Regina is just the latest city to report problems with unreliable battery-powered transit

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Regina’s adoption of electric buses has been a disaster for the public. It’s the latest Canadian city to find this out the hard way.

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The news slipped out during Regina city council’s Monday budget hearing, when transit union president Sukhwinder Singh was asked whether electric buses have impacted costs.

Aside from being more expensive to run — defeating their original purpose of saving on gas money — Singh said they were “not for the Saskatchewan weather.” He added that four buses had to be pulled off the line and re-charged the previous Friday, as they had fallen to 15 per cent battery. “I’m not in favour of electric buses at all,” he said.

“For the winter, their battery dies very quickly, and they can just run for two, three hours, that’s all,” he said. The buses weren’t good for the summer either, because the charge couldn’t reliably last.

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This was always a predictable outcome, particularly since Edmonton already wasted millions on the same kind of failed project. In 2018, back when climate was the issue du jour, the city came up with a plan to spend $43 million on electric buses. Half of the funds came from the federal government, with the province of Alberta and the city of Edmonton covering a quarter each. The deal was announced by Don Iveson, then-mayor, and Amerjeet Sohi, the Liberal transport minister at the time who would go on to succeed Iveson as Edmonton mayor.

Iveson boasted that the switch would “produce a more reliable bus for our operators” and that their purchase was “absolutely critical to our city’s accelerated leadership on energy and climate.”

Fast forward to today and Edmonton has 60 of these buses in its fleet of 1,000. In December 2023, it was reported that only one quarter of these were in working........

© Edmonton Journal