Clarifications on Valley Transit Bus Purchases

The Appleton Common Council is back on its regular schedule this week following a couple of light weeks and weather delays. The agenda for our full council meeting on Wednesday is relatively light on items of interest, and should wrap up without much controversy or debate.

In the meantime, I wanted to take this opportunity to share some information and insight into another recent decision that has generated some discussion: New bus purchases for Valley Transit. As I noted in my last update, Valley Transit has recently made progress on a longstanding concern regarding its aging fleet by submitting an order for five new clean diesel buses. Issues regarding the age of VT's fleet have been difficult to solve for a pair of reasons:

• First, nearly all of VT's active fleet was purchased around the same point in time, meaning those buses also reached the end of their depreciation cycle and useful life around the same time.
• Second, Valley Transit's capital expenditures are paid for by an 80/20 federal/local match program. As such, capital expenditures can only occur when federal funds are available to cover their share of the projects. These funds have been difficult to come by in recent years.

With that said, I'm happy to report that we're well on our way to solving some of these issues and Valley Transit has a plan to replace buses over the span of the next several years to avoid the aforementioned fleet aging issue occurring again. Our expenditures, however, brought up another question: At what point does it make sense for Appleton to consider making the jump from clean diesel to electric or other renewable fuels?

My colleagues and I have been getting a fair amount of feedback on this topic since a Post Crescent article discussed the matter back in December. I've been happy for the opportunity to discuss our decision with a few interested folks individually, but wanted to share my thoughts here in case anyone else might be curious.

The decision to acquire clean diesel vs electric buses was driven by a couple of factors. The first, as you might imagine, was cost. Until recently Valley Transit's entire fleet was purchased in or before 2005 and nearly every bus had more than a million miles in service. As mentioned above, our need for new buses had stacked up for a long time and left us in a position where we had an enormous number of buses due for replacement at the same time. As such, we needed to stretch available replacement dollars as far as possible to replace our aging fleet. In the last year we've gone as far as accepting buses phased out of service by Go Transit in Oshkosh because they were still newer and in better condition than some of our fleet.

As an organization with big needs, we need to maximize the return on our investment. As part of a recent grant distributed by the state in the VW settlement, the city of Racine received around $6 million for bus replacement and, to my understanding, used it to purchase six electric buses. Valley Transit recently placed an order for seven diesel buses at a cost of $3.5 million. By that math, the cost difference between electric/diesel is about $500,000 per bus. We'd have to save a lot of fuel to make up that cost, and recent history shows that other Wisconsin bus companies that have purchased electric buses are still burning some fossil fuels to heat them.

The other issue is long-term reliability. As I mentioned above, Valley Transit buses are operated near constantly and may put on 1,000,000 miles over more than a decade before being replaced. We have track records to show that a clean diesel bus can manage that workload, but don't have the same data to prove that an electric bus will hold up that long without needing extensive repair, frequent battery replacement, etc. Within the last decade Valley Transit took a step in this direction by buying small hybrid buses to operate downtown. The hybrid element of those engines did not operate reliably and ended up being removed. As an organization with limited resources, it's difficult for us to take risks on early-generation technology.

With all of this said, I'm glad that cities like Racine and Madison are taking the plunge and trying out electric buses. I hope those experiments serve them well, as increased proof of performance for electric buses would make it much easier for an organization like Valley Transit to consider them in the future. In the end, however, the combination of our large need, limited resources and reliability concerns made clean diesel buses the right decision for us at this time.

You can see all of this week's meeting agendas and the full schedule at the city's Legistar page.

Keeping you informed on issues that may impact you around the city is one of my primary goals as an alderman. Good governance happens in the open, and I remain committed to raising awareness on the issues coming before us.