Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Busses are replaced regularly anyway. An average bus in Germany for example is 8 years old, so 6-7% of all busses are replaced every year. Just buy electric busses when replacing the old ones instead of throwing out perfectly new combustion engine models. That's also more environmentally friendly, as a large part of its lifecycle pollution happens during the construction of a vehicle.
The other question is obviously highly dependent on the city (size, density, geology etc.) and the type of transit you're building (underground vs overground, separate rails vs. tram on streets etc). As a current example Hamburg is building a new subway line that'll go through the entire city (25km, 24 Stations, almost completely underground) is estimated to cost 15 billion €. So, depending on how mucch your city needs it could be anywhere between 10 and 100bn for a subway net. However, the national accounting will benefit 1.28€ for every 1.00€ that's spent, due to savings in travel times, fuel, cost for accidents and road maintenance, freed up real estate in the city etc. according to the calculations.
As soon as you add one electric vehicle, you also need to deploy your entire electric vehicle infrastructure. Generation, charging, maintenance, vendors, etc. Then until you retire your last legacy vehicle, you have to maintain your entire legacy infrastructure.
I think "entire" is too strong a word.
Yes, you need charging, maintenance, supply chain, etc. but in very limited quantities at first. Usually, pilots are started with a limited number vehicles, staff, routes, and infrastructure. Similarly old vehicles are often phased out with as the depots, maintenance facilities, etc. are converted to support the new vehicles.
This is not only economically and environmentally efficient, but also operationally efficient. If you simply switch from one technology to another over a short period of time, you're opening yourself to minor issues causing major havoc.
For a reasonably sized transport association it will be outright impossible to electrify an entire fleet at once:
You don't need too much infrastructure to start transitioning: You can add charging infrastructure to on one or two terminal stops, upgrade one bus depot, educate 10% of your mechanics and start by upgrading all the lines going to these terminal stop. In the next year you upgrade the next terminals, the next depot and train another 10% of your mechanics. After a decade you're fully electric without a big hassle.
Buses = 🚌 🚌 🚌 Busses = 💋 💋 💋
English is such a weird language. 💋 EDIT: According to Meriam-Webster and OED both spellings are allowed (at least in US-English)
Note that buses do last a lot longer than 8 years, some of the ones in NZ were probably imported second hand from Germany 😅
If the average bus is 8 years old, that means that buses are replaced approximately after 16 years. According to this source, the average bus in New Zealand is more like 16 years old, so they're actually running for 32 years 😱
In nz they import quite a few of them second hand, so the median bus age will be closer to the average here.
But yeah they might last a bit longer here too if they're putting less mileage on them as our busses are not very frequent...