The Capital Area Transit System is looking at the cost-effectiveness of adding alternative fuel buses to its fleet. At the regular meeting of the CATS board Tuesday, the board unanimously approved authorizing CEO Bob Mirabito to hire the University of New Orleans Transportation Institute to provide a report evaluating alternative fuel options and recommending the best solution for CATS. Mirabito says the contract is for $91,000.
“We are still negotiating details and are trying to move up the date, but we would like to see an October timeframe for the report. We are going with an institution of higher learning because it has no predetermined notion—it is technology agnostic and unbiased,” says Mirabito.
Mirabito says he and the board have previously discussed the possibility of adding alternative fuel buses, but that it hadn’t moved past the conversation stage until now. What prompted the movement?
“We have around 45 buses that will need to be replaced over the next four years, and while federal funding is shrinking there appears to be more money available for alternative fuel options,” he says. “We have CMAQ—congestion mitigation and air quality—funding directly tied to alternative fuels.”
Currently, CATS has no alternative fuel vehicles in its fleet. CATS is considering compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, hydrogen, biodiesel, electric and diesel-hybrid options, Mirabito says. Major metro areas such as Dallas, Los Angeles and Phoenix—and even mid-sized cities such as San Bernadino, California; State College, Pennsylvania; and Ann Arbor, Michigan—have transit vehicles using green technology. Mirabito says CATS is not looking to emulate any particular system implemented by other cities.
“We are completely independent of anyone else, because we are looking at a Baton Rouge solution,” he says.
More than a third of the country’s public transit buses already use alternative fuels or hybrid technology, according to the American Public Transportation Association. Nationwide, public transportation fleets are being converted to run on CNG, propane, diesel-electric hybrids and biodiesel. APTA statistics from early 2011 show that 18.6% of U.S. transit buses used CNG, LNG and other alternative fuel blends. Almost 9% of public transit buses were hybrids, and nearly 8% used biodiesel fuel.
