Q&A: Foothill Transit Team Discusses Sustainability Leadership, Federal Transportation Policy Opportunities | Article

EESI sat down with the Foothill Transit Team, a Los Angeles-based transit provider that services the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys, to discuss their pioneering sustainability work. Foothill Transit was the first transit provider in North America to put fast-charge electric buses on the roads and continues to embrace sustainability in their business practices. Read on to learn about other exciting initiatives like a double-decker electric bus project as well as policy ideas on how to scale up zero-emissions public transit across the United States.

Question: How have Foothill Transit and your sustainability initiatives been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic?

Doran Barnes, Foothill Transit Executive Director: If you look at the impacts of COVID-19, it actually really elevates our mission—specifically, the part of our mission that is providing essential services to the community, including individuals who are going to medical appointments and those who are essential workers getting to job sites. That part of our mission really has been highlighted through COVID.

From a ridership standpoint, we are running at just about half of pre-COVID level ridership, but we have committed to running at virtually 100 percent of our pre-COVID service level. We are sending out marketing messages that say, “We are here for essential trips, but otherwise stay home, don't ride the bus.” You might think, why would a transit system ever say that? But that is what the moment really demands. This gets back to that essential mission that we have to meet the needs of the community and the changing needs that have been thrust upon us by COVID.

From an alternative fuel standpoint, we have continued to move forward with our program. We are looking to continue pioneering technologies and learning about what the best approaches are. Funding continues to be a challenge—our pace, our learning, and our deployment are based on our ability to obtain the resources to keep moving. But we have kept moving.

From my standpoint, we have not really changed much relative to COVID. We are still pressing forward, we are still looking at new technologies, and we still need resources.

Roland Cordero, Foothill Transit Director of Maintenance and Vehicle Technology: The only issue that we have run into in terms of our zero-emissions project is the impact of COVID on the manufacturers. A lot of the manufacturing plants closed because of COVID-19, delaying production of some infrastructure, including our double decker bus project out of the United Kingdom. Bus manufacturers are also experiencing slowdowns in parts and supplies because their suppliers closed down, too. But, for us at Foothill Transit, we continue to move forward with the zero-emissions project.

Q: Foothill Transit was a very early adopter of non-diesel buses. Can you tell us about some of the major steps that Foothill Transit has taken to reduce emissions in your bus fleet?

Felicia Friesema, Foothill Transit Director of Marketing and Communications: We started our commitment to move away from diesel in 2002, when we decided to switch from diesel to compressed natural gas (CNG), and we retired our last diesel bus in 2013. We demolished our diesel tanks shortly thereafter. You know what they say, if you come to a new world, you have to destroy the ship.

Barnes: CNG has become such a bedrock part of what we do. It is a clean alternative fuel, because we are using renewable natural gas (RNG). There are parallels and differences between our CNG experience and our electric experience. With CNG, we were actually a later adopter. Our CNG program has moved forward quite nicely because we learned from others' experiences.

With electric buses, we are the pioneers and we are forging new ground that nobody has been through before. We were the first transit agency in North America to implement a heavy-duty, fast-charge electric bus. We did that in 2010, our launch point. We have demonstrated that fast-charge technology works from a technological standpoint. We then moved on to look at extended-range buses and have deployed that technology. Our double decker bus is going to be arriving here in January 2021 and that certainly will be an exciting milestone.

Throughout this decade, we have continuously learned about these technologies, and we have collected a ton of information. We have been able to share that information not only across the United States, but really across the world. There is still a lot more to learn to really get that right balance of operational performance, energy management, and financial performance. And all of those pieces really have to work together to get to the ultimate end result that we are trying to achieve.

Cordero: There are a lot of technological advances that are going to happen in the next five to six years. Battery technology has to improve to be able to provide transit agencies the range that we need to operate our buses without having to worry about range anxiety. There is also a focus on fuel cells. Transit agencies have to determine what type of technology they want to deploy in their transit system. It is not a one-size-fits-all application, so each transit agency has to study its type of service and what kind of technology fits best for its provision of service.

Barnes: A part of the journey for all of us is driven fundamentally by a commitment to the environment and sustainability, but it is also, in part, shaped by the regulations that have been put in place. For CNG, there was a requirement that we move to an alternative fuel by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. We are now looking at the California Air Resources Board putting a mandate in place to go to zero-emission vehicles. It is that combination of being committed to the environment but also responding to the regulatory environment that we are working within.

Q: What are some of the key lessons learned so far from your pioneering work with electric buses? Can you tell us more about your initial work with hydrogen fuel cell buses?

Cordero: We have been operating battery electric buses for 10 years. We started with three 35-mile range buses at our Pomona facility, and then we added more of those short-range technologies. In 2017, we acquired 440-kilowatt hour extended range battery capacity buses with an expected range of about 220 miles. We found out that the technology limits you to 150 miles because of the battery range, and you have to preserve some of that energy to get the buses back into the bus yard. We realized that if we are going to switch over to more battery-electric buses, that is going to require us to buy more buses to meet the service that we provide to our customers. It is about a 1.5:1 replacement ratio between a battery-electric bus and a CNG bus. If you are buying more buses to provide the same level of service that you currently provide, and the buses cost a lot more, there is a big impact in terms of capital investment.

Our 2019 In Depot Charging and Planning Study determined that it would cost Foothill Transit $120 million for the infrastructure to electrify our entire fleet and there was an added cost to operating the service of about $15 million per year. So, there is a huge capital investment required to switch over to entirely battery electric.

Fuel cell buses have the capability to operate up to 320-350 miles and refueling them takes about 10-15 minutes, as opposed to a battery electric bus that could take 3-4 hours depending on the state of the charge of the battery. So, it seems like a fuel cell bus would be a lot easier to operate even though a fuel cell bus is more expensive than a battery electric bus, at this time, because there has not been a big market for fuel cell buses. We anticipate, as more transit agencies switch over to fuel cell technology, there will be a drop in price. For fuel cell buses, it is a 1:1 replacement ratio with CNG buses, and there are fewer operational impacts. We are shifting some buses over to fuel cell technology to see how that works for us and compare it with electric. We could end up having two technologies to run our service; it will depend on what the data shows for us as we move to fuel cell deployment starting in 2022.

Q: Can you explain how Foothill Transit addresses tailpipe emissions in the context of your broader sustainability considerations?

Barnes: Looking at the lifecycle emissions of the vehicle is really important as we are making decisions. Zero emissions at the tailpipe is certainly a critical measure, but looking at the emission profile of how the energy is generated is something that also needs to be part of the discussion. When we are talking about renewable natural gas versus electric power, renewable natural gas is not as clean as electric power, but electric power does have some emissions. When we project into the future, both of those profiles are going to change. We have to make sure that we are being smart about the full spectrum of sustainability—and sometimes that means you get a benefit here, but there is a tradeoff there. That all needs to be part of the discussion. The whole goal of being sustainable, focusing on the environment, is incredibly important and incredibly complex.

Q: How is Foothill Transit increasing the resilience of the transit system to impacts such as extreme heat and wildfires?

Cordero: California utility companies have been shutting power down to certain locations because of their exposure to the liability of causing brush fires. One issue we need to look at is what kind of support system or added technologies would we be able to use to operate battery-electric buses when electricity is not available. There has to be a focus on battery storage or solar panels, or another type of technology that we can use to provide a backup system. With natural gas, it is a little more resilient given current technology versus electricity, because it is separate from the grid. We need to look at how we are going to support these new technologies with ongoing climate change.

Q: What types of federal policies would help bolster transit agencies’ ability to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts?

Barnes: One of the areas that really requires an evolution in thinking has to do with federal support to continue to advance the technology. There has been federal support for low- and no-emission vehicles and sustainability programs, but what they have often done is funded fleets at a very, very small and incremental level. So, if you look at the grants that have been provided, for the most part, they have been two buses or three buses—pretty small in scale. That is important because all the transit systems need to get the experience of working with this technology. But there is another layer of learning that we have not really focused on, and that is getting to scale.

We really need some deployments of 25 or 50 or so—large numbers of these types of vehicles—and to do it in a way that provides the support to get through that learning process so that the benefits of that learning can be shared with the rest of the industry. What we do not want is to have multiple fleets trying to figure out the technology independently, not getting it right, but then replicating the not getting it right across the sector.

We need a sizable investment in the technology combined with independent research to evaluate performance, and then turn that learning into best practices going forward. That strategic scale-up is a piece that we really have not seen at the federal level. We are way beyond research and development, but we have not quite reached full, robust, completely figured out deployment. We are in that middle zone, and the middle zone requires a high level of resources that we really have not seen. Our country could be well served by making those kinds of investments in addition to the incremental investments.

We really need to get to that scalability. That is the number one thing on my wish list.

Interview by: Anna McGinn

This interview was edited for clarity and length.