Despite the documented immediate need for 8 additional clean diesel buses, the Lancaster city and LA County representatives instead voted to commit to buy 4 to 8 electric buses. This was not on the agenda, and there was no staff analysis, and no public notice of this action, as required by the Brown Act. And I found it more than ironic that Lancaster is pushing this full steam ahead, when they were found to have surreptitiously not been paying their capital contributions to the agency a while back, capital funds that are used for purchases, such as this. In addition, we have been counting on grant funding to make these purchases, specifically federal No-Lo emissions grants - our application did not make the most recent cut - and state Cap and Trade money for disadvantaged communities - but those criteria were recently manipulated, and the lead agency has been Cal EPA, to ensure certain communities in Los Angles proper and in the Central Valley, are assured the bulk of that funding. There are no qualifying zones in the AV. So who is expected to bear the cost of this cart-before-the-horse fiasco? The cities, the local taxpayers, and the commuters - who ironically wont be using those buses because they dont have the range! The substantive problem is, we are still undergoing a pilot program to evaluate the BYD electric buses. We are running them on limited basis on inner city routes. We should have the objective analysis over the full range of routes and seasonal impacts completed before committing ourselves. These electric buses are estimated (no staff analysis, just the bus salesmans pitch) to cost about $1 Million each - thats the cost of purchasing the bus (to reduce the capital outlay) and leasing the battery system. By the way, thats been presented as a deal, voodoo accounting at its best, to somehow rationalize that the costly electric units cost the same overall as the diesel units. However, NONE of the remote charging equipment is installed yet, and the Edison engineering has yet to be completed to provide capacity upgrades at PTC and LCP transit centers to feed the sophisticated inductive chargers necessary to extend the range of the electric buses. Currently, we can only charge a couple, which takes overnight, at AVTA HQ. The diesel bus costs a little over $400,000. By the time we factor in the electrical infrastructure necessary to charge the electric buses, we could have probably bought 3 diesel buses. We have the infrastructure in place for them. We need buses now, to replace an aging fleet that presents a liability to the agency and the cities; buses that have the flexibility to perform in the commuter route and in the outskirts, as well as the limited urban routes of the electric bus.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 01:49:21 +0000
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