The Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) led an effort for the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) to identify the economic costs, performance issues, risks, and recommended timeline associated with transitioning to a zero-emission transit bus fleet. This encompasses UCSC’s full fixed-route system of buses and cutaways. The goals of this project were to assess the feasibility of transitioning the entire fleet to 100% zero-emission technology and to understand UCSC’s technology options, transition timelines, and relevant costs. Within the scope of the plan, CTE estimated capital and operational costs, planned project phases and timelines, and determined the infrastructure requirements necessary to adopt zero-emission bus fleet vehicles. The study included the analysis of multiple zero-emission technologies (battery electric and fuel cell electric buses).
CTE applied its standard Transition Planning Methodology to complete the analysis. Using this methodology, CTE first completed a Requirements Analysis and Service Assessment, calculating energy efficiency, energy consumption, vehicle range, and fuel costs for every route and block served by UCSC’s fleet. Once the service needs were identified, CTE developed cost estimates for each transition scenario based on fleet assessments, facilities assessments, fuel assessments, maintenance assessments, and a total cost-of-ownership assessment.
Next, CTE conducted a Redundancy, Resilience, and Response Assessment to investigate UCSC’s options to continue to provide service in fuel scarcity scenarios such as grid failures and shutdowns. As a part of the analysis, CTE reviewed UCSC’s ability to support emergency response in natural disaster events that may require differing duty cycles and vehicle applications. At the conclusion of this assessment, a workshop was conducted with the agency to review the facility and vehicle technology solutions to support a zero-emission fleet in off-grid or grid-down and emergency situations.
This project was unique because it was built off an existing effort from the UCSC student community to transition the university’s fleet to clean vehicles. In 2018, the Transportation and Environment lab at UCSC performed a feasibility assessment and cost analysis of transitioning the current diesel fleet to electric buses.
The reports produced across the duration of this project were presented to campus leadership in January 2024. After a series of Q&A meetings, CTE submitted the final Transition Plan to UCSC in April 2024.
