Buses

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Praxis II Showcase 2009 at U of T

When:  Wednesday, April 15 from 9:00 am to 7:00 pm

Where:  Bahen Centre Lobby, 40 St. George Street

What:  First year engineering students spent half a term identifying and researching issues of usability, accessibility, and sustainability within the TTC system.  This led to 80 “Requests for Proposals (RFPs)” of which the top six were selected as design challenges to be solved during the second half of the course.

Topics:

  • Improving Passenger Safety Near TTC’s Exposed Subway Tracks
  • Solving the Heat Loss Problem
  • Improving Wayfinding Signage on the TTC
  • Service Delays Caused by the inefficiency of Passenger Dynamics Into and Out Of Subway Cars
  • Revising TTC Bus Interiors to Maximise Space and Boost Passenger Satisfaction
  • Improving the Emergency Response System on the TTC Subways to Decrease Delay Time and Increase Safety

For more information, please see the full invitation.

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Trolley Buses? Not For Toronto (Update 2)

The TTC commissioned a report from Dr. Richard Soberman on the economics of trolley bus operation in Toronto.   Cutting to the chase, the conclusion is that creating a new system from scratch is uneconomic, and we should wait for coming improvements in electric vehicles.

Soberman’s report makes a strong case against trolley buses on its basic economic arguments, and that’s a debate worth having.  However, electric vehicles have yet to make a substantial dent in the personal car market, let alone for vehicles the size of a city bus.

I have one simple reply:  Remember CNG?  The saviour of the enviroment for the TTC?  We lost the old system through neglect and through belief in an unproven technology, not to mention political machinations.

For your reading pleasure:

Commission report and summary

Dr. Soberman’s report

Updated February 15:

A detailed review has been added to this post.  Some of the document is reasonably accurate, but there are enough outright mistakes and misdirections to cast the whole thing in an unsavoury light.  This is a report that tries to sound balanced while hoping we won’t notice what it gets wrong either by accident or by design.

Update 2, February 16: My long-time Vancouver friend Angus McIntyre pointed out two issues with the Soberman report.

  • Vancouver will order an additional 34 articulated trolley buses funded from the Federal gas tax.  This adds to the new fleet of 188 standard and 40 articulated buses.  These plans are not reflected in the TTC report even though the press release is over a month old.
  • The substation spacing of 1.5 to 2km is a measure used on “feederless” systems such as Seattle’s where small local stations feed directly into the contact wires rather than the Toronto or Vancouver model with large substations feeding a local network of services.  Has the report used Seattle’s close spacing, but Toronto’s costs for larger substations?

Continue reading →

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Better Batteries for Hybrid Buses

The TTC’s supplementary agenda for this week includes a report on the settlement of negotiations with Daimler for the problems with the hybrid bus fleet.  Parts of this report are confidential, but the main items of interest for system users are in the public report.

  • The existing fleet of hybrid buses will be converted from lead acid to Lithium-Ion batteries.  This is expected to greatly improve reliability and to reduce fuel consumption by about five percent due to the much lower weight (4,100 vs 1,000 pounds) of the batteries.  (The TTC quotes the weight in pounds.)
  • The 2009 bus order for 130 hybrids will remain in place.
  • The optional 2010 bus order for 120 diesels will proceed.  It should be noted that supplementary Federal funding for “green” bus technology is not guaranteed into 2010.
  • Due to the larger than expected number of vehicles required both for construction projects (e.g. St. Clair) and to compensate for poor hybrid reliability, 52 “retirement-eligible” GM buses will undergo a life extension.  This is expected to add 2 to 3 years to their life.  Buses now out of service will be the first to go through this rebuild so that the active fleet is not further depleted.  This project will cost $3.5-million or about $65K per bus. 

From a budgetary point of view, the total spending remains below the original Capital Budget mainly due to the savings on diesel versus hybrids on the 2010 bus order.

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Diesels, Not Hybrids, At Least For Now (Updated)

Updated October 23:  The TTC amended the staff recommendations by adding two clauses, roughly as follows:

  • The TTC should withhold award of the optional 120-bus add-on order for clean diesels with Daimler Buses until the problem with batteries on the existing fleet are resolved.  If this is not done, the TTC should go with an alternative supplier.
  • The TTC should investigate conversion of the 2009 bus puchase from Hybrid to Clean Diesel.  Staff should explore the options for contract termination as well as the impact of the technology change on funding from various sources.

It is unclear how the first point can be achieved given that the cutoff date for exercising the existing contract’s add-on provision is October 31, 2008.

At this point it is clear that the 2010 bus order will be diesel, and there is a strong move to convert the 2009 order as well notwithstanding possible advances in battery technology.

Continue reading →

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The Economics of Hybrid Buses

The City of Toronto’s Executive Committee agenda for October X contains a report on the City’s Green Fleet Plan for various agencies.  By far the biggest of these is the TTC, and in an accompanying report, we learn just what the economics of the hybrid bus fleet are.

On page 15, the TTC presents a chart showing the fuel efficiency of its fleets, and it is worth noting that fuel consumption per vehicle km is rising at the same time as the average capacity of the vehicles is falling.  This is partly due to the additional systems, notably air conditioning, that are present on newer vehicles.

Of the total fleet, just over a quarter (450 out of 1653) are hybrids, and these consume about 10 percent less fuel than their pure-diesel cousins (based on experience to date).  This implies that the increased fuel consumption on the diesel fleet is even higher, proportionately, than the consolidated figures imply because of the offsetting benefit of the hybrids.

In the longer term, the relative fuel savings of hybrids may rise as they operate on routes with dense, stop-start traffic where the benefit of electric propulsion and battery energy storage will shine.  Nonetheless, there will be a considerable net cost of owning hybrid buses relative to diesels over their lifespan.

The TTC expects to spend $110-million on diesel fuel in 2009.  This includes a saving of $3.6-million for the existing hybrid fleet, and that saving will rise to somewhere around $6-million annually by the time that the fleet is about 50% hybrid (854 out of 1864) in 2011.  That’s a per vehicle saving of  about $7,000 per year.  We do not know yet what savings, if any, on maintenance will accrue to the hybrid fleet.

The capital cost premium for a hybrid bus is about $200,000, and the hybrid saving is only about 3.5% per year on this additional investment.  In time, if the capital cost premium comes down, the cost of fuel goes up, or the average percentage saving across the fleet rises, the numbers will converge and the rate of return will improve.

Meanwhile, it’s a shame we don’t have comparative figures for the cost of trolleybus infrastructure for our major routes.  Two decades ago, the TTC sacrificed its trolleybus system on the twin altars of environmental responsibility and natural gas buses.

Postscript:  The supposed economic advantage of natural gas as a fuel was almost entirely due to the fact that it was not taxed.  A large chunk of the TTC’s annual fuel bill is in tax paid to the Province of Ontario.  Without this tax, the economics of buses in general would be rather different.  Oddly, because the dollar saving from reduced fuel consumption would actually be lower without the tax, the economics of hybrid buses would look even worse if this tax were rescinded.

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The Myth of Fuel Cell Buses (2)

Recently, I wrote about the proposal by one neighbourhood group at the waterfront to use hydrogen fuel-cell buses in place of LRT.  Many thanks to all who contributed feedback to that piece.

This item contains a lot of technical bumpf and calculations.  If anyone finds an error in this, please let me know and I will be happy to correct it, even if that worsens my own argument.  I would like some real information to be “out there” on the issue rather than a lot of hype. Continue reading →

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The Myth of Fuel Cell Buses

There are times that the hot air surrounding transit technology forces my hand, and I have to take a stand on what really should be a marginal, non-starter of an issue.

In reviewing possible transit services in the eastern waterfront, one group, the Central Waterfront Neighbourhood Association (CWNA), is advocating not just that we use buses in place of LRT, but that we use hydrogen-fuelled buses.  Their presentation material includes a PowerPoint from Ballard Power Systems who have been trying for years to make a go of this technology. 

According to a Ballard press release dated October 23, 2006, there are only 36 buses operating worldwide that have, collectively, operated over 1.5-million km of service.  Let’s put that in context.  In 2005, the TTC bus fleet averaged just under 70,000 km/vehicle, or 2.5-million km for 36 buses.  That is over 60% more than the total mileage operated by all of the Ballard buses running worldwide.

Meanwhile, worldwide interest is focussed on hybrid diesel-electric buses on which a diesel generator powers an electric motor through a power storage system.  Hundreds of these vehicles are running in many cities, and the TTC already has 90 of its first 150-bus order in service.

There is no question that small-scale trials of hydrogen buses have been undertaken in many places, but it is unclear how this technology will stack up against diesel hybrids, especially considering that far more work is underway to produce hybrid buses that do not require the special fuelling facilities of hydrogen. Continue reading →