Commentary
While the political battle rages on over mandates for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, Canadian municipalities have been going all-in on electric buses, and it hasn’t gone well. Despite the failures of electric bus fleets in numerous North American cities, local governments continue to commit to large-scale electric bus purchases. Calgary’s recent commitment to spend nearly half a billion dollars on a fleet of electric buses is one of the latest and largest expenditures in Canada.
Civic administrations and politicians have been going through the motions of due diligence on electric bus purchases, yet they ignore the negative results of their trials. The push for electric bus fleets appears ideological rather than practical.
In 2021, the city of Calgary budgeted $14 million for a pilot program, which would include purchasing 14 electric buses from Vicinity Motor Corp. The delivery of the buses was continually delayed until the order was finally cancelled in late 2024. The city says that no money was given to the now-bankrupt bus manufacturer, but it never disclosed how much had been spent on the chargers and maintenance facilities for a type of bus that no longer exists. By every measure, the trial was a failure. Money was wasted for years, and not a single bus made it to the road.
The city of Calgary ignored the failure and plowed ahead with a plan to purchase 259 electric buses from a different manufacturer at a price nearing $500 million. Since committing to that plan, the number of projected buses to be purchased has fallen to 120 while the cost remained the same. In other words, the price has more than doubled. A diesel bus in Calgary costs $400,000, according to Calgary Transit. The cost of electric buses is reaching over $4 million per bus. That’s a 1000 percent increase in costs per bus.
Mayor Jyoti Gondek said that “Zero-emission buses will be far less costly to maintain and operate with lower fuel costs when compared to conventional diesel buses.”
Will they, though?
By Cory Morgan
