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HALIFAX, N.S. —

Halifax Transit will detour past electric buses for at least the next three years.

“In terms of electrification of the fleet, we are going there,” Dave Reage, director of Halifax Transit, told Halifax regional council Tuesday in response to an exasperated plea from Coun. Richard Zurawski to accelerate the process to get electric buses on the streets.

“At this point in time, even with best efforts, I would estimate that we are three years out from seeing an electric bus on the road,” Reage said.

Reage said he appreciates the irony of transmitting greenhouse gases with diesel buses but some of the bus fleet has to be replaced before Halifax Transit will be ready to transition to electric buses.

“We don’t have a choice, we just have to buy diesel at this point,” Reage said. “I anticipate that when we come back here in three or four years and we are having the same conversation, we are going to be talking about electric buses at that point.”

The focus of that part of the budgetary discussion was the Moving Forward Together plan, a multiple-year initiative to restructure the transit network. The first phase of the plan, to reconfigure existing transit routes, is already underway.

Zurawski, council representative for the Beechville and Clayton Park area, views as unacceptable the three-year electric delay put forward by Reage.

“It’s not what I want to hear,” said Zurawski, who a year ago led the charge for regional council to declare a municipal climate emergency.

“There is a difference between what is acceptable in terms of mitigating our climate output and what is just doing something,” Zurawski said. “We are moving glacially toward where we need to go with this. Is there not some way that we can begin the infrastructure planning a lot more quickly than what we are doing right now?”

The municipality in November issued requests for proposals for 150 new Halifax Transit buses to be supplied from 2020 to 2022. The proposal estimates that 46 buses will be required this year, 63 in 2021 and 40 in 2022 as replacements for buses that will be completing their life cycles. The 150 new carriers will become part of the fleet’s 330 diesel-driven conventional buses.

“Buying buses is the easy part. … The complicated and time-consuming part is rebuilding garages, it’s the electrical infrastructure."

The cost of a conventional diesel bus is estimated at more than $600,000 but still comes in at roughly half the price of an electric bus. Electric buses would also require installation of charging infrastructure and bus maintenance garages to be retrofitted. Still, Zurawski points out that the HaliFACT 2050 action plan that the municipality is to finalize in the coming months, will call for municipal carbon emission reductions of 75 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2050.

Zurawski said Moving Forward Together projections of spending nearly $70 million from 2021 to 2023 on new diesel buses is not compatible with the direction the municipality needs to take.

“We are looking at massive changes happening with Hali-FACT 2050 coming out in the next couple of months … yet we are looking at almost $70 million in expenses on traditional diesel buses, which we know do not in any way fit with what HaliFACT is telling us.”

Reage said in its 2020-21 business unit budget presentation Halifax Transit will request funding for a full-time fleet transformation manager who will be tasked with introducing fleet electrification, “actually sitting down and doing the work and making it happen.”

“That work does take time,” Reage said. “Buying buses is the easy part. … The complicated and time-consuming part is rebuilding garages, it’s the electrical infrastructure. That’s really what this

person is coming in to do, to figure out how we do that. Building anything takes lead time. The expansion of Ragged Lake (bus garage) will be set up for electrification, so once that is built, we can actually start bringing buses in.”

In the meantime, Reage said replacement diesel buses will be more environmentally friendly.

“They are all diesel but the ones that are coming in will have less greenhouse gas emissions than the ones they are replacing,” Reage said. “The ones they are replacing are quite old. They don’t have catalytic conversion and I understand that is actually resulting in a higher level of emissions. While I would never sit here and profess that diesel is a green technology, I think there is still a few more years in getting to electric and in the meantime, we’re taking some of our dirtiest buses off the road.”

About 50 per cent of the Moving Forward Together plan route changes have now been implemented, including alterations during the 2019-20 fiscal year to 19 routes located primarily in the areas of Sackville, Bedford, Dartmouth and Halifax mainland south.

A staff report concluded that anticipated ridership increases with route changes have exceeded expectations, driving an overall network-wide ridership hike of 4.8 per cent in 2018-19 and 8.3 per cent to date in the 2019-20 fiscal year.

The Moving Forward Together plan, the next phase of which council eventually voted to include in its final 2020-21 budget deliberations, includes the purchase of additional conventional diesel buses.

“It’s important to remember that, yes, an electric bus is better environmentally than a diesel bus but a diesel bus is a heck of a lot better than a whole bunch of cars and everything that we’ve been getting on this Moving Forward plan is that it has increased ridership,” Coun. Sam Austin (Dartmouth Centre) said.