Metro transit is test driving an electric bus on the #99 Downtown Trolley route through Tuesday, April 11. Commuters traveling through downtown St. Louis will have an opportunity to ride the bus as the MetroBus operations team evaluates how the 42-foot all-electric bus from Proterra performs on the street.
The 42-foot all-electric bus has a magnetic drive motor and can operate on a single charge for about 250 miles. The battery, which can store about 440 kilowatts of electricity, takes a little less than four hours to fully recharge. The testing will allow Metro to see how it operates under different passenger loads and in changing traffic and environmental conditions.
For an electric bus to be a candidate for the MetroBus fleet, it will need to produce the same performance as current clean-diesel MetroBus vehicles, which average about 200 miles a day. The electric bus must also meet the vehicle standards set by Metro’s internationally recognized maintenance program, which leads the transit industry in several reliability, efficiency and maintenance metrics, including extending the lifespan of its buses to 15 years and more than 750,000 miles, beyond industry standards of 12 years and 500,000 miles.