Green View

Thanks for your question, Carol! Just like the current buses, Metro’s new electric buses are low-floor buses that kneel to make it easy for everyone to board!

Great question, Ron! Metro is aiming to have more than half of its fleet be all-electric by 2035. MGE is partnering with the City to help plan for and design the charging infrastructure needed to help meet shared sustainability goals.

Thanks for watching, Cindy! While there aren’t plans to install solar panels on the tops of the buses themselves, renewable energy helps power the electric buses. MGE’s Hermsdorf Solar Fields helps power City of Madison operations (Learn more at https://www.mge.com/newsroom/news-releases/articles/madison-solar-project-delivering-locally-generated). Plus, one of Metro’s maintenance facilities is powered by renewable energy from a roof-mounted solar array. Metro also reports that it’s planning for an additional solar installation at its second maintenance facility in the near future. The energy generated will be used to charge the new electric buses.

Thanks for your question, Rich! Metro reports its new electric buses are longer at 60 feet––that compares to 40 feet for Metro’s current fleet. The 60-foot electric buses weigh about 49,000 pounds (without passengers). This compares to about 29,000 pounds for the 40-foot diesel buses.

It’s great to see these new electric buses around Madison more and more, helping to reduce air and climate pollution as well as delivering a quieter riding experience. Bravo to all involved!

I’m hoping to see more of them in the future, as well as more clean electricity initiatives in the Madison Area in the years to come.

The video explains that the 125kWh charging station recharges the EV bus to 100% in about 3 hours. But the video doesn't answer the question of how many run-time hours/miles a single charge lasts? I presume the buses will return for a 2nd or 3rd charge during the day rotating through new shifts of drivers.

The electricity for EV charging is increasingly "green" and MG&E can do more to get out of the coal-fired generation business! I love the fact that ghe Madison Metro garage roof is covered with solar panels, making this transportation very clean when the sun is shining! https://www.google.com/maps/search/madison+metro+garage/@43.0849999,-89.368986,212m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu

It is a great advancement for Madison Metro to use EV buses, and an EV fleet for the new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system now being built. More BRT routes (north-south and northeast-southeast) will make the system really work for more people, it can't happen fast enough!

As new EV auto owners ourselves, we love the simplification that EV brings to transportation.

Many thanks to METRO & MG&E for MOVING us with electricity! Good start...bet we can beat that 50% goal by 2035 by 5 years!!

Way to go Madison Gas and Electric and Green View very nice and great idea.

I've ridden it and I loved it! Hope to see more of them. My favorite is how quiet they are.

Fantastic assist from MG&E to Madison Metro in setting up the garage with charging stations. cleaner for our planet, quieter for noise pollution, continued education for the mechanics, safer for the driver.

Thanks for sharing the informative video. I've yet to ride on one of the electric buses as I'm a part time metro rider but I've been able to see one of them driving around. They are defiantly quieter and I would concur with the other comments that the elimination of the diesel fumes is a great win when you find yourself in traffic behind a bus.
Keep up the good work, I think Madison Metro is making good strides to improve public transit across our growing city with the electric bus rollout being another positive forward looking step.

I'm excited to see this. As a bicyclist who frequently sits behind buses at stop lights it is great to avoid the tail pipe exhaust!

Now we need some high speed trains, too. Thank you MGE.

I am so pleased to see these new buses!

Electric buses should make Madison Proud as we step into this potentially cleaner, quieter, and renewable energy power source.

It’s great that Metro is electrifying. I think the city needs to pick up the pace. 2035 is not soon enough. We are in a crisis situation where slow and comfortable is no longer good enough!

This is good news, and a great use-case for electric vehicles. More efficient, fewer diesel fumes, quieter...and in the long run, they likely need less maintenance and are cheaper to operate. A win for riders and everyone in the Madison area.

(And as someone who works at Epic, and knows how the 55 and 75 buses fill up, hearing about bigger buses sounds good too.)

This is exciting news to hear! I have a hybrid vehicle, so it is partially electric and I love my car!
Will new electric bases be easy to get into for someone that uses a cane for instance to get around? Maybe steps that lower to ground?

Thanks for the informative video about the Metro buses!

I love the goal of electrifying more than half of its fleet by 2035. I hope there is a goal for 100% electrified fleet as well. I quit riding the bus in 2017 because the smell of diesel fuel made me nauseous, so when more of the fleet is electric, I may try again.

A nice step forward. Is Metro on an 'all renewable' energy plan from MG&E? Sounds like you're going to need a lot more charging stations in the not too distant future.

So glad to finally see some progress with electric and public transportation! I hope these buses welcome parents with strollers and are better laid out too. Using the buses in Copenhagen for a year showed us just how good it could be and when it's that good, everybody will use it and thus reduce gas car use. Thanks for sharing!

If only the entire fleet was electric now. Who knows what the climate will be like by 2035.

when you are going to put solar charging on top of the buses?

With electric busses, I am almost ready to accept them on State Street. State Street, with streetside dining, is no place for diesel engine fumes.

Love this! I’m so excited for electric rapid transit coming to Wisconsin. It will make farmer’s market trips a breeze.

This is great. So glad Madison is thinking about our environment.

Looking forward to how this works out. What is the weight of an all electric bus compared to the busses it will replace?

great technology that will help to reduce carbon emission.
looking forward for this new technology

Since Bus drivers stomp on the gas and then stomp on the breaks (every time you step on the breaks you throw all that energy away) it only makes sense to recover that energy with regenerative breaking. It’s almost (depending on efficiency) like you never stopped. A hybrid could do that (should have happened long ago for busses), but if the energy comes from solar or wind (or other non-fossil fuel) then we are saving the planet with all electric, YAY!