Valuation of Public Bus Electrification with Open Data
This work addresses the challenge for cities worldwide in assessing bus electrification without requiring granular, hard-to-procure data, offering a practical tool for decision-making.
The researchers tackled the problem of evaluating the economic, environmental, and social values of electrifying public transit buses by developing a novel framework using open-source data, specifically the General Transit Feed Specification, to provide scalable guidance for fleet prioritization, demonstrated in case studies of Boston and Milan.
This research provides a novel framework to estimate the economic, environmental, and social values of electrifying public transit buses, for cities across the world, based on open-source data. Electric buses are a compelling candidate to replace diesel buses for the environmental and social benefits. However, the state-of-art models to evaluate the value of bus electrification are limited in applicability because they require granular and bespoke data on bus operation that can be difficult to procure. Our valuation tool uses General Transit Feed Specification, a standard data format used by transit agencies worldwide, to provide high-level guidance on developing a prioritization strategy for electrifying a bus fleet. We develop physics-informed machine learning models to evaluate the energy consumption, the carbon emissions, the health impacts, and the total cost of ownership for each transit route. We demonstrate the scalability of our tool with a case study of the bus lines in the Greater Boston and Milan metropolitan areas.