Thanks, Beege Welborn, for bringing this to my attention!
Local 10 in Miami investigated why the county has almost 100 electric buses, worth tens of millions of dollars and paid for by taxpayers, that remain unused for over a year.
Around 60 in Miami-Dade County are off the road, while 31 in Broward sit in a landfill site.
So what’s wrong? Reliability issues! Color me shocked:
The buses were manufactured by Proterra and were once promoted as the future of public transit.Instead, both counties say the buses were plagued with reliability issues.“They would only do a partial run, and then they would fail, which required us to either send out mechanics or to tow them back into one of the two garages that we have,” [CEO and general manager of Broward County TransitCoree Cuff] Lonergan said. “And that just kept happening and happening.”Officials say parts have been difficult to obtain because they are proprietary.Proterra filed for bankruptcy. Its assets were sold to a successor company, but counties say support and parts availability have remained unavailable.
The buses cost almost $96 million in total.
Anything federally funded comes with strings, even electric buses.
One string requires taxpayers to pay back a portion of the funding.
Broward County and Miami-Dade County are trying to get out of it:
In Broward County, transit officials have formally asked the Federal Transit Administration for forgiveness in an effort to avoid paying that money back.“And so one of the things that we are, the application that we submitted to the FTA is for us to be able to get forgiveness from them so that we do not have to reimburse them for the funds that they have provided to us and also to be able to dispose of them,” said Coree Cuff Lonergan, CEO and general manager of Broward County Transit.In Miami-Dade County, leaders are taking a different approach.Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the county is still trying to find a way to get the buses back on the road.“We are still hopeful we can still put them into service. The company that is the successor company is not able to give us the level of service we need,” she said.
Federal guidelines that the electric buses stay in service for 12 years or 500,000 miles.
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