rough draft: electric buses and modal shift

state and federal governments are spending a lot of money on zero-emissions bus procurement as part of larger initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. some of these buses have had high-profile mechanical problems, and their range limitations have drawn some scrutiny from transit advocates. one opinion i've seen a lot online is that expanding transit capacity and getting people out of their cars is a more efficient way to reduce carbon emissions than replacing existing transit vehicles with zero-emissions ones. while i agree that modal shift is critical to combating climate change, i believe the reaction to spending on zero-emissions buses relies on incorrect assumptions about how transit agencies are actually funded.

1. usually, fleet and depot upgrades are the main, if not only, capital investments transit agencies have direct control over. bus lanes, stop amenities, etc are up to city DoT's at the end of the day, agencies that are mostly concerned with road maintenance. often, something as simple as replacing bus stop signs can be glacial, as each municipality served only wants to use their own personnel, who are usually in short supply.

maintenance is a similar story. a transit agency might convince a city to install an amenity, but the city might not want to maintain it. especially in the suburbs, maintaining bus stops just isn't a priority. thankfully benches are pretty resilient, but i've seen a lot of bus stop light fixtures that were installed but never repaired and just sit, bricked, indefinitely. and that's just signpost-mounted lights - real-time info screens would fare even worse.

(an aside about this - you may have seen some of those stainless steel and frosted glass metro bus stop structures with built in lighting, real time info, and a maintenance hotline number in some LA suburbs. turns out, most of them are in unincorporated areas of the county, meaning there's less conflict of jurisdiction. there are some really good amenities within the city of LA too because LADOT and metro have gotten relatively good at coordinating these things)

with bus lanes, DoT coordination is even more of an issue. i think there are a lot of examples of BRT and LRT funding being used to pay for road refurbishment and even car throughput increases because that's what city planners, systemically, are expected to provide. street infrastructure is real messy and largely outside the control of transit agencies.

so what does that leave for capital spending that can be paid to transit agencies, and that can actually be assured will result in improvements to transit? the buses and the bus depot, the only things the transit agency itself directly owns.

2. they can't just buy more new fossil fuel buses. the federal and state funding that's going to battery buses is predicated on requirements to purchase only zero-tailpipe-emissions vehicles after a specified deadline. it's a carrot and stick model: the carrot is the procurement funding, the stick is restrictions on what can be procured when. public service fleets generally - school buses, garbage trucks etc. are procured this way too.

this funding arrangement isn't unique to zero emissions buses - it's the same basic system that was used to replace diesel buses with clean-air CNG buses when california wanted to reduce particulate pollution. iirc it's also a large part of how high floors were replaced with low floors after the ADA. some transit agencies continued to purchase high floors by forgoing state and federal assistance completely, but that generally isn't practical for the vast majority of transit systems.

it could be argued that these past carrot-and-stick procurements were also diversions from "simply" improving transit, but the reality is that this funding is only partially "for" transit to begin with - it's also a way to achieve these top-down policy goals. we have a state particulates target? buying CNG buses and trash trucks is a fast, simple and assured way to take a bite out of that target, compared to the slower, messier business of regulating private vehicles. disability advocates make mobility a right? buying low floor transit buses and making them the standard is much more efficient than providing paratransit to everyone who could conceivably need it.

(another aside - during the UMTA TRANSBUS program, some transit executives argued that low floor buses would be impractical and prohibitively expensive compared to providing paratransit to every disabled person. this seems laughable today, but it was the conventional wisdom of the time.)

the state and federal governments have more control over public service fleets than any other category of vehicle, and for decades this has also been the only way that transit vehicles are procured. dependence on state and federal grant money is such a deeply integrated part of today's american transit. so, now that the policy goal is to decarbonize, transit fleet procurement funds are again one of the most convenient tools for contributing to that goal. the FTA may be the entity directly implementing this, but the policy goal comes from far beyond the FTA. the EPA, DOT, and policies like the inflation reduction act all push for zero emissions vehicles.

yes, wholistic modal shift is necessary, but what capital investments can create modal shift without corresponding operational spending increases? my impression is that that's an open, academic question without consensus - and most such investments are focused on street infrastructure, which, again, is not the sole purview of transit agencies. at the state and federal levels, capital expenditure is treated as an investment, while operational expenditure is treated as a subsidy - compensation for loss-making "businesses" that "should" support themselves. even though transit agencies depend on state and federal funds for both, and have for many decades, capital spending is viewed more favorably.

partially this is a natural outcome of existing in a capitalist society. public transit exists in america, at the most basic level, because it is cheaper for business owners to fund it with taxes than to directly provide transportation service to workers who can't afford cars. the fact that transit used to be a profitable industry, nearly a century ago in a completely different time, still influences the basic attitudes our society has towards it. it's encouraging to see these attitudes changing in the advocacy world, but it's worth acknowledging how much they still prevail in the industry.

it's also the result of a high-turnover government. operations funding allocation is often cautious of the possibility that a subsequent administration might try to cut it. transit agencies have to prove in their grant applications that they are providing essential service in order to expand their service-hours with state and federal money. there's always a risk that hiring lots of new operators to improve service could lead to later having to lay off those operators when the state or federal government decides to impose austerity policies.

this has been a roundabout way of saying: although wholistic modal shift is necessary to combat and mitigate climate change, the transit industry - operating agencies, regulators, funding agencies - do not have the tools or authority necessary to create modal shift. it takes coordination with local politics, which looks very different from place to place. replacing and upgrading the assets transit agencies directly own is one of the only one-size-fits-all solutions available. it is also one of the most convenient tools for the government to contribute to its environmental policy goals that come from far beyond the transit sector.