FOUR YEARS AGO, as part of a surge of go-getter climate optimism that fueled a legally binding state commitment to slash greenhouse gas emissions, Beacon Hill ordered the MBTA to switch its entire fleet of fossil fuel-reliant buses to electric-powered vehicles. For months, if not years, however, it’s been an open secret in transportation circles that the T will not come close to hitting the deadlines lawmakers set for that multibillion-dollar changeover.
Many voices argue that it’s not all the T’s fault. Yes, the monumental undertaking has already featured budget overruns and complicated planning, but there’s also a market mismatch, with multiple transit agencies across the country competing for a constrained supply of battery electric buses. Federal policy under the Trump administration is changing, too, making it more difficult to get money from Washington for electric buses.
Just over four and a half years before the first major deadline, T higher-ups concede that the agency is almost certainly in no position to comply in time. What’s more, they are ready to tee up a bigger question that seems sure to stir thorny debate: Is the push for a rapid transition to an all-electric bus fleet even worth the tradeoffs?
The MBTA today has about 1,100 buses, all but a tiny fraction of which run on diesel fuel, compressed natural gas, or hybrid sources. The cost to replace all of those with vehicles that spew virtually no emissions, and to build out the unique maintenance and charging infrastructure they require, is several billion dollars under the most optimistic estimates, and the notoriously cash-strapped T is already struggling with limited capacity for funding big projects.
But even if the money materialized overnight, the MBTA would still need to sequence and execute a series of major garage retrofit and construction projects over the next decade and a half. Today, officials are ready to say they don’t think they can do that without taking several facilities offline, temporarily forcing significant reductions to bus service.
All of that raises the question of how best to use limited resources. Some transit advocates argue spending hundreds of millions or billions on expanding bus service, regardless of the kind of fuel the vehicles burn, will make a bigger difference toward overall emissions by getting more drivers to leave their cars at home.
Altogether, it’s the latest spasm of uncertainty muddying the state’s aspirations to lead the nation in climate policy, coming just a few months after lawmakers in House floated the idea of weakening a statewide 2030 decarbonization mandate. Beneath both issues is the same difficult reckoning as lofty goals collide with the everyday reality of executing complicated change.
MBTA leaders — who are publicly sharing their doubts about the bus electrification deadlines for the first time — hope their new candor on the topic will kick off an open public dialogue about the wisest use of resources, and the best way the transit agency can support the state’s decarbonization goals. The first key target is still nearly five years away, and the T would not officially run afoul of state law until it attempted to purchase a bus that produces any greenhouse gas emissions starting January 1, 2031 or later. That means there’s enough time, officials say, for robust debate about amending or lifting the requirement.
“Our first order of business is to, in some ways, come a bit clean that this is going to be a really hard mandate for us to meet unless we had, frankly, a massive infusion of funding dedicated solely to this effort, and we were willing to accept some service reductions in order to make it happen,” Lynsey Heffernan, the MBTA’s chief of policy and strategic planning, told CommonWealth Beacon. “I don’t think that’s a choice that people want us to make.”
Several transit advocates think it’s more important for the T to focus on maintaining or expanding bus service than to ensure a rapid transition to having every single bus powered by a zero-emission fuel source. In the state’s fight against climate change, the agency is “part of the solution, not part of the problem,” said Brian Kane, executive director of the independent MBTA Advisory Board watchdog group.
“The question, then, from a public policy perspective is, how can we utilize this incredible asset better to help us meet our goals and our targets?” Kane said. “It might not be the case that electrifying every single bus is the most efficient, cheapest, and best option.”
The T might struggle to make its case to the one entity whose opinion matters the most. Only the Legislature, with the support of a governor, could amend the MBTA mandates written into a 2022 climate law, and one of the chief architects of those deadlines is skeptical about the need to change them.
Sen. Mike Barrett, a Lexington Democrat and legislative guru of climate policy, invoked a scene in the 1974 satirical Mel Brooks Western Blazing Saddles in which a newly appointed sheriff escapes a dire situation by pointing his own gun at himself and threatening to pull the trigger if anyone comes closer.
“You’ve got the T having failed to do its job in a timely way now claiming that asking them to make up for squandered time will produce a worse outcome than if we simply let the T escape,” Barrett said. “That’s the Blazing Saddles defense: ‘I will produce bad service if you make me do the job you asked me to do five years ago.’ That sort of takes my breath away.”
The statutory marching orders for the T came at a time when Beacon Hill was much more optimistic about the future of clean energy, and more willing to embrace it on an aggressive timeline, than leaders are today. In a 2022 law, legislators and then-Gov. Charlie Baker agreed: the MBTA must purchase only zero-emissions buses after 2030, and all buses on the road must be free of emissions after 2040.
Those mandates did not carry with them any dedicated state funding, and they got only a small dose of attention at the time as part of a wide-ranging law. Still, it was clear to T officials even at the time how heavy the lift would be: in May 2022, when lawmakers were still negotiating over the bill’s contours, the MBTA published a report setting its own goal of electrifying all full buses by 2040 — and called it “one of the most ambitious fleet transition timelines in the nation.”
By the start of 2028, the T said in that report, nearly 30 percent of its fleet would be electric; by 2030, the fleet would be more than halfway transformed.
Today, the MBTA is nowhere close to those targets. Five battery-powered electric buses run on the Silver Line, and a handful of others provide service along routes in Cambridge. Officials have greenlit the purchase of 120 electric buses, more than three-quarters of which have not yet been delivered, for a combined cost of nearly $185 million. Altogether, that’s a fraction of the fleet, and the agency would need to buy and deploy several hundred more electric buses in the next four years to meet its previous goals.
Kane, whose group is independent from the T and represents cities and towns that help fund the system, argued that the sluggish pace is not the T’s fault. “The target, while being aspirational, was never based on technology or where the industry is, and was never really achievable,” he said.
The options for purchasing zero-emissions buses are very limited. All 120 of the recently ordered T buses come from New Flyer, one of two American manufacturers, alongside California-based Gillig, offering zero-emissions buses. That leaves many transit agencies with their own electrification projects competing for a limited number of buses from two possible sources. Adding to the pressure, Heffernan, the T’s policy and planning chief, said Los Angeles Metro could go to the “front of the line” because of the city’s pledge to run a low-emissions 2028 Olympics.
On top of the supply constraints, the available buses appear to have some reliability issues. Janno Lieber, the head of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has been publicly warning that buses the agency has deployed from New Flyer — which he called “a good company” that’s “doing their best” — are failing more often than officials there hoped.
“Here’s a cautionary note, which is the electric buses — about 60 altogether that we’ve received so far — have been underperforming in terms of their breakdown frequency. We are slowing down the acquisition of electric buses until that is resolved,” Lieber told New York state lawmakers at a budget hearing in February. “This is not only a New York problem. This is a national problem. Electric buses are not moving quickly enough in terms of how well they’re functioning, especially in an urban environment.”
Jim Aloisi, who served as transportation secretary under Gov. Deval Patrick and is now a board member at the advocacy group TransitMatters, described the electric bus marketplace as “awful” and the legislative mandate for the T to electrify its full bus system by 2040 as ill-considered.
“The track record on New Flyer is terrible, and the track record on Gillig, I think it’s fair to say, is too soon to know,” Aloisi said. “If the T made this decision on its own, the Legislature would criticize it. The inspector general would have an investigation. It boggles my mind that anybody thinks this makes any sense.”
Getting new electric buses is only one side of the equation, though. The T also needs a place to store, maintain, and charge them, and the existing bus garages lack the necessary infrastructure. In fact, officials say many of the 10 aging garage facilities — the newest of which opened in 1975 — are subpar even for current operations, let alone a modern electric fleet.
The North Cambridge garage has been retrofitted to accommodate battery-electric buses, and it will be able to support up to 32 vehicles. A new Quincy facility, currently projected to be complete in the summer of 2027, could host up to 120 more. Officials will soon announce that another project, the Arborway garage in Jamaica Plain, is fully funded, capping off a yearslong quest.
All of that still leaves a massive amount of work before charging and maintaining a fully electric fleet of more than 1,000 buses is possible, and two of the most important garages could pose the largest hurdle. The Cabot Yard facility in South Boston and the Charlestown facility, which together are responsible for about 40 percent of the T’s bus fleet, are the two newest in the network, which means they’d likely come last in the overhaul project.
“If you get closer and closer to the 2040 deadline, we would have to close them concurrently in order to meet that deadline,” said Kat Eshel, the T’s senior director of climate policy and planning. Doing that, she said, would mean reducing bus service. The MBTA already has limited space available to store and maintain vehicles, and the remaining facilities would not be able to fully absorb the massive load currently borne by Cabot and Charlestown.
Or put another way, the decision, Eshel said, is boiling down to, “‘Do we cut service, or do we meet this mandate?’”
Transportation accounts for about 38 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts, the largest share of all sectors, according to state data. The entire MBTA, including diesel fuel burned to power commuter rail trains and its use of electricity that comes from a grid still reliant on fossil fuels, is responsible for about 1 percent of the state’s transportation-related emissions. That makes the T a tiny dot, and non-electric buses even more microscopic, in the bigger emissions picture.
With that in mind, advocates like Aloisi and Kane argue that Massachusetts can better achieve its overall decarbonization goals in the short term, counterintuitively, by spending money on more diesel buses. More bus service could incentivize more people to use public transit instead of driving alone, the thinking goes, and dozens or hundreds more diesel buses would spew less greenhouse gases than thousands or tens of thousands of gasoline-powered cars taken off the roads.
Kane said the hybrid diesel buses in use by the T today also aren’t the belching all-diesel polluters of the past. “They’re still burning dead dinosaurs, but they do so pretty efficiently from a climate perspective,” he said.
MBTA leaders made a similar case. Heffernan said garages that can support electric buses tend to cost about 20 percent more, and with capital funding already constrained, that means committing to battery-electric bus charging capability across the entire network is also “a choice to not invest in something else.”
“If we’re running a hybrid electric bus” — which still produces some emissions — “but it’s keeping people from having to buy a car, we think that’s still a climate good,” she said.
That argument is not universally embraced. Barrett said the primary focus of the 2030 and 2040 targets was never the T’s contribution to statewide emissions totals; the goal, he said, was to cut the localized impacts of pollution, especially on so-called environmental justice communities that rely more heavily on buses.
“The reason we implemented that original mandate was because these diesel buses go through urban neighborhoods. They make people sick,” said Barrett, who co-chairs the Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee. “Diesel buses contribute to bad outcomes for communities of color.”
Back during the debate in 2022, Barrett said, other senators encouraged him to write even more MBTA mandates into the clean energy law, such as forcing the commuter rail network to be electrified by a specific date.
Sen. Brendan Crighton, who co-chairs the Legislature’s Transportation Committee, struck a more measured tone. The Lynn Democrat described the bus mandates as an important tool to force a transition, but signaled he’s open to discussions about their feasibility today. Crighton wants the T to avoid service cuts “unless absolutely necessary,” especially after considerable work to restore rider confidence in the past few years.
“I would certainly want to fully examine alternatives to make sure that we’ve left no stone unturned,” he said about balancing electrification with day-to-day operations.
Should the Legislature prove unwilling to revisit the electrification requirements and the T move to purchase a diesel or hybrid bus in 2031, the agency could theoretically expose itself to legal action. Some insiders question, however, whether anyone would actually take the MBTA to court.
“If any environmental group wanted to sue, I would say to them, ‘You’re not doing your job,’” Aloisi said.
Tough conversations loom for policymakers, some of whom are still smarting from the intense opposition campaign environmentalists quickly mounted in the fall when House Democrats floated, and then retreated from, a plan to weaken a statewide emissions reduction target for 2030. Lawmakers said at the time they were still committed to longer-term decarbonization, but were worried that hitting the end-of-decade target would prove too difficult, and therefore wanted to minimize the risks of legal exposure.
A push to sand the edges down off a 2030 climate-related mandate as the once-envisioned clean future becomes harder to achieve — that’s starting to have a familiar ring.