Awesome! Always good to hear about progress being made to decrease pollution in our local cities.

That all depends on your definitions of "zero" and "emissions."

I guess the people who live near the electricity power plants (who are generally lower income than Mountain View residents) would beg to differ that our busses in Mountain View have zero emissions.

MV Resident, Thanks for reminding us all that there's always a negative side to any perceived good news. LOL.

Electricity is fungible and it's better and more efficient to centralize energy production, since it can benefit from economies of scale. Not to mention CA's power generation mix is cleaner than most.

Electric vehicles also benefit from improvements in electrical generation automatically.

Due to repeated violations of our Terms of Use, comments from this poster are automatically removed. Why?

$925,000 each WOW! Several electric minivans would be more practical as the buses I see around have few passengers. It costs $619million annually to run the VTA and it takes in $42 million in passenger fares, leaving a shortfall of $577 million, made up directly and indirectly by our tax dollars. This is a disgrace! It would be cheaper to give those in need Uber vouchers. I have no time for Trump but this is why people voted for him. It is an example of a swamp that needs to be drained!

Zero emissions. Zero useful destinations. Zero riders.

Oh great.. the empty busses running up and down El Camino are a little bit better for the environment.

I'm so happy.

It's not often we get someone outright saying poor people don't count ("empty"), but I guess nothing is too shocking these days.

@concerned, agree, it is truly ridiculous seeing these huge bi-articulated busses up and down El Camino, NEARLY empty at all hours of the day and night. It would be far more cost effective to issue Uber/taxi Vouchers to the few people who do need a lift.

Our city leaders are under the delusion that if they build multi storey high density housing with inadequate parking it will force us to take public transportation, that MIGHT be true if we had efficient public transporation, but considering it takes 1 hour 11 minutes on the #22 bus to get from PAMF Mountain View to downtown San Jose (less than 14 miles), demonstrates that nobody will ever rely on bus service unless they are unable to drive for one reason or another.

I agree that electric buses (my dictionary says "busses" is also OK) will save on fuel cost and reduce pollution, especially CO2 pollution. This will cut operating costs, as well.

The nearly million-dollar cost of these electric buses is high, but not part of the operating cost cited; and diesel-powered buses are not cheap.

The idea that smaller buses would be much less expensive to buy is right but the operating cost per bus is not a lot greater for the big double-length route 22 buses and for the very small community buses because each as one driver--a significant part of the operating cost. Maybe autonomous buses will have lower operating costs.

I agree that not all electricity is clean, but in California it is getting cleaner year by year. At worst, I think it is better than diesel and maybe better than compressed natural gas; at best (Mountain View) it is essentially CO2 free.

I don't ride the bus nearly as much as I used to now that I am retired, but "empty", double-length route 22 buses have never been my experience. While I have been on very few that were "standing room only", I have also been on very few with less than 10 passengers. Until I retired last year I regularly commuted to and from work on the route 81 bus and my hours were not the most popular. While I was on very few with more than 10 passengers, I was also on very few with just me and the driver. Also, this route has special, extra buses, morning and afternoon, taking kids to and from school that are ofter "standing room only".

I agree that the route 22 run from PAMF in Palo Alto to downtown San Jose is very long but the route 522 bus runs nearly as frequently, and takes so much less time that it's worth waiting for. Also, at 14 miles, this run takes 28 minutes in a car at an average speed of 30 mph--a high speed, considering the many signals.

Good to know VTA has electric buses, definitely good for air quality in Mountain View, however, is there any research to show how many passengers riding the bus? I usually see no more than 5 people riding those big buses on El Camino. It’s such a waste to have big van running around with only 3 or 5 passengers. VTA should do something to reduce this waste of energy and bus operation.

"it's better and more efficient to centralize energy production, since it can benefit from economies of scale."

You are leaving out the losses of the transmission lines from the power plants to the charging station, the losses of the electric battery chargers, and the losses in the batteries. You are also leaving out the extra energy to manufacture the batteries, not to mention the environmental effects of mining the materials, look up lithium mining. So you gain some from economies of scale but lose much more through these other factors.

This is plain virtue signaling by the VTA bureaucracy at the taxpayers' expense.

@@b

By that logic it'd be more efficient to run every house on it's own gas generator instead of hooking it up to a central energy grid.

YIMBY, your attempt at derisive analogy is way off target and appears even to fundamentally misunderstand the comments it responded to.

"b" is correct that energy production economizes when centralized. "@b" also right: accurate accounting of transmission, storage, and transduction losses impairs that efficiency significantly. The upshot depends all on the specifics. (That's basic energy-balance accounting, which many a technician or undergraduate engineering student could explain to you offhand.) "@b" also raised the very important further point of lifetime energy accounting (which has its own carbon footprints) for production and disposal of the vehicle's components. In the case of modern electric cars, that has been quite an issue, equivocating what at a superficial glance may look like a radically cleaner and carbon-free alternative to internal combustion.

The human habit of considering only facets obvious on the surface (like how much exhaust a vehicle itself produces when in use) underlies many misconceptions about energy. This is the famous conceit of EV drivers who boast that it produces zero carbon footprint. True only in the mind of someone ignoring how the energy was first generated, efficiency factors in getting access to it, and the production and retirement of the vehicle itself. Even seemingly pristine primary power sources like hydroelectricity, burning no fuel in operation, still entail significant carbon footprints when the reality is examined as a whole rather than selectively.

So you mischaracterized "@b's" comment in reply; the comment didn't suggest at all that powering a house on its (not "it's") own generator is more efficient. And yet ironically, in some distribution and location situations that could even be true. It all depends on quantitative details not in evidence here.

You took a long time to say essentially nothing. The logic that @b is working under where transmission loss across power lines and energy cost in building batteries for it would negate any efficiency gains, or in their words "gain some from economies of scale but lose much more through these other factors", of course would not simply apply to electric cars, but most anything we transmit power to. What he should have said was that there are some costs involved, and it's not an 100% clean process all the way through, but to claim that you actually lose more energy vs what you gain through the efficiency of centralizing the production of it is ludicrous.

Oh, I dispute too the one part where "@b" implied that the collective inefficiencies *always* negate the gains of wholesale electricity generation, although -- again -- even that can happen, it depends on the details (not on online opinions).

On the main points of criticism above, though: that such power is never, ever actually "carbon free" or "zero-emission;" that (as an early comment so rightly pointed out) "zero emission" refers just to the buses themselves, their use of commercial electricity having conveniently relocated the associated greenouse gases and pollutions to someone ELSE's back yard (so much for "YIMBY," where carbon emissions are concerned anyway!!); and that with such factors in mind, the main point of these buses does look like "virtue signaling by the VTA bureaucracy at the taxpayers' expense," those comments are all accurate and perceptive.

Some Wikipedia reference info on both full energy-path and product life-cycle efficiencies (vital but frequently overlooked background issues for this topic -- YIMBY, above, for example, labeled them "essentially nothing," and many other people aren't even aware of them):

Web Link

From Web Link on efficiency:
"EV [electric-vehicle] 'tank-to-wheels' efficiency is about a factor of 3 higher than internal combustion engine vehicles.[98]  Energy is not consumed while the vehicle is stationary, unlike internal combustion engines which consume fuel while idling. However, looking at the well-to-wheel efficiency of EVs, their total emissions, while still lower, are closer to an efficient gasoline or diesel in most countries where electricity generation relies on fossil fuels.[107][108][109] / Well-to-wheel efficiency of an EV has less to do with the vehicle itself and more to do with the method of electricity production. . . Thus, when "well-to-wheels" is cited, one should keep in mind that the discussion is no longer about the vehicle, but rather about the entire energy supply infrastructure."