Not as sexy as rail, but a novelty in the US, for sure.
Electric Double-Decker Buses to Service Downtown Los Angeles in 2019
July 12, 2018 by Susan Carpenter
Double-decker transit buses are an icon in London and a mainstay in other European cities, but stateside? Not so much.
But this week a transit agency serving commuters in the San Gabriel Valley just outside Los Angeles announced that it would add a pair of double-decker buses to its fleet. The fact that they’re electric makes them a double novelty.
“We believe that electric vehicles are there,” said Doran Barnes, executive director of Foothill Transit — the first transit agency in North America to use all-electric double-decker buses. Already, about a third of its 370-bus fleet is electric, and it plans to go entirely electric by 2030.
“There’s still things to be learned,” Barnes said, “but we’re leaning in and leading the industry in advancing the technology.”
The double-deck buses can carry 80 passengers in the same footprint as a 38-passenger single-deck bus, Barnes said. In an increasingly congested part of the country where every inch of road space counts, stacking passengers holds the potential to reduce traffic.
And doing so on an electric platform also helps one of the region’s other entrenched issues: air pollution. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that electric buses were eight times more energy efficient than those that ran on natural gas.
“We wanted to help Foothill, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense for us to develop a double-decker bus,” said Ryan Popple, chief executive of Proterra, one of two major electric bus companies based in California.
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Link:
https://www.trucks.com/2018/07/12/el...s-los-angeles/