Cinnamon Janzer wrote:

While the deployment of electric buses can help mitigate the air quality impacts of public transportation, transit authorities often face budgeting constraints that center cost reduction rather than equity — until now.

University of Utah researcher and associate professor Xiaoyue Cathy Liu, in cooperation with the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), recently developed an open source, web-based modeling tool that lets urban, city, and transportation planners and more across the country explore various scenarios for deploying electric buses. The tool models the trade-offs that cities can expect when making decisions around introducing electric buses into a municipality’s fleet or increasing their use—everything from how many buses and chargers to buy to what routes to run them on and tradeoffs between cost, air quality, equity, among other parameters.