Not so green buses
If your electric transit bus is billowing smoke, take it back to that used vehicle dealer and demand a refund. Today the local transit authority decided to withdraw their mini-fleet of “EcoloBus” due to a recurring problem with pollution. Three out of seven isn’t a majority, but let’s just park the tiny lemons and walk away.
According to the news story, each bus has a price tag of $400K, and seats a baseball team. Compare that with a real bus that costs $400K and packs in a couple of football teams, with room for the coaching squad. OK, it’s not the best sports analogy, but these weren’t the best purchase by a large transit authority.
No, I’ve never ridden in the “EcoloBus”. None serve the routes I use, and for the longest time they were a free ride for tourists. Hard to amortize, with that fee structure. They were (slightly) less noisy than their Diesel brethren, and (usually) offered less of a carbon footprint. Still, you can buy cheap passenger vans from Detroit and still pretend to be green.
It must be hard to do mass transit properly. I mean, I make do… after 25 years, taking the bus would be a “hard habit to break”. But I’ve been fortunate to have a job that is well served, in both route and schedule. Fall “off the bus”, by trying to cross town in the middle of the day (or night) and you had best bring a good book along. Slow but steady isn’t enough, any more.
Maybe if we had a subway, say the naysayers. Doubt that anyone would accept another quarter century of roads under construction as a fair tradeoff.
