Miami Beach officials knew something had to be done. With one of the hottest entertainment, tourism and convention districts on the East Coast, the traffic on Ocean Drive was almost unbearable.
“On Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, we have total gridlock on South Miami Beach,” says Judy Evans, executive director of the new Miami Beach Transportation Management Association. “People who work here, who operate businesses here, have to park blocks and blocks and blocks away.”
A group of political, private and transit leaders were researching mass transit options when they learned of Chattanooga’s downtown electric bus shuttle. In the next two years, Miami Beach officials made seven trips to the southeast Tennessee city, where they watched battery-powered buses being assembled at Advanced Vehicle Systems and met with members of the local transit authority board.
The benefits of the buses were hard to ignore. Because they burn only a third of the fuel of their diesel counterparts, the low-floor, 22-foot, 22-passenger vehicles cost less to operate. And because alternating-current induction electric motors convert practically all of their fuel into usable power, they’re more energy-efficient than internal-combustion engines. Money is saved on maintenance, too, because battery-powered buses need no tuneups or oil changes.
What’s more, electrics weigh 10,000 to 12,000 pounds less than the diesels, causing less wear and tear on brakes and roads. And the quiet, comfortable, non-polluting buses tend to attract riders who may have shunned mass transportation.
In mid-January, seven AVS buses made their debut in Miami Beach. The five-mile, two-way circulator system provides access to 3,400 parking spaces and 29 stops, where passengers can transfer to a paid metro (diesel) bus to get to the mainland or farther north on the beach. On Oct. 2, the passenger count passed 1 million, 55 percent higher than projections, Evans said.
“We’re getting extremely positive feedback, not just because (the buses) help the environment, but because it’s a new technology. Riders like being part of it,” says Evans. “And they like the fact that they’re frequent, very visible and dependable. In fact, the system is so successful that we’re turning people away, and people are standing on the buses because they’re so full, a problem we never thought we would have this early in the project.”
The Miami Beach story is a familiar–and welcome–one for Joe Ferguson.
In late 1990, after 15 years as executive vice president of Chattanooga Glass Co., which makes soda bottles, and another four as chief executive of an international gas burner manufacturer, Ferguson took an early retirement, only to find himself “climbing the walls.”
He accepted a consulting offer from the Chattanooga Area Transportation Authority unaware that the “temporary” project he was running would turn into the largest electric bus manufacturer in the U.S.
Then-Mayor Gene Roberts had challenged the transit authority to come up with a way to move tourists around Chattanooga’s revitalized downtown–without the dirt, smoke and smell of diesel buses.
The idea of going electric kept cropping up.
“The problem was nobody was building what a public transit group would normally want in a heavier-duty, purpose-built electric bus,” Ferguson says. “That’s where I came in.”
After scouring the country for battery-powered buses, Ferguson headed to Europe. He found three in Zermatt, Switzerland, a small village at the foot of the Matterhorn.
There was one major problem: Even if a deal could be struck with the Bavarian maker for one of its buses, the shipping cost would be enormous.
So, in late 1992, Ferguson bought a 15,000-square-foot building five minutes from downtown, hired three employees and formed AVS, the nation’s first company dedicated to the production of electric and hybrid buses.
AVS is still in the driver’s seat. Of about 120 electric buses in the U.S., AVS has built 69, mostly for public transit organizations and power companies in cities such as Burlington, Vt., and Birmingham, Ala. (Some are operated by power utilities; for example, Georgia Power in Atlanta has shuttle for employees.)
Each bus is built by hand, and no two are identical.
A no-frills, 22-foot model sells for $168,000, compared to about $230,000 for a 30-foot, air-conditioned diesel made by conventional busmakers.
One competitor is APS Systems of Oxnard, Calif., which has supplied five electric shuttle buses to Santa Barbara, Calif., according to adminstrator Dan Levine, and others to cities such as Santa Monica, Oakland and Burbank, Calif.
“The market’s going to change pretty quickly over the next year or two; there may be some large entrants into the market,” says John Wilson, president of the Atlanta-based Southern Coalition for Advanced Transportation, one of seven non-profit research consortiums funded by the Departments of Defense, Environment and Transportation. “But AVS has been the pioneer in this area. They are clearly the market leader now and are expected to remain so in this shuttle-bus market that they have defined for the industry.”
Electric bus manufacturing is not always full-speed ahead.
Since the technology is not taught in most colleges and trade schools, hiring and training employees can pose a challenge.
Reliable parts suppliers are hard to find.
And then there’s the great drawback of the product: short battery life. The average 22-foot electric bus can run only about eight hours before needing a battery change. Though a spent battery pack can be replaced with a fresh one in about 10 minutes, the recharge process takes up to seven hours.
That’s why AVS recently introduced a hybrid-electric bus that uses a small, natural-gas-powered turbine to recharge the batteries while the vehicle is operating.
“One of the reasons it’s such a breakthrough product is that it burns at such a high temperature rate,” Ferguson says. “Natural gas is the cleanest of the fuels to start with. If you check emissions at the tailpipe, it’s just practically zilch.”
Global interest in AVS has been staggering.
At a 1997 summit of Central American leaders, President Clinton toured a Costa Rican rain forest in an AVS bus, praising Chattanooga’s shuttle as “good for America and a good use of American technology.”
Ferguson is now working with the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation to place electric buses in Mexico City; Johannesburg; Bangkok; Shanghai; Cairo; Delhi, India; and Santiago, Chile.
Though he won’t disclose details, Ferguson says he has also formed a partnership with a Middle East bus manufacturer.
Closer to home, his next major challenge is to build 10 30- and 35-foot buses (and one 16-foot prototype) for the Chattanooga Area Transportation Authority to use in its neighborhood routes.
The new fleet will mark the first time larger, faster, hybrid-electric buses will be used in normal mass transit in the United States.
The transit authority expects to replace its fleet of 70 aging diesel vehicles with electric, and Ferguson plans to hire 65 more people and double the size of his plant to meet the demand.
“Five years from now, I think (this technology) is going to stagger most people,” he predicts. “What they will see on the road is going to be electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. We’ve literally kicked a sleeping giant.”
