Electric, Hydrogen & Hybrid Electric Buses in Ireland

LOL yep, I was going to link to it but I’m just on the phone.

I highly recommend that video to others, it is very entertaining in how genuinely mad it is, it makes you appreciate how good and modern Luas is. Just a pity we don’t have more lines.

Not Just Bikes also has a podcast and he had RM Transit on the two of them complained about how bad the trams are for a good hour.

BTW Toronto’s planned updates to their heavy rail services have also largely been cancelled and are a massive mess. RM Transit Made a big video about what a mess it is two months ago and how angry it has made him!

Toronto is absolutely not something we want to be following!

Irelands Electric buses don’t have a secondary diesel heating, but then Ireland isn’t Toronto, so we don’t really get that level of cold weather. I personally found the EW’s comfortable during last winter, but of course I’m well aware different people have different temp comfort levels.

I went digging for the report into the issues with electric buses and having read it, I don’t think there is really anything for us to worry about in it, it seems to be a normal Toronto public transport mess!

First of all, they currently have only 100 EV buses, we already have a lot more then that operating on our roads every day, Toronto is already pretty small scale compared to us.

But to make it worse, they didn’t buy one model of EV buses, they bought 20 odd from 4 different bus companies!

BYD, Proterra, New Flyer and Nova Bus. Proterra were a start up and have gone bust. BYD while they aren’t a new bus manufacturer they are relatively new to the North American market and they have had problems. New Flyer being owned by ADL’s parent are more established and Nova Bus are owned by Volvo, so a bit more established.

But relatively small orders split between multiple companies isn’t going to draw much “excitement” from them and certainly complicates maintenance and operations.

They mention supply issues, but I suspect that is due to Trump and only impacts the North American market. While we are talking Canadian and not US, it would certainly complicated things for them, US manufacturers likely are struggling to get batteries from China given the tariffs and BYD are likely to leave the market if they haven’t already. Nova Bus already announced they are leaving the US market!

I haven’t heard of any such supply issues in Europe, Wrights seem to be churning out new electric buses at a high rate and so much so, that we have more then we have chargers for, so this really doesn’t seem to be an issue for us or the bus market in general in Europe.

As for the chargers, that is where the usual Toronto messing up of public transport comes in. Apparently Toronto government are refusing to building a new bus depot, which is needed to install chargers and eventually grow the fleet! It is even impacting Diesel buses. Very different from the NTA building multiple new depots in Dublin and around the country!

Finally on range, Toronto are apparently getting 250km out of their buses in the worst of their winter. That sounds pretty good to me in the context of Dublin. Specially when you consider that more then half the fleet returns to the depot off peak anyway, so you can always get a topup charge then if needed.

So I don’t think there really is all that much for us to learn from here, other then not what to do. The NTA while definitely not perfect, already seem to be doing a far better job then Toronto, buying far more EV buses, from a seasoned manufacturer and most importantly investing heavily in new bus depots and chargers.

BTW Toronto’s issues goes beyond trans and buses, they recently had a massive breakup with Deutsche Bahn to build a S-Bahn type heavy rail system for Toronto. It seemed DB wanted to build a European style S-Bahn service, but Metrolinx instead have decide to cut back to a far less ambitious plan (e.g. rubbish plan).

Frankly Toronto’s public transport investment looks like a dumpster fire, certainly nothing for us to learn from!

Sounds like you live somewhere that gets much colder then Ireland, so I'm not sure if it is at all relevant for us.

Having said that, I don't think the trial of 3 Hydrogen buses with BE has been at all successful. Looking at Bustimes it looks like two of them haven't been on the road since October. I don't think it is an issue with cold, rather an issue with Hydrogen refuelling facilities and the high cost of Hydrogen fuel, at least based on previous articles on the subject.

Having said that Belfast has 25 or so and are actively using them, so they seem to be having more success, so I'd be interested to hear any feedback on the experience they are having with them.

That is great, but if we really are short on chargers and have more EW's then chargers, then surely it would be better to prioritise putting them on the road, at least until the O launches.

While true, it is worth noting that grid capacity is highly localised. So while one part of the country might be highly constrained, for example certain areas of Dublin, another part of the country like Sligo might have plenty of spare capacity.

I don’t know if that is the case for Sligo or not, but just because it is an issue for Dublin, doesn’t necessarily follow that it would be for other parts of the country too. Athlone for instance didn’t have any issues with getting chargers installed.