An All-Electric City Bus Fleet? Welcome to Montreal, Circa 2025
By John O'Dell May 25, 2010
Electric drive for intra-city mass transit makes sense. The vehicles, typically buses or trolleys, don't travel all that many miles in a day and don't need to strain battery capacity by flying down the freeways at 80 mph.
Montreal will begin testing electric buses next year. This model, from Colorado's Proterra, is using a prototype fast charger to top up its batteries.
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Quite a few cities are testing the waters with a bus or two, but the Canadian city of Montreal has decided to try full immersion.
An article in the Montreal Gazette (brought to our attention by our friends at AutoblogGreen) reports that the city's transit operator - Societe de Transport de Montreal, or STM - has announced thatit intends to replace almost all of its 1,300 buses with electric models by 2025.
It will start testing buses next year, initially using trolleys that pull power from overhead lines but switching as the technology advances to so-called fast-charge buses with battery packs that can be recharged in as little as 20 minutes.
The idea, STM operations chief Carl Desrosiers told the newspaper, is to put a fast charge station at each end of a bus line. "When the bus arrives its recharges for 10 t 15 minutes and it's good for another 20 kilometers...That's the future," Desrosiers said.
We think so, and we applaud Montreal for becoming what appears to be the first major North American city to commit to a fully electric bus system.
STM used almost 12 million gallons of fuel for its buses last year, Desrosiers said. "My dream is that in 2025 we will use zero."
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