Riders’ perceptions towards transit bus electrification: Evidence from Salt Lake City, Utah

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Abstract

While battery electric buses (BEBs) can lead to energy savings and reduced emissions, BEB adoption is developing slowly. Although BEBs offer quieter operations, better acceleration, and no smell of diesel or gas fumes, little focus has been placed on the user’s perspective. This study investigates bus riders’ preferences toward BEBs. To achieve these objectives, a survey was designed and administered to solicit riders’ typical travel behaviors and patterns as well as preferences and opinions about BEBs’ performance in terms of emissions and noise. Statistical analysis showed that several factors influence rider perceptions towards transit bus electrification that include trip purpose, attitudes towards environmental issues and environmental impacts of BEBs, and certain non-instrumental ride factors such as ride comfort and social image. A better understanding of the importance of electrification to transit riders can help transit service providers adjust their marketing decisions and their systemwide operations to accommodate preferences towards BEBs.

Introduction

With the transportation sector accounting for the largest portion (27%) of total U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2020 (EPA, 2022), decarbonization of transport has become a crucial challenge. Electric vehicles (EVs) could help by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air and noise pollution as well as alleviate energy security concerns. Electrification of medium and heavy-duty vehicles can mitigate the adverse health impacts to underserved communities that are mainly located near major transit hubs and corridors (Thomas et al., 2022). Battery Electric Buses (BEBs), in particular, are proposed as a solution to the local air pollution caused by diesel buses. As of 2019, less than half (45%) of all buses were diesel powered, with BEBs comprising a small share (1%) of the active fleet (APTA, 2020). Several service providers and transit agencies are introducing BEBs to their fleets, setting up ambitious goals of full fleet transit electrification in the coming decade (roughly 70% of the U.S. fleet by 2030).

Prior research on BEBs has mainly focused on the analysis of planning and operational characteristics for informing the decision-making process for the fleet transition. Past studies have developed simulation and optimization models for investigating scheduling, BEBs battery size, charging infrastructure allocation, and analysis of energy demand and consumption (He et al., 2019, Iliopoulou and Kepaptsoglou, 2021, Kunith et al., 2017, Liu et al., 2021, Wu et al., 2021). In addition, total cost of ownership or lifecycle approaches have been widely used for the economic evaluation of BEBs (Basma et al., 2022, Jefferies and Göhlich, 2020, Rupp et al., 2020). These methods allow examining multiple operational and charging infrastructure attributes of transit networks operating with BEBs in a bid to provide guidance and decision-making tools to service providers and transit agencies that might be hesitant to electrify their fleets. Major barriers to the willingness of service providers to electrify their transit fleets, as reported in the literature, include financial barriers, such as high upfront costs (Li et al., 2018, Mohamed et al., 2018), and operational and technological barriers (Aldenius et al., 2022), such as unknown risks and standardization (Mohamed et al., 2018). In addition, for large-scale transit bus electrification deployments, the installation of charging infrastructure is needed, which will demand space and affect the design of transit depots (Linscott et al., 2021).

Apart from the financial and environmental benefits that BEBs can offer to the operators (Holland et al., 2021, Meishner et al., 2017), the shift of transit agencies towards more sustainable fleets may affect their image and influence users’ and nonusers’ perceptions toward transit, as environmental concerns and sustainability have become important in mode choice or car ownership decisions (Asgari Toorzani and Rassafi, 2022, Gkargkavouzi et al., 2019, Shokoohyar et al., 2022). BEBs would likely affect some important service attributes, such as ride comfort with respect to noise and gas or the smell of fumes. However, the attitudes and the characteristics that affect riders’ perceptions towards transit bus electrification have not been studied to date. Extensive literature has focused on the importance of service quality and user satisfaction to assess behavioral intention and loyalty toward urban public transportation (for example, see the discussion in Losada-Rojas et al., 2019, van Lierop et al., 2018). The need to examine travelers’ preferences, perceptions, attitudes, and opinions toward BEBs has only been recently pointed out (Wang et al., 2022), as it can provide valuable insights for the successful deployment of BEBs and their impacts on public transit systems operations and ridership.

In this context, this paper examines transit bus electrification from a user’s perspective. In more detail, the research questions that this paper attempts to address are the following:

  • i.

    What are bus riders’ perceptions towards the ride comfort attributes of BEBs (e.g., quieter operation, better acceleration, no smell of diesel or gas fumes)?

  • ii.

    What are bus riders’ sentiments towards transit bus electrification?

By attempting to answer the aforementioned research questions, this study identifies the factors that affect riders’ perceptions, and their preferences and concerns related to bus electrification using econometric models that account for the interrelationships across riders’ perceptions and opinions. Findings of this study can offer guidance to transit operators and agencies by informing their strategic plans, marketing campaigns, and systemwide operations to accommodate preferences towards BEBs.

Section snippets

Literature review

As research on riders’ preferences and perceptions towards BEBs is scarce, this section first presents an overview of the quality-of-service attributes that have been argued to affect the attractiveness of public transit and then, discusses the attitudes and perceptions towards emerging technologies in transit, as reported in the literature.

Empirical setting

The empirical setting for this study is Salt Lake City, Utah. The majority of commuters in the city drive alone to work (63.1%), while 1.9% of employees take public transit and 8.5% carpool. Additionally, almost 12% of Salt Lake City residents travel in under 10 minutes to work (ACS, 2022). Moreover, according to the 2021 ACS 1-year estimates, 97.7% of Salt Lake City’s households own at least one car.

Although a small portion of commuters use public transportation, UTA offers services with

Methodology

Two econometric models were estimated that account for the interrelationships across rider opinions and their support (or not) for the transition to BEBs in a bid to examine transit bus electrification from a user’s perspective and identify factors that affect rider perceptions and their preferences and concerns related to bus electrification. When two or more dependent variables are correlated or share unobserved characteristics, univariate modeling approaches cannot provide unbiased parameter

Multivariate binary probit estimation results

Table 3 presents the estimation results of the multivariate binary probit model to assess perceptions about BEB ride comfort attributes. All variables are statistically significant at a 90 % confidence level. The correlations across the three equations are large and significant, which validates the selection of the model and further demonstrates that the perceptions about ride comfort attributes of BEBs (quieter engine, better acceleration, and no diesel or gas fumes) are interrelated.

The

Summary and conclusions

This paper examined users’ attitudes and perceptions towards transit bus electrification. To this end, survey data were collected in Salt Lake City, Utah, gathering 224 responses. The study area was selected both based on air quality concerns in the area as well as the plans of UTA to gradually electrify its fleet. The factors that affect riders’ perceptions towards the different ride comfort attributes of BEBs (quieter engine, better acceleration, and no diesel or gas fumes) were found to be

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, under award number DE-EE0009213, and the Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification (ASPIRE) Engineering Research Center funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1941524. We would like to thank graduate students Jonathon Sinton at Purdue University and Joshua Ward at Utah State University for their contributions to the survey design and data collection. We would like also to

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