Belleville Transit continues to move towards electrification of its bus fleet.
Operations Manager Paul Buck says the Transit Committee is going ahead with a plan in conjunction with the Metrolinx Transit Procurement Initiative to determine how to best transition to a zero emissions fleet.
The Metrolinx Zero Emissions bus project would be completed in four phases starting with a review of current services.
“So there’ll be a full service review, a full operations review of the service that we’re currently operating and then a look at what we need to do for expansion over the next five, 10, 15 years as part of this study. And then we build and electrification and budget projections around that.”
They’ll now take that budget request to council.
“We’ll take this to council during the budget process to get approval to move through the phases and with their approval, we’ll start the electrification process. So it could be as early as two years, we’ll have the facility infrastructure started and order some vehicles.”
Buck says the review could cost about $250,000 but government grants could cover up to 80 per cent of that cost.
Belleville is part of a group of 13 Ontario communities represented by Metrolinx which allows smaller communities to pool their buying power for new buses.
