals where CNG vehicles were prohibited, either due to clearance or because of the associated explosion risk. A second batch of buses were converted to diesel so that the fuelling station could be decommissioned.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  Many bus routes have a 5-10ish min break at some point (usually the main station) in the route. If you can utilize those ten minutes to do a top-up, you can go a lot further on the same sized battery.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    No bus route should be more than 15 minutes between full and empty. That is you start at some station, go 15 minutes, then turn around and go back. There are many systems that attempt to do more, but there is no point: people have places to be: on the bus is not on that list. That 15 minutes means an average of 7 minutes, now they walk to some other express bus that gets them nonstop (at faster speeds) to someplace, but you still only get 15 minutes to get there before it isn't worth the bother, than 7 more minutes on some other bus. Add in 5 more minutes of walking time (and transfer time!) and we are at 45 minutes - this is unreasonably long for normal trips already, but it is the best you can do!. In short there are plenty of places to switch buses if you need to.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      Is there any bus route anywhere that never goes more than 15 minutes from the depot?
      - bluGill 2y ago
        Not that I know of - but there shouldn't be.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        How do you get somewhere which is 20 minutes from the depot, or in general between any two points that are more than 15 minutes apart?
        bluGill 2y ago
        You put in a different depot for the 20 minute trip. With express buses the trip between the two depots may only be 5 minutes. People through history have always considered about half an hour a reasonable daily commute. Doesn't matter if it is a hunter-gatherer going to their gathering grounds (if they follow herds they will move camp if the herd moves more than half an hour), or "modern man" going to the office, half an hour is what you get. Everything I said is based on making as many of those half hour trips possible as I can - but not all trips can be done that way and some locations will be left out.
- zizee 2y ago
  > That means the technology problem is now a money problem. This is such an odd insight. Most problems in the world can be described as a "money problem", and it's usually the problem that problem solvers are pushing up against.
- dangus 2y ago
  https://apnews.com/article/chicago-electric-bus-cold-weather-eea4314383f4678c01d78ff202936d68 https://apnews.com/article/chicago-electric-bus-cold-weather... Good article on this topic. It's a lot of infrastructure investment but the per-mile running costs are so much lower that it should eventually pay off, especially as buses get cheaper when volume ramps up. As someone who has witnessed EV buses in person, I think the local pollution and to a lesser extent noise benefits are really great for cities that have or want to move more toward human-friendly streetscapes. They just eliminate so much bus engine stench that just can't be good for breathing in. It also seems to me that they have to be a lot more reliable. I have seen so many broken down buses with the engine compartment open on the side of the road in my lifetime.
- adrianmonk 2y ago
  > That means the technology problem is now a money problem. And not even a horrible one. A bus that is driven half as much per day will wear out (about) half as fast. Which means, although you do have to buy twice as many buses up front, the number of buses you have to replace per year won't change. So in the steady state, the cost of buses isn't actually that much worse. There is still some penalty for needing more buses, though. For example, you have to pay more to store buses. Also some maintenance is more of a function of time than mileage driven. And you're tying up more capital, which may mean more bonds or opportunity costs.
- jjani 2y ago
  > (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") In most of the US yes, in dense big cities they're still quite a bit worse (especially if they run at night too) because they're very noisy compared to electric or hydrogen. I live in such a place where the buses were all CNG and are now shifting to electric. Unfortunately the switch isn't going too quickly, but every time an electric bus goes by the peace and quiet is blissful. I think every new bus they buy is electric, but I get that they don't want to throw out all of the existing CNG stock.
PaulHoule 2y ago
In Tompkins County we were early adopters of the electric bus, at least for the American market. We bought them from a startup which had trouble with the structural aspects and eventually they fell apart https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/tcat-pulls-all-electric-buses-delays-sustainability-goals/article_4367fe6e-f688-11ee-8e73-0f1455324953.html https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/tcat-pulls-all-electric-b... Established bus manufacturers make good electric buses now but we don't have the money to buy replacements.
- ttttannenbaum 2y ago
  Five months before the company filed for bankruptcy, Proterra's CEO was appointed to the President’s Export Council (PEC), "the principal national advisory committee on international trade."
  - vkou 2y ago
    Bankruptcy, like death, often happens lowly, and then all at once.
- Tijdreiziger 2y ago
  > 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons > We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
- ryantgtg 2y ago
  Thanks for your insight. The amount of damage that Proterra did to the overall BEB adoption rates should not be underestimated. I work with many agencies and so many of them are running from BEBs toward FCEBs in large part because of their, or sister agency, experience with Proterra buses.
jrussino 2y ago
> A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment I hope you're using "should" as in "that's what I'm accustomed to" rather than "that's how it ought to be"... right? :-D Personally I feel like quieting buses would be a huge step toward making day-to-day city life more pleasant.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Yup, wasn’t being entirely serious. They’ve gotten progressively quieter over the last few decades; when I was a kid, they really did sound like they were within seconds of complete failure when going up a hill. The electric ones are a shock the first time you get on one, though - very futuristic.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  Busses are not going to be quiet. Around here we have pretty cool "Van Hool ExquiCity" trolley busses and they can glide gracefully at slow speeds, but when they are hurtling down patched up streets they are not much quieter than the traditional busses.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Most city buses spend most of their time going fairly slowly. The electric buses are absolutely a lot quieter, at least around here. Crucially, also, they don’t vibrate; I’ve never been on a diesel bus where vibration from the engine wasn’t at least somewhat noticeable.
    - BigGreenJorts 2y ago
      On the older busses in the city I live in, the level of vibrations actually make me sooo motion sick, I have gotten off the bus and immediately evacuated my insides.
- vvillena 2y ago
  This process happened in Madrid a few years ago. It's an incredible quality-of-life improvement for everyone in the city. Diesel buses were phased out a few years ago. The newer hybrid CNG buses are uncannily quiet, and some lines in the city core, where distances are smaller and speed is slower, are fully electric.

bombcar 2y ago

Batteries have won this so hard (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") - because even when they hadn't won it, you just needed more busses. Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem. Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.

rsynnott 2y ago
> But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases. That said, current electric buses have sufficient range that this mostly isn't an issue. The unnervingly silent double-deckers I mention have a claimed range of 320km, which, at least here, is sufficient. The big problem with Dublin's electric buses, ridiculously, was that the operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  This depends a lot on local climate and topography. Seattle has kind of been a bust with them because the hills really reduce the amount of charge, and on top of that the existing bus depots are already full, so switching to electric only would mean having to find and locate space for more bus depots, which is quite difficult.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Seattle also has (or had) trolley busses which fixed that problem. Everything is cost, it's all cost, not the ability to actually solve the problem.
    - KeplerBoy 2y ago
      I wonder if trolley busses will make a great comeback now. Seems so obvious to just put the overhead lines near a few central bus hubs, so buses can recharge during the shift.
      - bobthepanda 2y ago
        The main issue with trolleybuses is that they are subject to a lot of NIMBYism, so you'll run into issues siting trolley hubs.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Hills should never reduce the range, because the energy lost during climbing up is recovered when going downhill. This is one of the great advantages of electric vehicles with batteries, when properly designed. Electric buses with batteries are even more suitable for cities with hills than for cities without hills, because they provide greater energy savings over buses with ICEs. While I have never used buses with batteries, I have lived in cities with electric trolley buses. Even with the primitive technology of many decades ago, they were doing great in cities with hills, recovering most of the energy when going downhill, unlike the buses with ICEs, which had excessive fuel consumption because of the hills.
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      Regenerative breaking is not perfectly efficient, so you may loose a significant portion of the additional energy needed. Better EV systems are what, 70-80% efficient on the breaking efficiency?
      - 2y ago
- tanewishly 2y ago
  > Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases. Alternatively, you could add charging infrastructure in more places. Eg, partially have trolley-like lines on the route to "top up". This could make sense on dedicated buslanes, especially when multiple lines use that stretch (eg near central stop).
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
The stop-start nature of city busses makes them a real low hanging fruit for battery electrification, benefiting from instant torque to start and regen to stop and, as you say, fixed known routes within larger fleets. The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.
- busthrowaway23 2y ago
  (At least in King County Metro) the newer diesel-electric buses are series hybrids that use electric motors for traction, and diesel generators to power a small battery. So the low hanging fruit of electric traction was already “picked”. You can look up the bus model online - New Flyer XDE class
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  For the same reason the electric mail trucks are a good idea. You can probably expect UPS and FedEx to start replacing their fleets over time as the existing vehicles age out, now that all electric vans are starting to become available.
  - adrianN 2y ago
    DHL is already using many electric vans.
  - jimnotgym 2y ago
    Where I live a parcel delivery round can be hundreds of miles, so let's not over generalise
    - nine_k 2y ago
      But most deliveries take place in cities and in suburban areas, just because more people live there.
    - 6SixTy 2y ago
xattt 2y ago
CNG buses were about a 10-year experiment in Toronto. There were a number of bus terminals where CNG vehicles were prohibited, either due to clearance or because of the associated explosion risk. A second batch of buses were converted to diesel so that the fuelling station could be decommissioned.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Many bus routes have a 5-10ish min break at some point (usually the main station) in the route. If you can utilize those ten minutes to do a top-up, you can go a lot further on the same sized battery.
- bluGill 2y ago
  No bus route should be more than 15 minutes between full and empty. That is you start at some station, go 15 minutes, then turn around and go back. There are many systems that attempt to do more, but there is no point: people have places to be: on the bus is not on that list. That 15 minutes means an average of 7 minutes, now they walk to some other express bus that gets them nonstop (at faster speeds) to someplace, but you still only get 15 minutes to get there before it isn't worth the bother, than 7 more minutes on some other bus. Add in 5 more minutes of walking time (and transfer time!) and we are at 45 minutes - this is unreasonably long for normal trips already, but it is the best you can do!. In short there are plenty of places to switch buses if you need to.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    Is there any bus route anywhere that never goes more than 15 minutes from the depot?
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Not that I know of - but there shouldn't be.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        How do you get somewhere which is 20 minutes from the depot, or in general between any two points that are more than 15 minutes apart?
        bluGill 2y ago
        You put in a different depot for the 20 minute trip. With express buses the trip between the two depots may only be 5 minutes. People through history have always considered about half an hour a reasonable daily commute. Doesn't matter if it is a hunter-gatherer going to their gathering grounds (if they follow herds they will move camp if the herd moves more than half an hour), or "modern man" going to the office, half an hour is what you get. Everything I said is based on making as many of those half hour trips possible as I can - but not all trips can be done that way and some locations will be left out.
zizee 2y ago
> That means the technology problem is now a money problem. This is such an odd insight. Most problems in the world can be described as a "money problem", and it's usually the problem that problem solvers are pushing up against.
dangus 2y ago
https://apnews.com/article/chicago-electric-bus-cold-weather-eea4314383f4678c01d78ff202936d68 https://apnews.com/article/chicago-electric-bus-cold-weather... Good article on this topic. It's a lot of infrastructure investment but the per-mile running costs are so much lower that it should eventually pay off, especially as buses get cheaper when volume ramps up. As someone who has witnessed EV buses in person, I think the local pollution and to a lesser extent noise benefits are really great for cities that have or want to move more toward human-friendly streetscapes. They just eliminate so much bus engine stench that just can't be good for breathing in. It also seems to me that they have to be a lot more reliable. I have seen so many broken down buses with the engine compartment open on the side of the road in my lifetime.
adrianmonk 2y ago
> That means the technology problem is now a money problem. And not even a horrible one. A bus that is driven half as much per day will wear out (about) half as fast. Which means, although you do have to buy twice as many buses up front, the number of buses you have to replace per year won't change. So in the steady state, the cost of buses isn't actually that much worse. There is still some penalty for needing more buses, though. For example, you have to pay more to store buses. Also some maintenance is more of a function of time than mileage driven. And you're tying up more capital, which may mean more bonds or opportunity costs.
jjani 2y ago
> (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") In most of the US yes, in dense big cities they're still quite a bit worse (especially if they run at night too) because they're very noisy compared to electric or hydrogen. I live in such a place where the buses were all CNG and are now shifting to electric. Unfortunately the switch isn't going too quickly, but every time an electric bus goes by the peace and quiet is blissful. I think every new bus they buy is electric, but I get that they don't want to throw out all of the existing CNG stock.

PaulHoule 2y ago

In Tompkins County we were early adopters of the electric bus, at least for the American market. We bought them from a startup which had trouble with the structural aspects and eventually they fell apart https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/tcat-pulls-all-electric-buses-delays-sustainability-goals/article_4367fe6e-f688-11ee-8e73-0f1455324953.html https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/tcat-pulls-all-electric-b... Established bus manufacturers make good electric buses now but we don't have the money to buy replacements.

ttttannenbaum 2y ago
Five months before the company filed for bankruptcy, Proterra's CEO was appointed to the President’s Export Council (PEC), "the principal national advisory committee on international trade."
- vkou 2y ago
  Bankruptcy, like death, often happens lowly, and then all at once.
Tijdreiziger 2y ago
> 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons > We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
ryantgtg 2y ago
Thanks for your insight. The amount of damage that Proterra did to the overall BEB adoption rates should not be underestimated. I work with many agencies and so many of them are running from BEBs toward FCEBs in large part because of their, or sister agency, experience with Proterra buses.

jrussino 2y ago

> A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment I hope you're using "should" as in "that's what I'm accustomed to" rather than "that's how it ought to be"... right? :-D Personally I feel like quieting buses would be a huge step toward making day-to-day city life more pleasant.

rsynnott 2y ago
Yup, wasn’t being entirely serious. They’ve gotten progressively quieter over the last few decades; when I was a kid, they really did sound like they were within seconds of complete failure when going up a hill. The electric ones are a shock the first time you get on one, though - very futuristic.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
Busses are not going to be quiet. Around here we have pretty cool "Van Hool ExquiCity" trolley busses and they can glide gracefully at slow speeds, but when they are hurtling down patched up streets they are not much quieter than the traditional busses.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Most city buses spend most of their time going fairly slowly. The electric buses are absolutely a lot quieter, at least around here. Crucially, also, they don’t vibrate; I’ve never been on a diesel bus where vibration from the engine wasn’t at least somewhat noticeable.
  - BigGreenJorts 2y ago
    On the older busses in the city I live in, the level of vibrations actually make me sooo motion sick, I have gotten off the bus and immediately evacuated my insides.
vvillena 2y ago
This process happened in Madrid a few years ago. It's an incredible quality-of-life improvement for everyone in the city. Diesel buses were phased out a few years ago. The newer hybrid CNG buses are uncannily quiet, and some lines in the city core, where distances are smaller and speed is slower, are fully electric.