Three-quarters of the city’s 60-bus electric fleet is in the garage with poor immediate prospects for parts to fix them.
Proterra, the American company the city purchased the electric buses from between 2019-2022, is in Chapter 11 filing for bankruptcy protection. Edmonton’s on a list of creditors, seeking $1.3 million and fulfillment of service and warranties. […]
While the website touts mileage up to 340 km on a charge, on Edmonton streets the stylish bus is a sluggish employee. It has a range of up to 117 km, which gets it on the streets from 5 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. before it has to hit the charger, and then gets back out from 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Nobody saw this coming, except everyone with an IQ over 50
Are you implying the people in charge are idiots?
They are Leftists, aren’t they?
They’re IYIs
Intellectuals Yet Idiots.
There are +165 billion barrels of recoverable oil just north of Edmonton and waiting to be cleaned up.
The genius’ who decided to buy these in Edmonton should be held to account. Though there is a part of me which laughs at them too, as Calgary has a connection through Vicinity Motors, which were set to be bought by City of Calgary Transit and powered via Proterra batteries. Maybe they’ll buy batteries from the “Great Canadian Battery Company” currently being funded by ALL OF US.
Hopefully the gov’t of Canada has a back door connection to this boondoggle, though the #Libranos seem to be made of teflon and nothing sticks or damages them enough to turn on their chief imbecile and PM.
Heh, I referred to “back door” and the PM in the same sentence. Probs loads of people thinking this.
“back door”
Noticed that.
These boondoggles are charged from a mostly fossil fuel powered grid. WTF?
I believe the Feds were subsidizing purchase of electronic busses. Bet you any money.
Yes Linda, but I didn’t search for the federal connection to Edmonton’s problems…
https://www.masstransitmag.com/bus/vehicles/hybrid-hydrogen-electric-vehicles/article/53063955/calgary-to-see-c325-million-federal-investment-to-electrify-buses
“Calgary to see C$325 million federal investment to electrify buses
The federal investment is in addition to the C$165 million the city received through an agreement with the Canada Infrastructure Bank in February to deploy up to 259 zero-emission buses.”
CNBC Closed their climate desk and will no longer have staff dedicated to coverage of Climate Change.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1726869269403865448.html
Elected Jacobins and green Bolsheviks aren’t good at math, physics, engineering, critical thinking, logic, economics, most life skills, thrift, and humility. They are good at parroting popular narratives, belief in absurdities, pimping hysteria, virtue signaling and pissing away borrowed money in buying votes and boondoggles.
Like I wrote on an earlier post, insanity prevails and is in full swing…although electric vehicles are not selling and piling up at dealerships with some car builders already cancelling new projects, What use to be Chrysler is suppose to release the new Ram “Ramcharger” with a complete 3.6 litre V6 under the hood, to power a generator to charge the battery. They call it the “extended mileage version”…. If you can’t reach a charging station, you stop, start the engine and wait a minimum 1 hour to get some charge…no you cannot run the engine/generator while rolling and no you cannot drive on the 3.6 litre either because it has no linkage to the wheels, just to an electric generator.
As far as full blown madness, this one so far tops it all…it even beats the craziness of having diesel powered charge stations.
I actually thought the “extended range” version meant they had improved the tech somehow.
The disconnected engine is too silly for satire.
Neighbor has a $90k Chrysler Jeep wrangler E something.
Has a reasonable v6 that cannot charge the battery. Must be plugged in. Thing is purely electric for 20km then purely gasoline at a miserable 19mpg hwy. Drives like a heavy plastic jeep.
Chrysler seems to have missed the whole point of a hybrid
Want to know how big a scam this was? In 2020, they bought 20 new buses using funds from Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB). This was after having 40 buses for a little over a year. In other words, they would have been in a position to acknowledge the parts deficiency and the mileage per charge falsity. And yet, they went through with the deal to increase the fleet by a third borrowing against the tax payers dime.
They either didn’t do the due diligence or they did and ignored it.
The goal was not the efficient use of tax dollars nor efficient transit service. The goal was to virtue signal about “saving the planet” with those EV’s.
And who got the commission on the bus purchases?
Or consulting fees?
They got rid of electric buses that worked in 2009 long after the global warming scam was generally accepted. Now they buy into a system that is infinitely more expensive and doesn’t work. The whole system of coal fired buses is stupid but why not use ones that have worked for about 100 years, first as streetcars, then as trolley buses?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_buses_in_Edmonton
Does this really deserve a comment? I don’t think so.
The city would be smarter run by 100 random people from the phone book.
Only thing you got wrong is an order of magnitude. Think 10.
All the busses are in a garage? Pretty ballsy. Who are the underwriters…Lloyd’s of London?
Here in the Superior Socialist Commune of Toronto we do things bigger which always mean better. For the benefit of the proletariat, our glorious city has put in an order for over 1000 electric buses! Only the imperialist and counter revolutionary speaks of facts and science. The buses will succeed because history wills it.
In an act of prescience, Heroes of the Revolution destroyed the capitalist trolley busses thirty years ago.
There is no turning back from the future.
Entirely correct. Toronto’s electric trolley buses were destroyed because of many years of maintenance neglect. This particularly included the overhead catenaries, which, if retained would have made electric trolley buses simple and inexpensive.
However, the political excuse by Jack Layton when he was a Toronto city councilor (remember that useless, dead POS?) and current NDP MPP Peter Tabuns is that electric trolley buses would encourage more nuclear power. Whatever socialists say about anything is automatically viciously stupid.
The irony was that Mayor Sohi, before being mayor, before being the stupidest cabinet minister in a Trudeau cabinet, was an Edmonton bus driver. Peter Principle rules again!
The competition for being the stupidest cabinet minister in a Trudeau cabinet must be brutal.
Probably easier than being the gayest. Rectum? Damn near killed him.
No, de Cosmos, there is a very clear hierarchy of the truly bad in the Liberal cabinet: Patty Hajdu, who was the world’s stupidest national health minister during Covid; and the spectacularly inept and lazy Bill Blair (Canada’s worst defense minister since the stupid and corrupt Col. Sam Hughes.) Climate Change Barbie was very stupid, but she’s gone.
Garden Gnome Barbie is neither stupid nor incompetent; she’s a vicious liar who had the one rather good Trudeau cabinet minister (and arguably Canada’s best defence minister in 100 years) dragged out and shot politically. Aside from Anand, all the rest of Canada’s defence ministers for the past century have been generally effing stupid.
L – Electric buses that can’t go anywhere. Yet, taxpayers are still being thrown under the bus.
Oh, the irony is heavy. When the voting is light in municipal politics. On the other hand they
could be embossed with the name of the politicians responsible, and then turned into shelters
for the homeless.
Lada-level quality – a hard level to reach.
Can’t we just park them in Downtown Edmonton in one place for the homeless to sleep on? The bus will catch fire and then they can stay warm.
In Philadelphia, beginning around 1900, you could get nearly everywhere in the city and suburbs on an electric trolley car. I grew up next to one of the suburban lines and rode the trolleys a lot in the 1970’s. That line still runs today. Back then many of the cars dated to the 1930’s. They ran great for 50 years. When they finally retired them, several went straight to museums. The reason they were reliable and successful was that they were built and operated by a for profit private enterprise. Public ownership of mass transit was still 20 years away.
Many who take the bus are POC.
Seems like some type of reverse environmental racism!
If they ain’t rolling, society benefits.
I was in a new Edmonton Transit bus barn a year ago and I noticed the charging stations for the new electric buses. I noted that the charging stations were near the center of the building and envisioned the disaster should one of the sparkies went hot while the barn is full.
Tax dollars are are not real money anyway.. 60 idiot busses that hardly work.. Fits nicely with 6000 city workers that hardly work.. I don’t think any of them care about service or value.. That’s just crap that none of them were hired to deal with..
I smell subsidies.. They got a great circle jerk deal on this boondoggle.. Unfortunately the American company had to do a little circle jerking itself / bankruptcy / rename and come back for more, boondoggle..
The boondoggles were just out of sync.. They need to be more careful in the future and pick ground floor boondoggles that go bankrupt at the same time.. Then we will be greener for longer :).