The first of Winston-Salem's 10 new diesel-electric hybrid buses took to the road yesterday, with more buses and fuel savings to come, transit officials said.
The bright green buses were hard to miss as they crisscrossed streets downtown going to and from the Campbell Transportation Center on Fifth Street.
The city hopes that lower fuel costs will be hard to miss too, although officials say they will have to wait and see to find out how big the savings will be.
The Gillig hybrid buses have a low floor that makes it easier for people to get in and out, and a quieter propulsion system that should ease the noise for people on the street or those waiting for a bus.
"It's a lot different," said Mitch Gaines, who stepped off one of the buses this afternoon at the transportation center. "It's a pretty color. It has a smooth ride to it."
Art Barnes, the general manager of the Winston-Salem Transit Authority, said that the new buses will have significantly lower emissions. WSTA officials started half of the new buses on their routes yesterday, and they plan to have the others running routes by the end of the week.
In December, the city plans to take delivery on 10 more buses. At that point 20 of the city's 52 buses will be hybrids, and the city should begin to realize some fuel savings, Barnes said.
With conventional buses, Barnes said, the transit authority has been getting an average of about 3.9 miles a gallon on diesel fuel. With the hybrids, it hopes to increase that to five to seven miles a gallon. The propulsion system has different settings that the city will experiment with to see which works best.
Barnes said that the city has estimated fuel savings of $145,000 to $232,000 a year, depending on what kind of mileage the buses get.
Hybrid buses cost more than conventional buses: about $580,000 for a hybrid compared with about $330,000 for a conventional bus.
But because federal money is paying 90 percent of the purchase costs -- and the state is paying another 5 percent -- the city's cost will be about $29,000 a bus.
If the hybrids save fuel as expected, the city could recoup its cost to buy the 20 buses in less than three years, Barnes said.
The buses rely mostly on electrical power at low speeds, but as the speed increases the diesel engine supplies more power. Still, the setup means that the bus can run using a smaller diesel engine than a conventional bus.
Brian Macleod, the senior vice president of Gillig Corp., said that demand for the hybrids has been picking up because of an interest in environmental-friendly technology and the fuel savings. The buses were put into limited use seven years ago and have been in full production for five years.
"They're in Seattle, Buffalo, New York, Orlando and a number of other cities," Macleod said. While the next step in auto technology should be a fully-electric car, he said, buses are not likely to become fully electric because they typically run 16 hours a day -- a feat he believes will be beyond battery technology.
Winston-Salem officials were concerned that they not make the same mistake they did in 2004, when two prototype hybrids built by a different company were put in service -- and taken out of service because they needed repairs too often.
"We did a lot of research before we bought these buses," Barnes said. "We took a trip to Seattle, which had been running these buses for a number of years, and they have an excellent track record."
wyoung@wsjournal.com
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