After more than eight months bus subsitution, trains are back on New Jersey Transit’s (NJT) Atlantic City Rail Line (ACRL) to Philadelphia, and on the Princeton Junction - Princeton Shuttle.
Service reductions elsewhere continue, and lack a definite restoration date. The ACRL and Dinky closed after Labor Day last year to permit the installation of Positive Train Control (PTC), but some local advocates and public officials questioned the need for a total shutdown.
16 january 2019: The new articulated buses that N. J. Transit unveiled on Friday should have been electric, not Diesel. It’s time that NJT becomes a leader in vehicle technology, not a follower. For example, only now will new NJT city transit and suburban type buses purchased be low-floor with wheelchair ramps {not lifts}. NJT insisted on buying high-floor buses with lifts for years after the entire transit industry had switched to low-floor technology. Fact is that NJT was forced to finally buy low-floor buses because no bus builders would build high-floor transit buses anymore. NJT’s excuse was the loss of a few seats with low-floor buses. But the advantages of low-floor buses far outweighed the loss of a few seats. About the only place that high-floor transit buses still operating in North America can be found are in New Jersey.
N. J. Transit will order a small batch of electric low-floor transit buses to be operated in the Camden area next year.
NJT’s bus operations are radically different from NYC’s, often with respect to range and relative economy of providing appropriate capacity rapid-charging points. That to me makes pure-electric design a crapshoot at best; a logistic nightmare if anything out if the expected (specifically including any unanticipated degrade of battery capacity over time) occurs. NJT had front boarding only, and the usual provision of front wheel wells for steering in an ELF bus makes for a bottleneck in that area as, unlike on existing buses, no longitudinal seating can be provided over the wells (or, sensibly, ahead of them unless there is excessive overhang length ahead of the front wheels, which will likely have poor effects on the non-beam-axle construction required by a suitable modern low-floor design.
In my opinion a good plug-in diesel hybrid is the only ‘future’ solution that makes practical sense as a general-fleet bus to replace, say, the MCIs. The situation only becomes more tenable when you get well into the era of legal autonomous operation, where autonomous ‘recharging vehicles’ could be requested if a bus ‘reports’ low power problems and promptly go to an arranged ‘interception’ point for recharge either from a clean genset or a large battery/super cap array.
I do think, in the absence of a large angle-drive engine at the rear, that low-floor accommodation aft of the rear wheel wells makes far more ‘sense’ than wheelchair lifts or the fun in providing wheelchair access past the front wheel tubs when the bus is crowded.
I think the questions are route lengths and miles possible between 20-80% charge. I doubt if NJT is so unique among mass transit bus systems that it cannot move towards electric.
They can, and I think they will; all I’m saying is that straight electric is not as good, or as flexible, a solution for what they need in a general fleet as plug-in hybrid. (The combustion engines themselves can be comparatively small, but they need to be sized to provide continuous sustaining HEP as well as reasonable street-speed operation)
We had something of a ‘dry run’ in charger saturation with the Dutch taxis that were given ‘free lifetime charging’ by Tesla. I think the chargers needed for these buses will be the high-current versions (Magnachargers, I think they’re called?) that Tesla expects to be necessary for the class 8 trucks; I don’t think that either prospective new-renewable generation or necessary distributed extension of the charging infrastructure has been either properly costed-out or arranged for implementation and maintenance. We are already seeing instances in California where ‘plug-in’ drivers are vilified for using chargers that BEV people think should be ‘reserved for their priority’.
As I mentioned, it is possible to distribute the charging architecture in interesting ways; this is not that much different from the infrastructure currently used to support practical electric bike and scooter rentals at correspondingly more capable scale. The alarming part is, aside from me, who have you heard discussion of these issues from?