City Council Work Session - Alternative Fuels Study   2/27/2024

I'll bring this meeting to order.

and try to keep between two and a half hours, but there's no limit on it.

But I think that that seems reasonable.

So good evening, counselors and members of the public just wanted to kick off tonight's conversation.

This work session was a result of a conversation that I've had ongoing conversation with Mr. Williams in regards to where we are as it relates to your pending decision.

There's been a lot of commentary internal external

All over the place in regards to what the various options are and what the recommendations are.

And I wanted to try to frame where we are at this moment with this work session tonight, leading to hopefully you being closer to making some decisions to what you would like to have staff do.

We are definitely in your direction at this time, but we want to make sure that you have all the information you need in order to make that decision.

Thank you, Mr. Manager.

Mr. Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of City Council, tonight we are going to present to you kind of where we are in your work session.

If you'll go to the next slide.

Part of what we're going to do tonight is setting the topics or agenda.

There are four particular areas that we're going to concentrate on.

The first one is just going to be just an overview of where we are and the goals that were set and the recommendations.

Then I'm going to turn it over to the Office of Sustainability.

and they're going to provide context for us and they're going to highlight five particular topics, climate context for us, health and climate assessment, the advisory committee input

hydrogen and zero electric bus technologies and then the recommendations.

After that, I'm going to turn it over to the office of the Department of Neighborhood Services Ben Chambers, the city's transportation planning manager.

And he's going to talk about transit expansion and alternative fuel vehicles and how they mesh together.

on cat service history on planning efforts and then the proposed improvements.

After that, you're going to hear a discussion about where we are bringing back the context of nailing home, giving you more detail about the recommendations.

And at the end, I'm going to give you some context as to where cat is today, operationally, and then hopefully get an opening up for discussions.

And hopefully at the end, we'll have a direction from the council about where we need to go.

So if we can go to the next slide.

Are you doing the recommendations and goals first?

Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm excited to start.

I'm excited for you to start.

So the recommendations that were put for you go to the next slide.

If you will recall,

Kimberly Horn gave us, based on a lot of work over the last 18, 19 months, came back with a recommendation.

The recommendation basically looked at where we are and how we achieve our goals of being carbon neutral or getting a zero mission as soon as we possibly can.

So the recommendations that were provided to us get us to zero mission our fleet by 2040 10 years before the stated goals of the city of being zero emission by 2050.

With that, we're also looking at providing two pilot transition fuel types so we can figure out which one of the two makes the most sense and we will aggressively, once we figure that out, pursue that track and make our transition happen as soon as we possibly can.

The recommendation is bringing on two battery electric vehicles for a pilot.

We have the authority and funding now, so we can start ordering that within the next 60 days, said that before.

We would also look at doing hybrid pilot tests purchased in 2027.

A hydrogen fuel cell pilot vehicle, two of those also in 2027.

That would give us two different pilots, one battery electric and one hydrogen fuel cell to move our model forward.

During that period of time, we will also be looking for a sustainable source of hydrogen that makes us truly green.

So we'll have a little more discussion about what green hydrogen looks like as a part of Ms.

Riddlevolt's slides.

During the pilot, we're also looking at expansion of our fleet.

Part of what we're trying to make sure that we do is provide adequate service for the community members who need our service, not just one our service.

And part of the handout that I've passed out to council today looks at our ridership.

But on the last slide of that handout, there is our frequency table that looks at

If you don't have it there, there should be.

Maybe they're under Mayor Wade's laptop.

The last slide, it looks at our frequency table.

And the frequency table basically says where we were frequency wise prior to the pandemic.

Right now we're running life, lifeline service.

And we want to try to get back to that and be better than the frequency table that is provided to you.

Our expansion plan allows us to do that.

And Ben's going to talk a little bit about that.

He's going to get in greater detail.

So if you'll go to the next slide for me.

The final mix will be determined by the two pilots.

Chief considerations will be given for the capital and operating expenses, of course.

Charging and fueling will also take place.

This is a major priority for us, happened at CAT.

We've identified, we're going to try to identify a source of hydrogen fuel, investigate on-site green hydrogen production as part of the site planning that needs to happen as part of the next phase.

and the City will investigate onsite generation of electricity for charging for BEBs as a part of these policies also.

So with that, the next slide talks about our goals.

From this study, when we first started out, we want to determine a preferred cleaner fuel type for cat.

We want to determine the high level of

Implementation Strategy, the timeline preferred for the preferred

fuel type.

We wanted to achieve 45% greenhouse gas reduction by 2030 with net zero by 2050.

And as I just went over, our recommendation gets us to zero to our net zero model by 2040.

And then we're going to build a fleet to support expansion over the next 10 years.

Thank you.

Can I ask a quick question first?

For these goals, were they set just with regards to CAT or with regards to the whole city?

Be quiet.

Yeah, if we can go to the next slide, please.

And then the next one.

So as Garland mentioned, these are the topics we're going to cover tonight.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to bring them to you from the Office of Sustainability, which is nice and new.

We're going to start with some contextualizing and then end with our office's recommendations.

So if we can go to the next slide.

Let's start with the context setting.

So I expect that all of you are familiar with the graphic here, which shows the profile and sources of greenhouse gas emissions from our Charlottesville community.

So it shows both the split of emissions associated with municipal sources and community sources and activities.

That's the blue box in the top.

And it also shows the split of emissions across emission sources in general.

So the feasibility study that we're talking about today is related to emissions from municipal operations in the broader transportation sector.

So while CATS serves the entire community, it is a city department and emissions from transit buses are counted as municipal sources.

Next slide, please.

So here you have a timeline showing the adoption of the city's most recent greenhouse gas reduction goals in 2019.

And to your question, I want to remind us that the climate goals are community-wide.

While they can appropriately serve as guides and milestones, they are not actually meant to be prescriptively applied to each emission reduction or decarbonization effort.

So they're not specific to municipal, they're community-wide, and essentially is across the board, this is what we're striving for.

So as the conversation around climate actions were underway and a climate action plan was in development, CAT engaged the service of Kim Lee Horn to conduct an alternate fuels feasibility study in 2022, and our office requested and funded a study addendum to evaluate climate and health implications of the various alternatives.

We also need to remember that what we're talking about is a feasibility study of shifting a fossil fuel fleet.

It's not an implementation plan and it's not a design plan.

Those are critical, subsequent steps.

Just over a year ago, Charlottesville adopted its first climate action plan, and here you see some of the text from that document, including a sub goal to increase transit ridership

meaning increasing bus occupancy and a key strategy directly related to fleet transition.

So like the climate plan, this feasibility study is a starting point on the path to action.

There will be issues to work through before we have alternatively fueled buses on the road, but this is how we get started.

I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that CAT initiating this work before the climate plan was adopted was a really big deal in moving towards action in the climate action plan.

And it is hard work and the team, including team members who are in the room here, have been very genuine and very thoughtful in their engagement on this.

Next slide, please.

So early on, we were interested in both emissions and air quality and health implications of the various alternate fuels being considered.

The pollutants listed in the table here are all harmful to both human health and the environment.

Children, elderly people, and people with asthma and other respiratory illnesses are all at greater risk when exposed to these air pollutants.

While all the scenarios of alternative fuels eliminate or reduce many air pollutants, the key differences are that battery electric and fuel cell electric buses have zero tailpipe emissions.

And so moving to these alternate fuels eliminates both greenhouse gas emissions and these other harmful pollutants.

Natural gas-fueled buses also have associated pollutant reductions, but would result in a significant increase in carbon monoxide.

Another air pollutant particulate matter is largely from tires and brakes, and so it is not entirely removed with a switch to any different fuel type.

The assessment also looked at some of the social and environmental impacts of the various fuels and technologies, and I'm happy to go back into that if anyone's interested in that conversation later in the work session.

Next slide, please.

So we've been asked to summarize and to present the copious input that has been received by the community related to this study over the past two plus years.

The input and the feedback has largely been in support of a transition to zero emission buses.

It has emphasized the critical climate action component of this work and it has responded to the outcomes and recommendations of the study itself.

I want to state clearly that in the next few summary slides, I want to state clearly that the next few summary slides do not necessarily represent the position of the Office of Sustainability, though we are in agreement with many of the points and I will present our position in a few minutes.

Next slide please.

So here you see a number of items that have been produced by C3, the Community Climate Collaborative.

C3 has been a leader in the transit and the transit equity advocacy space for a long time.

And I do want to note that this list does not include many of their related blogs and other outreach activities on the topic.

But C3 has recently and publicly indicated their support for the study's recommendation with the option for speeding the transition of the two fuel types as those pilots are successful.

Next slide please.

Additional input from the advocacy community, including CVIL 100 and other community members, includes support for the proposed transition while sharing some concerns about issues such as the near-term increase in the diesel fleet, the cautious approach to zero emissions bus adoption, ridership improvement projections related to planned fleet expansion,

Conservative assumptions about battery technology and battery costs, the performance of battery electric buses in cold temperature, viability and climate benefits of hydrogen buses, concerns with the alignment or misalignment with federal and state climate goals and commitments, and concerns about missing out on funding opportunities.

Others that didn't make it to the list or came up subsequently include concerns about insufficient internal capacity, inadequate planning and preparation, as well as different understandings of the term pilots.

Next slide, please.

So here we have some information.

We know that there have been concerns about piloting hydrogen buses, and we as a team have learned a lot about hydrogen, including the spectrum of colors related to the production and the climate related aspects.

The graphic here

shows several types of hydrogen that are most frequently referenced and starts with green hydrogen or the cleanest type of hydrogen in the upper left corner.

There's basically two ways to make hydrogen.

You're breaking apart of water molecules with electricity called electrolysis and the breaking apart of methane or natural gas molecules with steam called steam methane reformation.

Currently, the most available hydrogen is gray hydrogen made using natural gas without carbon capture, but electrolysis is becoming increasingly more common and a lot of resources are being invested in scale and clean hydrogen production.

Our office has been tracking and communicating with transit agencies outside of California who are tackling this transition work that includes Montgomery County, Arlington County, Philadelphia, New York,

And we know CAT has been tracking and sharing with you about several others, including some who have already started incorporating hydrogen buses into their fleet.

The Office of Sustainability is only supportive of transitioning to hydrogen buses if the sourcing is green or yellow hydrogen.

With the expectation that yellow hydrogen will become cleaner as 100% of Virginia's electricity is to be produced from carbon-free sources by 2050.

Next slide, please.

So this graphic before you is a very simple comparison of battery electric buses and fuel cell electric buses to each other, highlighting their relative strength based on current available data and technology.

And we expect that some of these relative strengths may change as technologies mature and we plan to continue to monitor those improvements.

Next slide, please.

So finally, the Office of Sustainability supports the recommendations made in the Alternative Fuels Feasibility Study.

The proposed plan, the proposed fleet expansion will allow CAT to provide improved transit frequency and reliability addressing an important issue of transit equity.

The pilot approach will allow CAT maintenance staff to gain familiarity with two technologies prior to widespread adoption.

The two proposed technologies provide unique benefits and can provide redundancy.

The recommendation is leadership by example.

We are encouraging our community to pursue fleet transition to cleaner fuel sources and need to do this ourselves.

And the plan achieves a zero emission public transportation fleet by 2040 ahead of the 2050 goals.

So we are supportive and we are supportive of expediting the transition of zero emission buses.

Deep decarbonization work is hard and we feel this study is a thoughtful and well researched first step in decarbonizing Charlottesville Transit Service.

We know there's a lot more hard work to be done and a lot more research, but accepting these recommendations would start us down a path towards a zero-missing bus fleet.

Given the pace of change of clean energy technology, planning to pilot two alternate fuels lets us be flexible and nimble based on future possibilities.

I would close by saying that reliable, accessible, and used public transit is an important climate strategy, but you City Council don't have control of all the aspects.

It is largely dependent on behavior change and personal choice.

We'll go to the next slide and we'll start talking about some context within which CAT is going to be working.

So just to introduce myself, I'm Ben Chambers, I'm the City's Transportation Planning Manager.

I work alongside CAT working on their transit strategic plan right now as well as this current effort

So we'll talk you through what's in that and what's led up to our current transit strategic plan work and how that's going to interact with this current alternative fuel feasibility study.

So next slide please.

Next one too.

All right, so over the past decade, we've had basically two different forms of cat.

We've had the pre-pandemic form of cat, which was 13 routes.

It had service running 6 a.m.

to midnight.

We had Sunday service.

We had some pretty low frequency routes built into our service.

We had some 30 and some 60 minute routes.

Our highest frequencies were on the trolley and the seven.

Things weren't going great.

We were having ridership declines every year over the previous five to eight years before the pandemic hit.

Then when the pandemic hit, we definitely had to scale back what we were offering at CAD.

We had reduced routes, and that was largely because we were relying on the availability of drivers, vehicles, parts, and those came and went in waves throughout the past three or four years.

We reduced nightly service hours.

We eliminated Sunday service.

And some of our routes had longer frequencies and longer wait times between buses showing up at bus stops.

So this has very much impacted our ridership.

Our ridership is way, way down compared to what was pre-pandemic.

I think more recently it has sort of drifted back up.

We also have fair free service currently.

That's a major difference between pre-pandemic and current service and we think that that has actually kept us from completely bottoming out what our ridership would have been.

So we are moving forward currently in a extended lifeline service and are working on plans to get out.

Next slide please.

So didn't we already have a plan to get out of this issue that we have with our extended lifeline service?

Yes, we did.

City Council adopted a system optimization plan back in 2021.

And the idea behind that plan was, thank you, new microphone.

The idea behind that plan was we wanted to look at the extended lifeline service and what it would look like to bring us back to a similar service level as what we had pre-pandemic.

But at the same time, address some of the issues that we had found with our pre-pandemic service that caused some of our ridership decline.

So this fixed some of our routes, made them more direct, but it also added up some new service areas in the city and the county.

It would have expanded Saturday service, returned some Sunday services, would have changed some transfer points in a few key areas around the system to make transfers less frequent, and added a little bit of recovery time on the end of each route so that our on-time performance for our routes would have improved.

This plan was adopted by Council in 2021 and due to the driver vehicle and parts shortages that have come and gone in waves, it has not been fully implemented.

We've had a couple of things that have been implemented, but mostly none of it has.

Next slide.

So here are some improvements from the system optimization plan.

I won't go through all of them, but they are generally looking at connecting key destinations, adding more frequency, adding weekend coverage and service, adding service to places in the county like PVCC that had some connections, but they were a little weak, and we could have used more connections out to those locations.

So this is just a snapshot of some of those improvements.

We can move on to the next slide.

Some people might be a little confused because there was another transit planning effort in the region.

Shortly thereafter, after we adopted the 2021 system optimization plan, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission and the Regional Transit Partnership started working on a regional transit plan for transit services that looked at more of a visionary planning of what would we do as a region with both CAT, jaunt, and UTS if they were involved with, you know,

building out a full system that covered the entire region.

That planning effort came up with two different visions of what that system would look like.

It included an unconstrained plan that said, what's on everybody's wish list?

We'll add it in.

And then it had a more constrained plan that said, all right, if we had a fixed budget, what would we pick as our expansions?

Some of the recommendations from this study sort of live in a reality that is outside of what CAT currently exists with and we would have to, you know, restructure some routes very significantly with some of the recommendations that they came forward with.

Things like making the trolley extend to pan tops would require further discussions between us and the county to make sure that they actually want that service and would have the capability of funding that service.

So there are some things in this that we'd like to carry forward, but are going to take some additional planning work.

Next slide, please.

So here's the additional planning work.

So CAT is currently working on its transit strategic plan.

This is a requirement from the State's Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

This basically is a

Reporting tool that we give to the state saying this is our plan for the next 10 years, this is what we plan on spending federal and state dollars on.

We get the okay from the state that we're doing it right and they let us continue to operate service in the way that we think is best for our local region.

Our current TSP is looking at marrying those two previous plans.

We didn't want to recreate the wheel on this.

So we wanted to deal with the fact that we're coming out of Lifeline Service, which was the goal of the system optimization plan, and look at what an expanded facility that serves, or expanded service that serves the entire region, both city and county.

How would that look and how would we roll those two things out together?

So we're kind of smushing these two plans together We'll have more details on the recommendations from this plan at the April 16th work session We'll be talking about transportation things in general at that work session But at least a portion of the time will be dedicated towards Kat's transit strategic plan Next slide please

So just in terms of what are we talking about when we're talking about expanding service, how much service are we talking about that's going into the system optimization plan, the regional transit vision plan, and now the draft CAT transit strategic plan recommendations.

On the left of this graph, you can see revenue hours that we have performed historically through CAT.

Revenue hours is how many hours of service are we putting on the road every year.

Hover's around 100,000 hours a year until the pandemic hits, and then it drops off to about 75,000.

In the short term, the recommendations from the TSP would recommend bringing it back up to that 100,000.

In short term, we're talking about within the next three years.

In medium term, we're talking about a significant increase in service and then long term, which is within the next decade, we're talking about doubling the amount of service that is on the road today and nearly doubling the amount of service that was on the road prior to the pandemic.

We're expecting this to not just double the amount of ridership that we're getting.

We're looking for this to be a compounding thing.

When you have more service on the weekends, when you have more service at night, and people have more flexibility and more frequency to be able to use the bus, we're thinking that's going to be a more appealing service.

But that's not all that CAD is going to be able to do to appeal to the ridership, and that's not all that CAD is working on right now.

So if you'll go to the next slide.

How do we expect to increase ridership in the next decade?

And this is going to be a very important thing for CAT to do over the next decade, not just for climate purposes, but also to turn CAT into a more successful transit system and a more effective and efficient transit system.

The first few bullets you'll see are about expanding the service itself, doubling the amount of services provided, increasing frequencies on routes, all of our routes, but making the trolley the five and the seven high frequency again.

Expanding our night service hours and Sunday service on all routes.

We're also looking at some other capital improvements, including new bus shelters.

We've been working with the Department of Rail and Public Transportation to start designing some new bus shelters.

We've got our initial designs for the bus shelter at Belmont Park are currently under review.

And then we have two shelters on JPA and a shelter at Midway Manor that are currently under design.

We should be working through those with DRPT and getting those permitted by the city and built over the summer.

We're also coordinating with the city, the county, and VDOT to make sure that we have safe access and sidewalks to some of these bus stops that currently don't have them.

Cat is currently working with the county to run a demonstration project called Microcat, both in the 29 North area and Pantops area.

We'll be looking at how successful that demonstration project has been, and then looking at potentially expanding the Microcat services both in the city and in the county.

They seem to be very convenient to the users, so we'd like to make sure that as long as it is an effective service that all of our users have access to that in some way.

We're also looking for increased funding resources through what is currently called the Regional Transit Partnership, but may evolve into a more robust Regional Transit Authority, which would be able to provide CAT with some direction on its planning efforts as well as directing

Michael Payne,

decade, at least, with having a reliable bus fleet, which is something that we've been focusing on very closely on this study.

I think we have more information on that in the next part of the presentation.

I want to ask questions.

You got questions on this?

Could you please go back to the slide?

So if we were to say double

from 100,000 hours to 200,000 hours.

If we were to go back to the slide at the very, very beginning where we talked about 95% of our greenhouse gas emissions are from non-unicipal, like everyone else beside the city, 5% or the city itself.

But looking at everything in total,

Do we have any way of gauging that if we were to go from here to here, what that 30% might drop to?

Yeah, so what we would need for that is a ridership estimate to figure out how many people are riding the bus versus coming out of their cars.

That's currently some of the work that we are doing as part of the TSP.

We've come up with the recommendations from these previous plans, but we're currently rightsizing them for how much they're going to cost, how many service hours we're actually going to be able to put on the road, and then how much ridership do we anticipate getting out of each of these recommendations.

Once we have that sort of information, we would be able to make a rough estimate

So if you put more hours on wouldn't that be more

That's the idea.

So there's two ways to do more hours.

So we can just do more hours with coverage, but we're trying to do more hours with frequency.

So we're looking at where we are in our model and saying, OK, the Route 6, which has hour long service, if we turn it to a 30 minute service, we're going to double in the amount of vehicles we need to make that model happen if we go beyond that.

And we're adding more vehicles, which acts

And this doesn't exist in a vacuum.

There's other levers we can pull.

Like if we have dedicated bus lanes, then timing can be more accurate.

Then it's also less handy to drive so people will choose bus.

And changes in land use are also going to be fairly determinative and how that ridership is going to change.

So I guess what I was getting at is that, you know, if we increase the frequency and we say, okay, it's going to increase the ridership by 50%, 20%.

And if we say some level of assumption that those individuals were driving, can't we say, okay, that's the reduction in vehicles on the road?

sort of level of use, right?

Do you have a single person in a car or a single person in a bus or do you have eight people crammed in the car and do you have the bus full?

Those are all really different scenarios that are going to influence what the emissions reduction are.

But if you have full buses and those full buses are clean fuel buses, you're going to have a bigger impact on the emissions reduction.

And I'm glad she said two years, because normally when you add new service, it takes a while for folks to understand that you've added the service.

It's not going away.

It is a permanent thing.

But it sounds like at this point there's not enough specificity to know, like just in what we got tonight, like ridership was 2.1 million in 2017, 1.1 million last year.

It wouldn't be known whether you double the service hours, whether you're even returning to the 2017 ridership.

So we do know the reason, part of the reason why we did the study is because we saw the decline.

Decline said that we weren't going where people needed to go.

That was one reason that we know that they're not using the service.

So implementing the changes from the optimization plan and increasing the frequency gives us a high probability that people are going to use the service.

Because now we have put service where people need to go on a daily basis.

So with that transition, I'm going to bring up the consultants from Kimley-Horn.

And we're going to advance to the next slides.

Next slide, please.

So we have at the table Paul Ellman and Sam Sink from Kimley-Horn.

And I'm going to turn it over to Sam to go through the recommendation in more detail.

Thank you, Garland.

Some notes about the analysis assumptions that are contained in the next few slides.

This analysis is based on CATS 2022 existing conditions, so it's not necessarily reflective of this five minutes.

and these assumptions are based on 2022 market trends and technology capabilities.

You know, obviously both battery electric buses and hydrogen technology are still evolving.

So this does represent the reality of about a year and a half, two years ago.

Next slide, please.

And I'll note that some of these slides are going to be familiar.

Some of these we went over in our last council meeting, you may have seen before.

But just to remind us all about the technology considerations that we went through in evaluating the different technologies, battery electric, hydrogen fuel cell, resources, what are the costs, operations, what would it take to implement these different technologies and sustainability, what are the different benefits

of each technology.

Next slide.

We initially looked at CNG or compressed natural gas or RNG renewable natural gas as well.

We've set those aside because they wouldn't be truly zero emissions, so we're really focused in, as Garland said, on the battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell evaluation.

As a reminder, the kind of pros of battery electric, you have the zero tailpipe emissions that we're looking for.

This is the more mature of the two truly zero emissions bus technologies.

And it does have a definitive source of fuel in the form of the electric grid.

Some cons, you tend to need a larger fleet.

These buses are higher cost than diesel.

And of course, there are range concerns that we have discussed before.

You also have additional infrastructure costs pretty much for each battery electric bus that you add to your fleet.

You need to add charging capacity as well.

With hydrogen fuel cell, the pros, again, you have that zero tailpipe emission, and these do provide a more resilient operation, fewer range concerns than with the battery electric.

However, they are a higher cost to deploy.

These do average a little bit more expensive than even the battery electric buses.

So if you can explain, you did it before, but it just kind of went over my head about the hydrogen fuel, the gray supply.

I think it was in the lower left.

Yes, it can be trucked in.

It's steam methane reformation, so it's converted from methane.

You can truck it in.

Hydrogen are on the hydrogen.

And I will note, we did provide a handout on some of the assumptions around the hydrogen fuel emissions.

I don't know if that got distributed or not, but yes, there would be a transportation element to that.

Next slide.

Kind of a just reminder about how these two vehicle propulsion technologies work.

Battery electric, obviously you're plugging in a battery, you're charging it up either overnight at the depot or you can use on route fast charging and that is powering an electric motor.

And with fuel cell electric vehicles that are hydrogen powered, you're filling up a hydrogen tank that is being used to power a fuel cell that in turn charges a much smaller battery, but that battery is ultimately powering an electric motor as well to provide propulsion.

So obviously we can see, or I'm assuming the size of the batteries means something in real life that corresponds to something about the size of the batteries.

I would really depend on battery capacity, especially the BEB.

I mean, you can get some of these.

I feel like I've seen the close to 800 kilowatt buses that people are talking about now.

That's going to start getting close up to probably 80,000 pounds.

You're going to start talking about needing special

licenses and permissions to operate on public roads with those.

So that's very dependent upon the battery capacity.

Fuel cells tend to be a little smaller.

But we don't have like a chart of like, this is what a diesel weighs.

This is what a... I don't believe that's currently in the analysis.

An odd question.

Does that...

So this is kind of a pared down version of a chart you've seen before just looking at the battery electric and fuel cell buses.

Just noting again on the emission side, both of these are zero tailpipe emissions.

This slide focuses more on the tailpipe emissions but it's of course worth noting as we have previously in this presentation that global emissions for both battery electric and fuel cell buses are heavily dependent upon your power source.

Your battery electric buses are only going to be as green as your grid

and your fuel cell electric buses are only as green as your power source, whether that be truly green electrolysis or, you know, SMR, gray hydrogen.

It can be powered by the grid.

It could also be like a freestanding solar onsite that powers it.

You know, that might be less likely.

With refueling and recharging, you have some different options for battery-elected buses.

It can be more of an overnight charging.

You can rely more on fast charging and on-route chargings and plug-ins.

There's inductive charging on-route that's really coming online now.

Hydrogen, you're dispensing from a pump, generally, at the depot, as you do with diesel buses today or with CNG buses.

and then on the infrastructure row, you know, both of these are going to require infrastructure upgrades at the existing cat facility, battery electric bus.

As I mentioned, you're you're adding charging equipment.

Pretty much every time you're adding a bus or two.

So the

for the training.

What do you mean by a new route planners?

So with the range considerations of battery electric buses, one thing you can do to try and address that is to change your scheduling.

And so that's going to require potentially some add-ons to your scheduling software, but retraining of your scheduling crew.

And that's not like a deficiency of the fuel sale buses.

No, because they have similar ranges to diesel.

can move on to the next slide.

So looking a little more in depth at each of the respective technologies, battery electric.

So the average battery electric that was available in 2022 when we looked at this was about 150 to 350 miles range.

Of course, this is significantly affected by external factors.

weather, ambient temperature, how the driver drives, bus occupancy, topography, all of these things can affect range.

Battery electric buses also have a higher purchase price than diesel buses.

You see battery electric buses, you know, this was a roughly 20-21 estimate for a million dollars.

I've seen a 35-foot bus

It's battery electric on the state contract in 2023.

Is it about 1.1 million?

And that's without any add-ons that you normally have, like a fare box or things like that.

So it's worth noting that these costs are increasing as noted in that second bullet.

And as mentioned before, there's depot charging.

There's on-route charging.

You can use a combination.

If you start talking about combinations, it's important to note that the battery chemistry of your bus is very important.

So you wouldn't want to go by all high capacity, 600 kilowatt buses and expect them to be able to charge in 15 minutes on a fast charger because its battery chemistry probably isn't geared for that.

It's probably geared more towards overnight depot charging.

So that's just something to consider as you're looking at potentially combining those two main types of

So one of the big changes we've seen in the battery electric space is the bankruptcy of Protera.

It's one of the big manufacturers of battery electric buses.

They're in the process of being bought by Volvo, but it's unclear what that will mean for the industry.

However, that's a big chink in the supply chain of battery electric buses that the industry has had to deal with, and it has pushed prices up.

And of course, there's just still, you know, all these supply chain issues.

I think that the battery component of the fuel cell bus is definitely subject to those same kind of supply chain issues.

It's just since the batteries are significantly smaller, tends to be less of an issue.

But overall, you're seeing bus prices increase, diesel, battery electric fuel cells.

I know for electric buses there are a few manufacturers approved by the federal government for usage and I think Gillig is in the process of getting one approved.

New Flyer is, I believe, El Dorado as a hydrogen still.

I think it's three or four.

Exactly.

And then the other question, not just for a battery electric, but hydrogen or diesel, whatever it is, that one million, roughly one million dollar cost, so the cost that we would pay is four percent of that, is that correct?

Depending on what grant source we used, it could be as low as 4%.

If we are looking at potentially speeding up how many vehicles we buy and we go and do a competitive grant, it can be 10%, 20%, 30%.

It all depends on how the grant itself is designed in the formulation.

So it's a couple of factors.

Yes, it changes with the speed, but also we have a replacement schedule.

So as long as the vehicles come up for replacement, we can replace them.

And then we're also competing with other transit agencies around the Commonwealth for that part of dollars.

Next slide, please.

So most of the average BEVs that are on the market would not be able to consistently complete CATS existing blocks.

Now that is not to say that you can't go out and purchase a very high capacity battery vehicle that would.

This is just looking at kind of the average that's available on the state contract.

So a transition to BEBs would thus likely require a mix of bus technologies or some kind of alternative fleet arrangement.

You could procure additional BEBs.

We've talked about a potentially greater than 1 to 1 ratio being needed, maybe 1.2 if you're using a lot of on-route charging and getting that to work out, perhaps as high as maybe 1.4 to 1.6, or 1 to 4, 1 to 6.

You can also restructure your blocks and routes.

That's where that additional scheduling consideration comes into.

That is, again, a trade-off.

There are operational costs involved in bringing a bus in more often and in not being able to run as long, needing more operators for that.

You can use on-route charging to try and address this that gets you closer to that one-to-one ratio.

You can also, as I mentioned, purchase the higher NBEBs with larger batteries, or you can investigate auxiliary heaters, diesel-fired heaters.

I understand there's been some conversation with Blacksburg Transit.

about how well BEBs are working for them.

They use diesel fire heaters.

And if you talk to them, when their diesel fired heaters go out, they lose about 40% of their better capacity in cold weather.

So that can definitely help with your range.

However, diesel fired, not zero emissions.

Next slide.

So this is kind of a graphic of how that breakdown of which blocks, those are listed there on the x-axis, you know, block roughly correlates to one operator's run during the day.

But which of the blocks would be able to be completed?

with this sort of average bus capacity and average bus range and which ones would not based on 30% reduction of battery capacity and a 40% reduction and those are just based on, we use that 30 and 40% because

The rough benchmarks for when the weather gets really cold, or just general battery degradation over the life of the bus.

Yeah, those are just the numbers assigned to these blocks.

A block might be one bus going out and completing a route six times during the day and then coming back into the garage.

So maybe block 0301 does that and it takes 160 miles, whereas when block 0902 goes out and makes its run for the day, maybe that only takes 130 miles.

This is one way to kind of interpret this chart.

And did you have a sense if you targeted like battery electric buses for those routes that aren't above that 40% reduction line?

I mean, if you look at the blocking and you just added the current model, you added the ones that are across the bottom.

So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

About 18.

So you would say probably like 20.

You probably saw in our model, you would need 20 to 22 vehicles to make this model work for the for the battery electric model.

So BEBs, in this model, we're talking about all of the vehicles are alternative fuel, whether they're BEB or Hygiene, but they're focusing, this one just focuses on BEB.

So we're saying 18 of the vehicles would be able to, if they were battery electric, would be able to complete their assigned routes based on the 40% reduction.

Are all of those numbers at the bottom are actual real route numbers?

So we did look up some potential locations for on-route charging just based on where some routes overlap and intersect so that you're maximizing that investment in on-route charging.

Downtown is kind of the obvious one, although that could be a challenging physical environment to install on route charging.

We also have Willoughby Square Shopping Center, UVA Hospital, Fashion Square, Barracks Rope Shopping Center, and the Charlottesville Public Works Facility.

These are not hard and fast recommendations, just potential locations that could be looked into.

They would likely require some kind of

Right-of-way acquisition, you generally put in multiple on-route chargers at each location.

Obviously, this is a new off-site maintenance concern for CAT that would have to be investigated.

probably not 10 minutes.

It's more like topping it off throughout the day every time it's coming in and having a layover.

Yep.

It's generally seamless.

You can have a pantograph charger where it's overhead and the buses just connects up to it.

There's also inductive charging built into the

connecting with it, unable to charge that way.

But the overhead's more efficient, right?

I think you could do inductive or panagraph probably to the same level.

But what we have heard from other transit agencies is the bottom one when there's winter weather and snow and ice is causing issues.

Next slide.

So moving on to the hydrogen fuel cell buses, these have a range more in line with your typical diesel bus of 260 to 350 miles.

They're less susceptible to range decreases than BEBs.

Some models may experience weather-related degradation, but certainly not to the extent of BEBs.

Your refueling is very similar to a diesel or a CNG bus.

It takes about 10 minutes.

A cat would likely be able to perform a one-to-one transition because of the range being similar to diesel.

They do have a higher purchase price compared to both diesel and BEB.

Again, these are at least 2021 costs.

They were at 1.15 million then and have since gone up.

And of course, the big elephant in the room with hydrogen, if not a commercial hydrogen provider near Charlottesville currently.

So we'd be looking at on-site hydrogen generation and constructing a fueling station, which would be a significant capital expenditure.

Next slide.

The embedded video is not going to work.

Got a blurry picture.

So we will send that link out to everybody.

But the link was basically talking about why hydrogen.

It was a three minute video from Champaign, Urbana that basically had the executive director talking about

The methodology they used to make the selection.

I thought it was important that one of the key points he said, why they moved towards hydrogen is because they wanted to have their model built for the ridership and not building a model around the vehicles.

So their service model.

They're building out to make sure that people can use it efficiently, not trying to plan the system to park a bus or charge a bus.

So this should be a familiar graphic.

This is just looking at the greenhouse gas emissions projected to 2050 for each of these fuel types.

As mentioned before, the gray hydrogen does not get us there.

That's kind of that middle line.

However, the green hydrogen and battery electric buses both get us over 99% reduction in GHG by 2050.

And I'll note, both of those are grid dependent.

We're assuming the power for these is coming from the grid.

For the gray FCEB, is that factoring in the emissions that are going into the production of that gray hydrogen as well as the transportation to us?

I believe that is factored in.

However, I would check the handout to confirm what I just told you.

I don't recall the top of my head, but I believe that was part of this was done in a model called AFLIT.

It's produced by the Argonne National Laboratory.

It takes into account operations and missions, not manufacture or end of life.

But I don't know.

I think it has that transportation piece.

I'll check.

Next slide.

So this graph is about the quickest we could transition to a 100% zero tailpipe emissions fleet.

This does include the aforementioned recommendation for both a battery electric and a hydrogen pilot.

I'll also note the increase in fuel size represents that almost doubling of service on the street.

A lot of these diesel bus purchases that you'll see kind of happening right now still.

Those are kind of programmed in already.

We're looking at 18 to 24 months from order to delivery.

So there's not a lot of opportunity to change that piece of the new diesels going into the fleet.

However, we do have opportunity here before 2042, aggressively transition to zero emissions and still have 10 years of wiggle room, so to speak for that.

What if, you know, if something doesn't pan out the way that we thought it would.

So at what year say the pilot study, whatever fuels are chosen, is very successful?

So I think you start buying those probably like 2029, 2030 is when you're putting those orders, first orders in for whatever you decide to go for it with.

And then I think it really picks up order wise in like 2032.

Yes, as long as you know, there's no hiccups in ordering these first two pilot buses and kind of starting to get that information.

Thank you.

If you look, there's we're not really purchasing more diesel vehicles after 2027.

So we would purchase our first this year, that are elected to two.

As soon as we get those, I'll assume in 18, 24 months, we'll be able to

have them in operation in about two years, then really get a test and feel for where we can use them and then figure out, you know, aggressively start buying more.

If that's the model we go, if we do the same thing for the hydrogen, we'll be able to say a comparison between the two and go aggressively towards one or the other or a mix, which I am in favor of.

This is just public transportation.

School buses.

Glad you asked.

We just submitted an application for two rebates through the EPA Clean School Bus Program.

Do you mind if I run it home?

Sure.

Is the latter in competition with other Virginia localities or nationwide?

Next slide, please.

So this is a chart looking at the emissions reductions and kind of planning level cost estimates for different scenarios that we could implement these various technologies with.

First, you have battery electric with it's 100% BEV transition using depot only charging.

That's that second line, assuming a 225 mile range.

The second one is battery electric with fast charging or on route charging and then the third line or fourth line is

Fourth Line is a battery electric low estimate.

This was kind of developed as a best case scenario if the technology evolves exactly when we needed to, how it needs to be, and that there's no cost increase, even with bigger battery capacities.

And we get that kind of one-to-one ratio, what those costs and emissions reductions would look like.

So you can see kind of the range of costs there.

The vehicle capital costs, those are just based on state contract costs per vehicle, facility costs or a per vehicle cost.

And then the operational costs are based on industry-reviewed publications for average operational costs of these different vehicle types.

And the number of vehicles required are all based on the system optimization plan that calls for 58 vehicles.

And then, of course, hydrogen is at the bottom there.

And you can see its costs as well.

It's a little bit more expensive per vehicle, and that's reflected there as well.

All right, moving on to the next slide.

One thing to kind of note about the infrastructure costs specifically, that portion of the capital costs with hydrogen versus BEB is there's this scale factor.

You have to add that

I'm

fairly expensive relative to the cost of a single bus charger.

I would just like to point out quickly for everyone looking at this chart that there are no measurements on the X with the Y axis.

It's meant to be illustrative of the concept.

Moving on to the next slide, switching gears a little bit to funding.

So, Ben mentioned the Transit Strategic Plan and the work we're doing with this.

The technology selection in this study affects what is put into the Transit Strategic Plan.

In the Transit Strategic Plan, we are required to, you know, kind of note what infrastructure projects are coming along in the next 10 years, what bus purchases are happening in the next 10 years, and we have to cost and program those out over those 10 years.

So we need some understanding of what this technology is going to be to be able to do that.

And consequently, the technology inclusion within the TSP, it impacts your ability to pursue state funding for vehicles and infrastructure.

The Department of Rail and Public Transportation, when you're making grant applications, they do look for whether or not something is captured in your transit strategic plan.

It's kind of a check on whether you are

Michael Payne

Program.

Those applications for this round are due April 25th, so we're getting pretty late if we want to make an application this year, but there are a couple more years of that program.

And I just want to note, it's going to be very hard for us to make the April this year because there's a transition plan that has to be completed.

and

The Department of Rail

for the amount of service you're putting out on the street.

And are you doing it at an efficient operating cost?

And so you are, there's one big pot or piece of pie, one big pie for every agency in the state.

You're all competing for it.

So agencies that prioritize high ridership and operational efficiencies are going to be rewarded with additional operating funds.

We just felt that that was an important point to make, you know, as we're talking about these big investments and kind of the direction of CAT, just making sure that we're kind of keeping our eyes on how the funding is coming in and how we can continue to make sure that we're leveraging as much of that funding as possible.

I have a few questions.

Sure.

OK.

So some of this is just me thinking aloud and other pieces have to do with comments that we've gotten, particularly at City Council meetings and emails.

And so I'm just going to kind of reform some things and bring me back as you need to.

As I think about just the difference in technology and, you know, life cycle, and not just life cycle, but all the components in the process to make an electric battery work, BEB versus a hydrogen fuel cell,

to me concerns that I would have if I were in your positions or I know these hybrid buses have been horrible thorn in your side.

The FCEB seems like a hybrid to me.

I get the fact that it's by that I don't mean like I

What I mean is that they're more than one sort of technological component that make this thing work.

It's inherently more complicated, just at a, I don't know, conceptual basis.

And so as I think about that, if I were running the shop, that's one thing that would concern me in terms of these.

I guess the second question I would have, it may be the answer to this, if I were to say,

FCE buses that had been ever built.

I would assume that battery electric buses would be at least an order of magnitude more.

Is that true?

Yes.

So there are a lot more of these things on the road and a lot more over time.

So for me, as I think the reliability, that is one thing to be on the leading edge versus the bleeding edge.

That's another thing that gives me concern.

Another thing that gives me concern about hydrogen, and I think hydrogen is cool,

But another thing that gives me concern beyond the fact of whether we have locally grown and organically certified hydrogen in our area, trucking it in or whatever, all of that seems incredibly, I don't know, improbable, but that's all going to work out.

The green and yellow hydrogen again feels like an organic buying organic fruit or something I don't know where you'd even go to get to get that kind of thing and and then the last thing that concerns me and this is something that a climate activist a guy I work with I won't mention his name I don't know the cares but as I understand it methane is 20 times more

impactful to the climate and carbon dioxide, something like that.

I don't know more.

I see the thumbs up back there.

And so I just, I think when you start talking about something like hydrogen as a commodity, which is really what we're talking about, I think it's going to be very difficult to sort of say, okay, this is our, this is our organically grown hydrogen and this is just what, you know, we bought somewhere.

And my guess is whatever we bought somewhere is going to be using methane to

to make it, which sounds like a horrible thing.

I mean, I'm not the transit expert, can't claim to be, but as an engineer, as a project manager, and I think about all those things.

I'm like, I just don't think I trust hydrogen enough to go there.

And with respect to battery electric buses, Mr. Groves is in the audience.

I don't think he minds me pointing him out.

I personally

Can appreciate the fact that we want to transition in in terms of some sort of new technology and we might not be fully confident in battery electrical.

We need to sort of wean ourselves off of diesel, that's how I would put it.

But I just know as an engineer that y'all clever folks with the consultants, if we knew we had a certain number of battery electric buses, we have enough history in this country with using them at this point, we could lay out routes, we could install these chargers, and we could make a system that works.

And I think if we put in these fast electric chargers in prudential ways,

then we could get the kind of range that we need.

So anyway, that's just sort of where I stand on.

I appreciate the points, Garland and Mr. Williams, about the scalability.

But to me, if you're scaling the size of Richmond, that's one thing, but Charleston was pretty compact.

And we could put, I don't know, half a dozen of these chargers out in the community.

And I think that might help with your scalability.

If I may, as your director, my concern has always been that we provide the most reliable public transportation system that we can.

And I need to clear up something about the public.

There seems to be a concern that I am opposed to any transition, whether it's battery electric or hydrogen.

I am not.

I am pro-cat.

I am pro-reliable cat.

And as your director, I hear often from the community that there are concerns about getting a reliable, frequent system on the street.

I have talked to my colleagues from California to New York to Illinois and they're all saying there are concerns about the range on battery electric.

I am not saying not to do it.

I believe that we should do a portion of our fleet with battery electric.

My concern is

having to mitigate all of the concerns that we keep articulating with one particular fuel type.

If we could do a dual fuel type, I think it alleviates my concerns about being able to provide reliable system for this region.

Many have often said that we're a diamond in the rough.

I believe that.

We're compact enough.

Our system is being designed so it'd be more direct.

I just need to get the frequency up.

And to do that, I need more reliable buses.

You articulated earlier that we have 10 hybrid buses in our fleet.

We've gone down the road where they worked really well in the beginning and now at the end of their life cycle we are having trouble keeping them on the road.

Normally when you start a transition, you're going from a place of strength.

We are not.

That is my major concern.

Let us get healthy before we start making an aggressive approach.

I think this is a process that we have worked with many departments.

We've heard the community concerns.

We want to transition to zero emissions.

I understand, but you'd be able to test out different blocks.

You'd be able to test out fast charging and things like that.

And we would still, our dual secondary fuel that we would have would be diesel.

I would be interested in knowing, maybe someone can tell me if

It's better than a diesel bus.

So part of what I need to say is I guess a little more clearly.

My concern is having our whole fleet be one type regardless of how many different models of battery electric that we have.

because I have seen from my colleagues that they're transitioning to a dual fleet themselves.

A lot of the transition is happening in California.

Champaign Urbana is an example I've sent you some clips from recently.

They have had battery electric vehicles in their fleet.

They're not getting rid of them.

They are augmenting their model with hydrogen.

I'm asking us to try that same model and allow us to be able to, if something goes wrong with our battery electric fleet, that we be able to run some semblance of service.

And it's also zero admissions.

So we're not talking about this model.

The study, if you remember, we have transitioned from where we were talking about compressed natural gas, renewable natural gas.

We've xed that out.

We're telling you by 2027, we're no longer going to do diesel.

Over the last several presentations, I have a lot of reluctance in going with hydrogen because I don't have a lot of reliability of where, how it's going to be produced, the green and the yellow.

That's what we want, but I'm not sure when or how we can get there.

So I am supportive of the battery, electric.

I understand, so you want to go through the test pilot of the tube.

So we've committed to trying to make sure before we expand whatever model that we are able to get green or yellow.

So that is our commitment.

So for this evening, I mean, because I thought you wanted some high level direction from council.

And

We have not committed to doing anything.

I understand.

And I would like to give you that guidance, but based on what I know now, without

going through the study.

I'm kind of leaning towards battery electric.

But I agree.

We should kind of test them both out.

Remember, we're not buying hydrogen until 2027.

That's correct.

But I don't want to, what we're asking, remember, it's also the study, this alternative fuel study links and has a direct correlation into our TSP, our transstrategic plan.

I don't want to shut that off because it then cuts off our ability to ask for funding for those particular tasks or pilots or fuel sources.

So if we start by saying we want to contemplate both tracks, then in 2027 we then say, whoops, the hydrogen has materialized.

The TSP process will allow us to change gears.

Michael Payne

over the couple of years between now and 2027, but obviously we wouldn't learn anything about hydrogen and how it works until 2027.

Correct.

Well, in one clarifying question, so with hydrogen, the purchase would occur in 2027, so deployment would be 2028 to 2029.

Correct.

Can I ask one question that somebody from Great Beyond sent to me?

Wanted to know if our fire department would require additional fire suppression equipment to deal with any of these issues.

Joe Phillips, Deputy Chief and Fire Marshal for Shultz and Fire Department.

There are some infrastructure that would have to be built.

There's also some planning of things that we would want to make sure on his grounds.

We did, you know,

where we charge the buses versus the exit, right?

If a bus did have a catastrophic failure, we don't want it to block and exit for all of his staff to leave or block so the fire department could come in.

The current shop that's there

It is not a sprinkler system, and even the fire department are, if a bus or any electric vehicle has a catastrophic failure, we're not putting the bus out or the vehicle out with what we have.

We are protecting what's around it with water.

and

It takes lots and lots of water.

And then we also have that as an environmental runoff because it's now mixed with the metals and everything.

So we would work with EPA if we had a large fire like that and make decisions.

Can we contain the water or is it better to let it burn?

And those kinds of things.

But yes, there would be some infrastructure not

Not a concern.

It's a known technological problem.

Correct.

I have a couple of comments and several questions.

First I want to thank you for using the terminology zero tailpipe emissions instead of zero emissions where possible because I think that's something that we have to keep in mind.

and the overall net emissions of this project.

If we plug something in and they're burning coal at Dominion, that's a coal fired bus.

The other comment I would like to make is that we had up there at some slide that increased ridership was a sub goal.

In conjunction with Garland's reliability as the goal, I think increased ridership is also the goal.

So that's another kind of shift in terminology.

I think we should be cognizant of, okay, great.

And then I think what we should get out of this in addition to figuring out what steps we want to do next to permit the pilot program is

Michael Payne

How do we get a good pilot out of this so that this is such a long-term process we want to make sure that we're using our time well?

So to my questions, what do you mean by green hydrogen is scaling?

What does that actually mean?

Who is working on that?

How hard are they working on it?

So you have the Department of Energy's investment in hydrogen hubs that were recently announced, I think, back in November.

The two close ones are the kind of Appalachian one, and that one will be more focused on gray hydrogen.

However, there's also a hydrogen hub that's centered more on New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland area, and that is projected to be more of a green hydrogen hub.

So I think you're seeing investments from the

The Federal side in that.

And you're also seeing continued investment in the development of the private hydrogen sector, companies like Plug Power, creating their new hydrogen factory in Western New York.

You're seeing more plans for those types of facilities.

So it's just, I think when we say scaling, we're just talking about the market continuing to evolve and there being more options to deliver that.

Do we have it?

Like, how much?

Okay, thanks.

That'd be good to have an idea.

Two years ago, Jennifer Ranholm came to UVA and as part of an announcement of a Virginia research effort that was expected to be a couple hundred million dollars itself and there were to be ten of those nationwide.

Okay.

Speaking of the coal burning of it all, you mentioned that Virginia is trying to be carbon free by 2050.

Is that, that's dominion?

I believe that's dominion.

Well, no, that's actually the Virginia Clean Economy Act.

So, piece of legislation that was passed by the General Assembly in 2022.

And yeah, Dominion made a commitment to be 100% renewables by 2045.

Okay, great.

That's good news.

So what other funding do we get from the county for this?

So I mean, if they pay for just the miles, that's not any part of the fixed costs of the operation.

They don't pay for fixed costs.

So capital.

Hopefully RTA they would.

That would be my hope.

If we get to RTA, we would rework those costs, which is why the RTA is so important.

And then a question that I was going to piggyback off of something that Lloyd was talking about earlier with the technology pricing.

You mentioned the bankruptcy of Protera, but there's other companies out there.

In all other technology, we've seen pricing go down over time.

Computers used to be

$6,000

I'm going to take this one, because what I have seen, and I'm going to speak to my experiences, previous system where I was at Greater Richmond Transit Company, when they transitioned to CNG, compressed natural gas, which they're a 98% compressed natural gas model.

They talked about, oh, over time, the cost for the CNG vehicles was going to go down.

That has never happened.

They've been running for 15, almost 20 years now.

and it's only going up because you have a fixed number of transit agencies who are buying these vehicles and because there are limited people buying these vehicles, it's not in their manufacturer's best interest to drive the prices down.

If you're paying for it now, you're going to pay for it in the future.

And that's what I have seen.

I may be wrong that the cost for battery may come down, but I doubt it.

So it sounds like it's monopolistic almost?

One quick follow-up.

So it's, we don't really charge them per mile, it's per hour cost.

It shows our cost allocation model.

We use that to have a conversation with them on how we fund their model, how we fund our model, where all the funding sources are.

I did it for the county.

when I was a transportation planner for the county for 20 years and it's changed in the last 15 since I haven't been doing it.

It was complicated then before all of this.

Do we have, or actually I'll come back to that.

A quick follow up on the school bus lottery.

Sorry to keep having you pop up and down.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know how many applications were put in.

And we asked for a small number again to do a pilot.

So I don't know.

Well, my fingers are crossed.

I don't really know but I think we don't know but I have I've heard different things so I don't want to say anything that is incorrect so what we can do is figure out

That would be a conversation with some of the California transit agencies who have been using this longer.

Because yeah, I consider that part of the net emissions of the vehicle.

And then do we have a general

So you mean capital wise or operating?

Oh right, if we get up to the street levels, that wouldn't happen.

It's primarily focused on the capital side.

And that doesn't really show a year over year.

That's a total.

And then the last one is just maybe because

and

So I want to basically give you kind of the overview of what CATS current system looks like.

We have 12 routes that are out on there, which is 20 operating blocks because we're still running lifeline service.

We have not been able to transition back to pre-pandemic levels.

On any given day, I am praying.

Yes, I said that out in public.

I am praying that we have 20 buses to allow us to be able to give that model our lifeline.

There have been days when we have not had 20 vehicles out of a 40 vehicle fleet to actually try to run our model.

That's because of the vehicles.

has been, we have not had vehicles available to us.

Out of our 40 vehicles, we have not had 20 vehicles at times.

And the city manager, normally when I get there, I start blowing his phone up.

I'm concerned about not being able to provide a certain level of service to everybody.

Maybe I internalize that too much, but I'm trying to make sure that we run a system and we provide the level of service that the county is paying for.

So there's all that in my mix.

Maybe I put a little too much on my shoulders, but that's just who I am.

I want to run the system as best as we possibly can.

So we have 20 blocks.

We're serving the urban ring of Albemarle County and Charlottesville.

We're compact enough.

to be able to run a model where we should be able to run everything 30 minutes or less frequencies on every single route.

We are not there.

The handout I gave you, if you look at the back sheet, that has the frequency model table on it one more time.

We have routes that are in pink that have 70 minutes.

That is horrible service.

You can't even predict it on a clock as to when the bus is going to come.

If you have 60 minutes, you know at the top of the hour, at least it's gonna come once every top of the hour.

You're losing 10 minutes every single time, so you have to figure out what time of day you are and where you are in the model.

That is horrible.

We're asking our folks to basically

work with us and give them terrible service.

So what we have done in this during the pandemic is we studied our system.

We proposed the plan to try to correct it.

We went for funding to make us fare free or zero fare.

That is, and we can see the direct correlation between the zero fare and our ridership numbers starting to turn around, even though we have not been able to return.

our ridership model back to where it was pre-pandemic.

We're on the uptake.

I don't want to do anything to cause any concerns or harm.

We still haven't been able to get the hours of service back to midnight.

We're running from 6 a.m.

to 10 30 p.m.

right now.

Next slide please.

One of the things that I wanted to make sure that we emphasize is we've heard a lot from the advocacy community about the battery technology and trying to do our politics.

But what I hear from the community is not just that, but also their concerns about how frequent our service is, how reliable our service is.

We are not meeting either one of those.

We should be concerned about that.

You are also the board of directors for Charlottesville area transit, not just council.

We have a group who depends on us to get them to work, to medical departments, to activity centers, to grocery stores.

And for our service to be as infrequent as it is, is a concern to me.

And I'm hoping it is a concern to you.

I'm asking you to trust us in the process to allow us to become more reliable, but also figure out how we can become zero emissions over the next few years.

The results of a survey that was done for our TSP shows that the top item that people ask us for is frequency.

That's what they want.

They're also saying the reason that they ride the bus is because they want to save money.

So we can do that as a part, that is part of transit's role to provide the backbone for each one of those.

Next slide, please.

They're also telling us why they are not riding the bus.

It takes too long.

Frequency takes care of that.

It doesn't go where we want it to go.

We've planned out how to make those changes.

We just have not had enough vehicles or drivers to implement the changes.

Give me the services.

Give me the resources.

We can make either one of both of those things happen.

Next slide, please.

Our transit network plan that Ben talked about.

There are results that we can predict about what those changes would do.

We're going to increase accessibility by the changes that we put in the optimization plan.

We're going to increase the accessibility by 2%.

That's a marked improvement from where we are today.

On Saturday about a 5% increase and 10% change on Sunday by adding more service and more frequency.

And if we go to 30 minutes or better, the overall population accessibility increases by 20%.

That is huge.

That gets a person to work faster, better, more frequent.

They don't have to worry about driving their individual cars.

And we're dependable, so people trust us to use the service in the first place.

So minority population would get 16% by what we've scaled.

The plans were making adjustments.

And then the low income population of 15% changed.

These are great improvements for areas that desperately need our services.

and the next slide for me.

So our next steps as we work through this, we're trying to finalize the alternative fuel study.

We're going to begin the conceptual design phase of this, which is necessary for us to start implementation and then complete the zero emission transition plan, which is the requirement.

And then that allows us to start asking for the money to make the implementation changes to transition us to zero emissions.

One of the things Council Member Oschrin asked about is, where are we now?

We've got 59 operators.

Our service model, to get back to where we need, we need more operators.

Working on that, and I will say, City Manager has been, since the deputy for operations, was keen on making sure that we got back to

and more resources.

It's a balancing act.

That can't take all the resources from this thing.

We understand that.

But we do need to start making the inversions to add drivers to make us more reliable.

That happens.

And we're just watching and starting to do that.

Hopefully, we will be able to make

and make more aggressive stances in the outer years.

But none of this works even putting the new shiny zero emission buses if nobody's going to ride it because the frequency is so terrible that nobody's going to use it.

That's the piece that I guess I'm more concerned about.

Yes, I want us to be zero emission.

I want people to use the service.

That's why we're here.

and if we put shiny new buses that don't work and they can't use them, it does no one any good.

I've got a couple of questions.

One, it was pointed out to us during this evening, the conversation that rare earth metals are not used in the batteries for electric vehicles.

Is that?

That's not true.

I have two questions about the presentation in particular.

On page 17, comparing battery operated vehicles and fuel cell vehicles, there is an advantage given to fuel cell vehicles for reliability.

We did some research using NREL studies.

And then on the next page, page 18, there's a reference towards the bottom.

It says, the study's proposed transition guide presents additional ZEBs starting in 2031, remains open as to which type.

What's the significance of 2031 in that regard?

So the pilot studies that will be done will hopefully get to a point of decision by 2031 is the point of this.

Yes.

I have the same concern I someone else expressed earlier and I had hinted at before that how we how we prepare the sort of the rules of decision of that pilot study are going to be very important.

And that that's not my area of expertise.

A few questions.

I want a little broader point on what you just talked to.

My understanding is from last budget cycle, there's $3 million for acquisitions of vehicles that was kind of rolled over.

Is it known as you do the strategic plan?

So, I don't know the city manager's thunder.

So the optimization plan is where we're trying to follow that.

So there are steps.

There is a phased letter or document, a phasing plan, portion of that document.

We can send that out to everyone so we've looked at certain routes because one of the things is we want to correct going back to the frequency table once again.

We want to correct routes that have worse than 60 minute service first and then 60 minute service.

After that, to get everything to at least a 30 minute model before we start being more strategic and getting routes that are more high performance.

I know there's been some requests for more service on the five and the seven.

But we want to make sure that we don't create a disparate impact on minority communities by having such great service in areas where there are choice riders versus folks who need our service who are still waiting for the bus an hour.

So the goal would be to bring everybody up to a standard of 30 minutes or better before we start strategically making more improvements on the edges.

And to enter that, there's three million dollars that has not been, we have not determined what the use of it is as a set aside for whatever direction you ask us to go with.

Absolutely.

I think they heard.

So I guess the big question I have is the commitment is for green or yellow hydrogen, which I agree from an emissions perspective is absolutely the way to go because being on the grid is what will actually reduce the emissions if the choice is hydrogen.

I guess is there a known sense yet of what, because it seems to me the only way to do that is going to have on-site hydrolysis, either on the grid or solar.

What realistically is that cost of that infrastructure or how quickly could it actually be constructed and ready for deployment?

And is there like federal funding opportunities to help fund that infrastructure investment?

The same funding sources that we're using to go out the money for battery electric, it's the same funding sources we would use to go out for the hydrogen fuel cell buses.

The federal government doesn't differentiate.

It's alternative vehicles.

It's one of the acceptable sources.

I might also add I think what I'm hearing this evening and what we've been talking about internally all these are the follow-up questions to a feasibility study so just as a reminder or as an example when we started out on this process

C&G was in the mix.

This study and this process has taken that out of the conversation.

I've got a question before we get to that though.

The big question I have is how it will play out in practice, kind of what funding sources we would pursue to do that on-site hydrolysis.

What's the cost to that?

What are we going after?

What's the likelihood that we do or don't get it?

And if we don't get it by 2029 or 2028 when those hydrogen buses would be

here for us to use.

How do we pivot then?

Because the big question I guess I have is what if any missed opportunities are there?

So even if I accept and agree that we want to fleet this multiple types, especially for those longer routes,

There's still like 30% or so of vehicles that could do the shorter routes with BEBs where that's not an issue.

And are we missing an opportunity for 20 to 30% of the fleet to more aggressively go BEB even while accepting, you know, we're going to want not just BEBs, you know, longer term.

All of your questions are warranted.

What I'm asking us to consider at this point is, as we go through the pilot, we'll be able to answer a lot of the questions that we know and the questions that we don't know.

Every transit system that I've talked to started out with a transition, a pilot, to figure out what their mix is.

Brian Pinkston, Juandiego Wade,

The smaller pilot is functional for us.

It allows us to test the waters and say, hey, we are very confident that 30% or 40% of our routes, no matter how we slice them, would be able to use battery electric, right?

Or then we have to come and say,

Yeah, we could use them on the other routes, but it's going to take two vehicles.

So we would be able to tell you if we went the total battery electric, what would that model look like and how many more vehicles would we have to purchase?

That all gets washed out as a part of the pilot.

That same model happens with the hydrogen.

We are seeing transitions of fleets, especially on the West Coast, where they were committed to doing 100% battery electricity.

They are switching a portion of their fleet to the hydrogen model.

because there are range concerns.

They don't want to have to buy two for one or 1.341, right?

And then there's also an operations concern about having an additional vehicle, an additional person to make the switch out or staging vehicles, having them unmanned out on your route somewhere.

Those are all operational things that me and my team have to figure out.

That's what you pay me to do.

I just need the direction to tell me where you want us to go.

I have the team.

We've assembled the team.

We're going to bring more on.

Part of that contract is we're going to continue to work with all sustainability.

We're going to continue to work with neighborhood development services.

We're going to bring in the fire department.

We're going to bring in multiple departments that haven't been really engaged at this point in time.

But that's all as a part of the transition plan.

What specific direction are you looking for?

I have a question before we get into that.

Go ahead.

A specific question before we get into that, if you don't mind.

Kind of back to my original question about talking a little bit more about the internal operations of CAT.

If we have 20-ish buses on a good day, and there's a couple of layers to this question, and there's some buses that have been operational but don't work,

So you've heard about, we just purchased five, six new vehicles that are on site.

The holdup has not been wrapping them.

The holdup has been radios.

and the GPS technology is required so that you would, so anybody looking on the app would know the bus is coming, one, and we'd be able to have track of the bus.

Part of that has been taken care of, the radios was the second piece, as a part of the

What is it called?

The surplus.

You just authorized us to purchase with city money the radio.

I do remember that.

So now we are in conversations right now about getting Motorola to come on site to install the radio.

We put the request in.

We're at their room about when they're going to get it done.

But we're in the queue to get the radios installed.

Once that happens, I'm not worried about having the cat logo on the side.

We're going to put some placards on the side of it to say cat.

And we're going to put them out on the road so it's more reliable.

I'll put Maggie Margaret if you want me to.

I just need the bus running.

We already have the GPS now.

We're waiting on the radios.

OK, cool.

And just TBD on timeline.

Yeah, so the number of operators is a product of how many vehicles we have out on the road at a time.

So because our span of service is about 17, 18 hours, one operator can't operate that the whole time.

So we divide that into two blocks, one in AM and one PM.

So for map purposes, we'll keep it quick and everybody will understand is that if I got 30 vehicles out in the morning, that's the same 30 vehicles out in the afternoon.

That's 60 drivers.

That's 30 in the morning, 30 in the afternoon.

That's 60 for five days.

We still haven't done anything for Saturday and we still haven't done anything for Sunday.

Depending on the amount of buses we put out on a Saturday schedule, a Sunday schedule or a Sunday schedule,

You would have that same model, the number of drivers required in the AM and the PM.

So as you look at that, we do all that we can in our scheduling how we put the pieces of work together to mitigate the number of drivers that we require.

There are 10 hour runs, 9 hour runs, 8 hour runs to try to make sure we keep our required number of drivers down to a minimum.

The baseline.

We still haven't allowed for anybody to take off.

Anybody getting sick, anybody getting pulled for a random drug test, anybody who needs to have required trainings, that's all

The 58 buses is 112 drivers.

It's the minimum number we need to get now.

We have authorization for 59.

And we are, aggressively, we have nine vacancies right now.

He said, will I say could?

Would you get five of them?

Maybe I misremembered.

Oh, three.

I'm sorry.

We can do two and two.

If you want us to do two and two, we can do two and two.

I didn't mean to do two and two.

Well, I was thinking five, but tonal.

Yeah, but regardless, I mean, our decision is about four or five buses tonight.

Yes.

The biggest outstanding question I have is, it sounds like from what you said, there is not yet, for once this pilot begins, definitions of what measurements will use, what success would look like for either fuel type

Right, because that's my big question, because as I stated earlier, my concern is I can accept, you know, we want to pilot hydrogen as part of this, especially thinking long term for those longer distance routes, especially with the regional vision plan, you're talking about routes that go much deeper into Surab, beyond even Albemarle.

My concern is

There's some portion of the fleet for the shorter routes that we, I think we could do BEBs on a faster timeline with, and let's say by 2029 that hydrogen technology is just not there.

Have we limited our ability to deploy more than just two BEBs?

No, we have not limited.

So what I'm trying to stress is

We're giving ourselves multiple options by going the recommendation is before you.

It's just the only thing that's preventing us from getting more is our replacement schedule.

So where my goal would be to add at least in these vehicles to replace the hybrid vehicles that we have right now.

That gets us to a level of reliability that allows us to test

The Alternative Fuel Vehicles also giving more frequency to give better service to folks who need CAT to get to work, church, shopping, you name it.

We're struggling right now with routes that have horrible service and we're wondering why our ridership isn't where it wants to be.

I mean, I totally agree.

I think from 2015 riderships down 54 percent.

I think it's like 44 percent, but we're going to argue about that.

Regardless, I agree.

It's too much and it's clearly for the success of the agency, the critical question.

But I just don't, especially for these shorter routes,

Do you mind if I ask you a question?

OK, I've got two more right now.

What is the life expectancy of the battery and the hydrogen buses?

And I know right now we struggle with mechanical expertise on fixing these.

What's the plan?

These are two separate questions I'm asking at the same time.

So, on the mechanic side first, we're aggressively hiring mechanics and we're trying to get them trained up.

There are programs, courses, there are

Academy, so we can send our mechanics to.

We would pay for that, of course, to get the training necessary.

We're going to have to do it anyway.

Or if we have a large enough group, we can actually fly those individuals in to do the training in-house, which I like because they'll be using our vehicles, the models that we have here.

So they get to see first hand how the

So fed say either or.

State has, in the past, said both, which is what we were talking about.

The state has now transitioned to be more like the federal government, and they've removed the both because

And that doesn't mean that the buses stop running.

You talking about battery electric vehicles?

Yeah.

Some transit agencies are making it work.

Warm, sunny California Warm, sunny, dry California But any bus could last longer than that.

But I know because the battery specifically degrades.

And you can negotiate warranties on batteries with manufacturers.

There's just a cost.

Yeah, let me do the job that you hired me to do.

So that's one thing I wanted to say.

To point out to you all that you've been on a ride for quite some time and to use the analogy of the bus, we have arrived at a crossroads.

That's where you are.

And you have a very big political decision to make.

And I think that's why it has felt awkward and uncomfortable.

And it's gotten a little more uncomfortable for me recently just as folks have made comments that I'm even not supportive of battery electric buses or climate innovation as it relates to transportation.

And that's not true.

I am definitely a proponent.

I have no reason to not be.

I have invested time and energy with our sustainability team to prove to them that I buy into this and that I want to support it and want to make sure that they get the support, which is why she's here tonight speaking to you.

That was at my request.

And then I have listened to and read a lot from a number of people who've chosen to share their thoughts.

But I will remind you of what you just heard this evening.

your transit director is sitting in front of you right now saying to you that we have a horrible transit service in the city and that to be unacceptable and I think that's what we have to make sure that we don't lose sight of when he speaks that's what's driving his comments and I join him in that that's part of what people have heard from me and I think they've misconstrued what it is that I'm responding to but the fact that you have this sheet in front of you and these yellow boxes

and even the pink boxes.

60 and 70 minutes.

for a bus to come back around that if you, living life as normal, just happen to miss the bus because kids needed something else for you to grab and throw in your diaper bag.

And you miss that bus.

You are 60 to 70 minutes later waiting for the next bus to come around.

That is not okay.

Should never be okay.

And this presentation has been made in some form of fashion in different ways.

He's been begging.

I will admit that he has lobbied me intensely.

The two and a half years that I have been here trying to get additional resources to make it possible for this to be a better service that we provide and I would say he wants to get to a good service.

He wants to be a great service, but he really is wanting to get to a good service.

It is hard to innovate when you're falling apart.

And I think that's the other part that makes it difficult for us to actually deliver what I think the larger community was hoping to hear.

And that would be a more aggressive approach to doing this.

But my vocabulary never really lands with people.

You hate my word discipline.

This is a disciplined approach.

also next week will be giving you sobering news about a budget.

We got to pay for all this stuff and we've got to figure out how to do it and yes there are federal grants available but we also have to get them so there's still a risk that we won't get them just because we want them and we have to be able to pay for anything else that we still want to do

when that grant doesn't come through, which is why it was important for you to hear when he said that we have a bus replacement schedule.

That is today our limitation for buses.

But if we want to expand, we can make that decision.

You have the right to make that decision.

We have to pay for that.

If we can't get the grant that we need, we have to find the money somewhere else.

And I've already told you how hard that has been for me in the past few months to figure out.

So again, I think where we are right now to try to wrap this up for the question that is in front of you tonight so that you can make a decision and we can all go home and sleep tonight.

Are you interested in hydrogen being a part of this scenario or not?

I think is one of the big questions that we are posing to you this evening.

Are you interested in leaving it in the mix for consideration or not?

If you are adamantly opposed to it, it would help to know that the majority of you feel that way and we will move along.

I'll come back.

So that's one question.

Then we would have to give you an alternative because I still don't think that means what some people would think that it means.

So I'm saying this for the public benefit as well.

If hydrogen is removed from the pilot and you just simply test battery electric, you still have a decision to make.

Which bus do you want?

There's more than one.

They all have different aspects of what we would use to evaluate.

So I would say to you and what I've already said to him that he did not like was that we have to pilot more than one electric bus if it's exclusively electric.

So it's still going to take some time to do that so that we can run that bus and evaluate its performance in our network.

And then we need to run a different bus in our network.

So then we are doing a comparison and that's our market study that we need to do to determine if this is the right decision because we're then fully embracing.

Another question I feel like we have in front of us and then there's a third question and I would say to you is

Are you ready to invest heavily in transit?

Transit.

Are you ready to invest in transit?

Because we have not.

We have not done that in a big way.

When I started this budget cycle, I told you all that my top three items for the budget this year was going to be collective bargaining, comp and class, and transportation.

Transportation was supplanted by schools.

That's the reality.

So in order for us to deliver on what is an aggressive request that has been made that you all have considered, we have to make a different decision as well as to how are we going to pay for this?

Because even though we're paying shares of, the shares add up as you start adding more and more buses.

And if we have to add more battery electric buses and diesel buses, we still have to pay $300,000 or more times however many more buses that is.

and we still need bodies to drive them.

So that's going to cost, he has beg for more drugs.

Michael, which I'm about to deliver for you.

And then we actually can start to do that, but it comes at a huge cost just to get that done.

So not opposed, not anti anything.

I hope no one misconstrues and the article says I said something that I didn't say.

That's not what this is about.

I am just providing the facts for where they are and reminding you of really what the question is.

Are you prepared to support hydrogen or not?

So I'd like to go around and get input, but I'd like to make sure all the questions are answered.

I've got a brief one, I promise.

So I thought what we were saying earlier was we can decide now to include both battery electric and hydrogen and then in a couple years before we actually pass the order for hydrogen we can say maybe we're not that into hydrogen and we don't have to do it but by voting now we have the opportunity to include it at a later date.

I don't want to wait

I need them working hydrogen doing research and trying to figure out scenarios for how this could even be possible so that they can keep you informed along that way.

Well, I am interested in having hydrogen being in the consideration

Though I am frankly very much concerned that by the time we would get to a decision point whether there would be a market for it.

But recognizing that we're not making a commitment to forge into an area where there's no market yet, I'm willing to do that.

Your second question was, am I willing to say we're going to have to put some serious money into it?

Yeah, ma'am, I'm having to fall back on the fact that this is a pilot study and, you know, I think sort of what I was initially is, you know, during the torpedoes full speed ahead, let's, how would I design this?

I'm willing to go along with, part of it, frankly, Garland, is that I respect you, and I've heard the fact that you've spoken to your colleagues, and you clearly have an opinion about this, and I respect that.

I'll go along with a pilot study.

I will be very interested in the way it's formulated.

It is absolutely essential, though, that we figure out the sourcing of the hydrogen.

If it's not chartreuse or whatever, then it's not acceptable.

So hopefully that.

But I get the points that Michael has made and you've made about range, and it doesn't look like battery buses are going to get there anytime soon.

Yeah, I'm interested to know what those numbers are, but, you know.

Michael Yeah, I mean I guess theoretically if you're talking about explorating yellow or green hydrogen shore with the caveat that it is yellow or green and not not blue or gray But I will still say I mean

If the default of that is that there's four total buses and between now and 2029 we're limiting our replacement of diesel with BEB to only two, I'm not in support of that because I do think we can more aggressively on the shorter routes replace diesel with BEB before we fully assess whether there's even a market for hydrogen here.

So that's where I'm at.

In terms of investing the resources,

So you support the pilot?

You would like to see maybe

We will bring that back to you.

And I can assure you also that the gray and, what are the choices?

Gray and what?

Blue and blue.

No, the two bottom.

Gray and blue.

Gray and blue.

We're not interested.

I can make that decision for you right now.

Great.

I am generally in support of the plan mostly because it does increase the number of buses, which ultimately addresses the actual problem, which is there's too many single occupancy vehicles on the road.

And we need to do what we can to provide an opportunity for people to make the choice to get somewhere faster and reliably

in a communal way.

So that's a bus.

That's bike lanes.

That's sidewalks.

That's all the things we want to invest in to make better transit and transportation decisions in Charlottesville, which is a manageably small-sized city to get around in if we build the environment so it's pleasant and capable for people to do that.

I definitely have concerns about reliability, about the net pollution and making sure that we're conscious of that throughout the whole process.

The costs for sure, you know, we can get two times the number of diesel buses for the cost of a battery electric bus and if reliability is our goal and increased ridership in getting people out of cars for net pollution benefit.

Then that of course is something to weigh into the process.

I'm concerned about the weight of the vehicles and how tire dust is much more hazardous than tailpipe emissions in a lot of ways and how that hasn't really been discussed much and then also of course

The weight is more damaging to our roads, which then means we have maintenance costs that go up as well.

So there's increased cost across the board.

All that being said, because this does increase the number of buses, because it does set a pilot program and process for reducing tailpipe emissions, I am in favor of it.

I am not that interested in hydrogen.

but I can appreciate leaving that door open and that if we decide not to do it later, we will at least have done the research to make a valid educated decision on that front.

I think the most important thing we can do is have a really good pilot program.

Whether or not we're able to develop that internally or we need help, I think that's the

And I have just one final question.

So maybe I misunderstand what I've read, but I think to get to a net emissions reduction with the amount of diesel under the scenario we saw here earlier, ridership, we need to go to like three to four million or at 1.1 million.

Would it make sense for us to define a ridership goal?

What that number is and just have that kind of guide our decision making?

What does it look like to get there?

So, Garland, if you could get that response to them, I want to kind of make sure we kind of close the loop.

And I just wanted to state that I'm in support of the pallet.

I'm also in support of the resources.

I'm still not 100% clear on how this new technology will improve reliability.

It reminds me when I was on the school board, and it was a big movement to improve the lunches and make it more healthy.

And we did that, and we implemented it in schools.

But all the kids threw most of the lunch away.

And so we had the healthiest trash cans

in the state of Virginia.

And so I don't want to have the cleanest buses in but no one is on it because we don't have the resources again, you know, to to implement it and do other things that we need to do.

We just need to look at the whole thing because and I'm backing off from this some but not totally that we double out diesel buses and

We're able to get a whole lot more vehicles off the road because we're able to improve our reliability and the cost.

Then, you know, I think that we may not be net zero, but we may be able to have an impact on that.

I'm not saying doing that.

The city-wide impact.

Yes.

I want the pilot, if we could transition, you know, to the gas, I mean, the battery electric that would be

Great with the hydrogen, maybe combination, but I'm in support of it.

But hopefully moving forward, we see how this is going to improve reliability because that is the ultimate goal is to get people to use it regardless of the technology.

So any other questions?

And knowing if the pilot is successful.

So one thing I would like to also do is I want to thank our friends from Kimley Horn who have taken slight beating from this community and the work that you've done because you just did the job that we asked you to do.

So we do appreciate that and recognize that.

You weren't making a decision, even though you were accused of making a decision.

You were doing what we asked you to do, so thank you.

As a practical matter, future years, we decide the deployment of diesel, replacement with diesel.

We wanted to do it, change that with the EBs at a faster pace.

Practically, is that decision point every single year what we vote on to include in the budget?

George, as you can make that decision on if we tell you that we can't do it through replacement, but expansion at a higher cost, if you're willing to foot the bill, you can do that.

But that would be your choice.

Yes.

But when we do the expansion model, we also show how we ask to show everyone state and feds that we're using the resources for the expansion.

They gotta be used.

So the model has to grow.

And that is part of the request, right?

To get more frequent.

And it's not about just buses.

I'm so sorry, I have one more question.

And this might be more a Kimmelinghorn question.

And it's kind of basic back to the fundamental organization of the pilot program and the recommendations.

If not.

I can answer that one.

OK.

So two right now for the pilot is because

We have not finished our study and I took an opportunity to request outside of our normal schedule the ability to expand our fleet to include two battery-elected vehicles.

We were granted that opportunity without us completing our stuff.

So we're ahead.

So we're ahead.

Normally we would have been rejected.

I just want to make sure the community understands if we had asked for more, they probably would have rejected it.

Two was a reasonable number to dip our toe before we have completed our plan.

And I wanted to get that into our fleet model as soon as we possibly could.

I want to say publicly thank you for the direction.

It does not

We're going to take this and now we have direction to actually move towards completing our TSP and we have direction to allow us to get more concrete costs and do the actual complete the transition plan which is required.

Thank you.

This is not a public, okay.

Hi.

Hello.

Yeah.

OK, cool.

Well, thanks so much for the exemplary vote.

I appreciate your willingness to engage in that Liberty Parole Designate Technologies.

I want to say that justice is definitely the main motivation for why we care about public transportation.

The justice aspect of being able to move around, to go to work, to school, to do their personal

Erin, that's top one.

But I think that's very important when we see public transportation in alignment with environmental and climate benefits, because then we just increase the reasons to care about that, and to fund that, and then increase the line of people in support of it.

So I really think that having that in mind is super important, and I appreciate your vote today.

I will say a few things that I would like to note.

First is that according to the incorporation plan of the new technologies, you're going to see that apparently, besides the pilot, there is only one zero emission bus that's incorporated between 2031 and 2034.

The other zero emission buses are going to be incorporated just after 2035.

And that's why we are waiting for the 12 years life cycle of the buses.

So I just want to make it clear that the decision you are committed today

It's not a decision that really has room to accelerate the implementation unless you consider adopting less disobuses in the next three years before the pilot is concluded.

So that's just something to be out there because I think that sometimes the conversations here was

Dr.

Just something to remember.

And I also wanted to, a few other things to Natalie's comments.

The tires emissions, yes they are, the particle emitters that come from tires, yes they're more, they're relevant and they come from all vehicles.

However, usually they are PM10, not so much PM2.5 and therefore they're much more, much less harmful for human health because they're bigger and they get trapped in the upper respiratory system, not in the lungs.

Another thing that I wanted to say is that simple calculation, hope you follow me, 2018 ridership was 1.8 million.

Assuming that an average trip in cats buses is about 30 minutes or less, especially considering that the free trolley, which is the shortest loop, accounts for about a third of the riders, 1.8 million for 100,000 revenue hours.

It's about 18 passengers per hour, but they're only inside the bus for 30 minutes.

So it's about nine passengers on each bus at each particular time.

That's barely break even with the emissions of a personal vehicle.

So yes, moving to the cleaner solutions is necessary if we ever want to reduce emissions from the community.

Hi, Susan Cruz, Executive Director of the Community Climate Collaborative.

Thank you all so much tonight for spending so much time on this issue and the large number of city staff who have engaged.

First, before I get to my main comments, I just want to encourage counselors to, there was a sheet of paper handed out that had the grid mix of fuel source and I want to make sure people understand that coal is almost eliminated from our electrical grid.

So that people know where, you know, electricity emissions are coming from and we've seen in climate that every year electricity gets cleaner and emissions about three to six percent, maybe sometimes even higher.

And every year the Energy Information Administration updates that number.

In 2019, the City of Charlottesville committed to a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

This is not an easy task.

Reaching this commitment will require difficult decisions along the way, like the ones you've made this evening, especially where climate decisions intersect with other community needs.

Since C3 was founded six years ago, we have yet to see a standalone climate decision.

Because climate issues are community issues and community issues are climate issues.

The best climate solutions are created with consideration for the people who will be impacted by them.

Cat's recommendation for alternative fuels strikes this balance, an important balance.

We can't ignore transit as a key driver in enabling community mobility and access to job services and recreation.

Reaching carbon neutrality will require an effective transit system that encourages people to leave their cars behind sooner rather than later.

Cat proposes to address this by expanding its fleet now and increasing frequency and service hours.

While these buses will not be zero emission, an effective and sustainable transportation to zero emission buses will require infrastructure to charge and house the buses and training for drivers and service staff, which you've all heard about tonight.

It is important to be

Both people and planet, C3 Applauds CAT for leading the way.

Tonight, you have heard from CAT, the Office of Sustainability and the Department of Neighborhood Services.

These dedicated city staff members have worked to create a collaborative recommendation.

They have earned C3 support, and I'm glad to hear that they've earned yours as well.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Katie Larson.

I'm both an intern at C3 and I'm also an environmental thought and practice student at the university.

First of all, thank you very much for having us and I'd love to voice my appreciation and support for this pilot program and also to affirm my ongoing support for a complete and timely transition to a zero-emission bus fleet.

Sustainability is something that we need to implement now and realistically yesterday.

And creating a more sustainable bus fleet is one of the most effective ways that Charlottesville can affect its climate impact.

And it's going to help both the local community's health and our ongoing commitment to leading the country as a sustainable leader.

It's my view, given both the finite nature of fossil fuels as well as the magic threat of climate chaos, that alternative fuels, especially zero tailpipe emission sources, are in inevitability.

We can't go on the way that we have.

We're going to have to change.

And it's simply a question of when we're going to get on the bus.

and the sooner we make the switch the more great positive impact we can have on the environmental issues and the more we can establish ourselves as a national leader of environmental progress.

So I believe that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to make a timely and effective change and for this reason I hope that this pilot program will lead to continued ongoing plan to vigorously pursue the transition to a zero emission bus fleet to help create a better life for ourselves and our children.

Yeah, thank you for the time to speak for just a moment.

I'm sure there's no doubt around the table in front of me.

My extreme disappointment in regard to the decision made this evening.

The temerity, right?

The over extreme caution about moving forward with electric buses is amazing.

People in this community applaud cat for being the first.

And I would just say it's great.

Something's happening with cat.

but it's the first of action that should have been occurring in this community years ago, right?

So Kat's moving forward and that's great but they're first because there has been essentially zero action in this community by this city of Charlottesville over recent years.

So you can applaud action but it's just, it's really not enough and there's, it amazes me and of course I was hitting you with a couple of emails here during the meeting

Some real fundamental lack of understanding about the climate crisis in front of us.

You don't even understand what materials are in batteries.

Your consultants are telling you the wrong information.

I put data in front of you all.

in

Be very supportive and beneficial for those people that do not have cars.

And additionally, some number of people will elect not to use their cars.

But the data shows that to get the sort of millions of riders that you want, rides that you want, you have to have speed.

People care about how long does it take to get from point A to point B. Your own survey data suggests that.

The research literature shows that, and yet in the last ten minutes around the table there's wishful thinking that people are going to see buses and say, oh, I'm going to all abandon my cars and we'll reach climate goals.

It's extremely disappointing.

and Michael Payne.

In 2030, next decade is acceptable.

It's not.

And we're all going to pay the price.

There are other things that I could say.

I'm about out of time.

I'll probably save them for an editorial to the Daily Progress if I can get it published again.

Thank you.

Other comments?

If not, thank you all for your time this evening.