San Francisco’s route to emissions-free public transit — a longstanding goal under the city’s climate plan — took a strange detour this week.
Facing financial limitations and pressure from fans of SF’s warhorse trolley buses, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board agreed Tuesday to alter a plan, adopted in 2018, to replace all buses in the Muni fleet with electric plug-in buses by 2035.
That plan would have even phased out trolleys — buses with rooftop forks connecting to overhead wires — which debuted on city streets more than 80 years ago and are, in the words of one advocate this week, “tried and true.” Going exclusively plug-in, including a conversion of bus maintenance yards into charging stations, would have cost more than $1.5 billion, the agency’s transit director Julie Kirschbaum said Tuesday.
The new goals are more of a lane change than a U-turn. But they illustrate how external forces, such as the pandemic disruption and voter discontent, can force a rethink of goals and regulations.
For example, officials acknowledge that SF’s transit is already quite green: The current fleet accounts for less than 1 percent of greenhouse gasses in the city, according to SFMTA. (Transportation accounts for 44 percent of SF’s emissions, but mostly from private cars and trucks.) Officials now aim to meet California regulations by 2040 and say both electric plug-in buses and trolleys will be part of the mix.
The move conceded that a shift by 2035 was too ambitious, given high costs and relatively small gains in emissions savings. Muni is also asking permission to keep buying diesel hybrids until 2030 (they can run for short distances in battery mode), which make up about two-thirds of the bus fleet.
Swapping the diesel buses for all-electric makes green sense. But the 2018 plan’s call also to replace electric trolleys, which are already zero-emission, made less sense to many parties, including SFMTA board member Steve Heminger. “Why not expand the trolley network and achieve the same purpose?” he asked during Tuesday’s meeting.
Kirschbaum did not commit to an expansion. But people who build electric infrastructure for a living were optimistic. “SFMTA is recognizing that trolley buses are integral to their decarbonization goals,” Alex Lantsberg, research and advocacy director for the SF Electrical Construction Industry, told The Frisc. He later called the policy change “a monumental shift” during public comment.
While the new plan puts trolleys in the city’s electric future for now, it isn’t the final word. Indeed, SFMTA itself still seems of two minds on how to proceed.
Money changes everything
While SFMTA deputies have pushed for battery powered buses, other factors have seemed to weigh against them. One is their own boss: In a July interview about the agency’s ongoing tests of plug-in buses, SFMTA executive director Jeffrey Tumlin noted earlier this year that “right now, nothing beats electric trolley buses. They’re incredibly efficient.”
SFMTA is also bowing to a budget crunch wrought by core riders — downtown commuters — who haven’t returned post-COVID. Meanwhile, federal pandemic relief ends in one year, and part of the replacement plan, a $400 million bond, lost at the ballot box in June 2022. That has hampered the ability to pay for upgrades. Kirschbaum said Tuesday that the first all-electric bus yard is still an “unfunded construction project.”
PG&E is another bottleneck, according to Kirschbaum. To power its trolleys, the agency bypasses the giant utility and gets juice from city-owned infrastructure. But electrification of bus yards requires more than SF public utilities can provide.
According to SFMTA, PG&E estimates it would take three to five years for each of the six maintenance yards to get the power needed to charge buses. (PG&E did not respond to requests for comment.)
At this rate, SFMTA would fall well short of a key milestone in its original 2018 plan. Instead of 100 battery electric buses in operation by 2025, it would have only 18. “It doesn’t do any good to buy electric buses if you don’t have the equipment to charge them,” SFMTA Zero Emission program manager Bhavin Khatri told The Frisc in a separate interview.
Electrification sensation
The move to electric buses isn’t voluntary. In 2018, the California Air Resources Board ordered all public transit agencies to switch to some form of electric vehicles, which can include fuel-cell, battery electric buses (BEBs), and yes, even trolley buses.
Still, for complicated reasons, SFMTA officials decided last decade to go all-in with battery buses and overhaul their six maintenance yards. (The highest profile modernization is the Potrero Yard, where the city will also build 500 units of affordable housing. It’s set to break ground in 2024.)
One facility that’s begun the transition is Woods Yard, just east of Potrero Hill. It’s part of a pilot project that started in 2022. At Woods, 10 battery electric buses, painted with giant lightning bolts, plug into 10 of the 12 charging stations installed so far. (Two more buses are expected soon.) The agency is using a $30 million federal grant to purchase 18 more charging devices, some of which will charge 60-foot BEBs, a longer bus yet to be tested on SF streets.
The BEBs have been put through their paces all over town, especially to see how they fare on steep grades and long routes. Khatri told The Frisc that they can climb a 23-percent grade — such as Fillmore Street between Vallejo and Broadway — and travel 160 miles on a single charge.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Kirschbaum said the reliability of the BEBs isn’t up to par with the diesel buses, and the agency is “holding the manufacturers accountable” for issues that she didn’t specify.
Trolleys of the future
Today’s trolley buses can run several miles off-wire, equipped with a powerful battery, which is helpful to maneuver around street construction or an emergency. Kirschbaum noted the agency has four next-generation versions ready for testing. These have a bigger battery to allow travel as far as 10 miles off-wire; a route like the 7 Haight-Noriega could use trolley buses when it reaches the Sunset, she said.
While advocates want to make trolleys the centerpiece of an all-electric future, Kirschbaum has reasons for caution, which she listed in a slide deck posted online before Tuesday’s meeting. (In an odd moment during the meeting, Commissioner Heminger asked about the “negative” slide, which Kirschbaum had not mentioned during her presentation to the board.)
One problem, according to the slide, is efficiency: The time it takes to reconnect buses to wires delays riders. Yet another is “public resistance.” When The Frisc asked Khatri for examples, he said, “We have a hard time with any approval to get new overhead lines,” without offering any specific details. (Yes, some San Franciscans have called the wires an eyesore.)
Perhaps the biggest problem is a combination of aging infrastructure and supply chain. SFMTA is hesitant to build new wires and replace substations — some are 50 years old — when the only North American trolleybus manufacturer had to be convinced to stay in the market. Kirschbaum shared that Khatri and Tumlin pulled together a coalition of five other transit agencies at a recent conference to “signal to the manufacturer that we are going to stay invested.”
Pressed by Heminger, she said the longer range of the next-generation trolleys could mean not having to add new wires to expand service. “I very much believe trolleys are an important part of our future and may even be part of our expansion after 2030,” she said.
Advocates hope the “may” in the previous sentence becomes “will,” and for clues they’ll be watching as SFMTA upgrades its maintenance yards. Kirschbaum said Tuesday that the Potrero facility, once it’s overhauled in a few years, will be a “hub” for trolleys, but during construction 90 of them will be mothballed. Why not use them, asked Cyrus Hall of the Transit Riders Union, instead of buying more diesel buses? “Let’s get those dozens of [trolley] buses on the road,” he said. “We already own them.”
Before the pandemic, SFMTA had plenty of trouble hitting long-range targets with complex projects. Now the task is even more complicated. The agency is still piecing back together SF’s transit system after it nearly ground to a halt in 2020, all while trying to re-imagine it for the rest of the century.