4 March 23-29, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents NEW BUS HAS BUZZ A new long-range electric bus for DART should soon provide answers for what the future of mass transit in Dallas will look like. BY KELLY DEARMORE E lectric vehicles are all the rage. You see them everywhere now, but you probably don’t hear them since, you know, they’re electric. Dallas Area Rapid Tran- sit (DART) recently made another sizable leap into the greener, presumably quieter, future with the addition of its first long- range electric bus. Setting sail on DART’s Bus Route 20 along Northwest Highway, the new addition joins the seven short-range electric buses al- ready working Bus Route 28. The 40-foot Proterra ZX5 Max offers USB ports for pas- sengers to use for device charging and, ac- cording to a press release, “regenerative braking that captures the energy normally lost to heat and returns it to the battery packs.” The difference in possible mileage be- tween short- and long-range in this case is significant, to be clear. According to DART’s media representative Gordon Shattles, the long-range bus is good for about 10 times what the short-rangers, bought in 2018, can do when its battery is fully charged. “Talk about an increase of technology,” Shattles says. “Those original buses have a 30-mile range as opposed to the new long- range bus, which has a range of about 300 miles.” The popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) continues to rise, as the Biden Administra- tion has expressed a commitment to deliver a reliable national network of EV chargers to meet the increase in EV sales. But DART isn’t yet sure its new electric bus represents the immediate future for the company. “The conversations we’ve been having involve asking, ‘What does the future of fuel look like?’” Shattles says. “Years and years ago we started with diesel and we eventually transferred to liquid natural gas (LNG), which had a very short run with us before we switched to compressed natural gas (CNG), which is a low-emission fuel that our fleet runs on now. Now we’re examining 10, 20 years out and wondering what the fu- ture looks like, and we think this new bus can teach us about that.” Large electric passenger buses like the ones DART has aren’t new, and several U.S. cities have already begun working them into their own mass transit rotations. In Texas, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth have electric buses servicing shorter routes. Else- where in North America, Portland, Seattle, Denver and Toronto have made substantial investments to add electric buses to their public transportation fleets. Financial factors will certainly be one of the key areas DART closely inspects over the next year or so, Shattles says. The long- range electric bus cost $780,000, including the charger, a sizable chunk more than the $500,000 cost of the current, standard DART bus. Part of the cost was covered by a federal grant DART had used to purchase the short-range electric buses a few years ago. Because money for oil changes, trans- mission fluid changes or CNG will not be re- quired, the sticker-shock difference between the old and new will likely lessen as time goes on. Saving money on fuel and oil and tradi- tional automotive maintenance is a plus, but for DART it’s not all strictly about money in this case. The agency has customers it must serve in a comfortable and reliable manner. Recent events and hot news topics will also inform DART’s discussion on its future with long-range electric buses. The extreme range of Texas tempera- tures will also test the new e-bus. Can a large series of lithium ion batteries packaged to- gether that takes only a few minutes to fully charge keep passengers warm in the winter and cool in the summer? Questions like this means that DART doesn’t yet know what success, or the future of long-range buses in Dallas, looks like. “We have plenty of other questions we’re asking right now,” Shattles says. “Maybe Proterra isn’t the manufacturer for us in the future, we don’t know. We have to think about the impact of big winter storms like the ones we’ve had in the past couple of years. We still need to be able to run our buses even if the grid goes down. We have to figure out how to charge a fleet of electric buses if there’s no power. Lots of questions, still.” ▼ ENVIRONMENT CLEARING THE AIR AIR MONITORS TO BE INSTALLED THROUGHOUT THE CITY, INCLUDING IN JOPPA AND WEST DALLAS. BY JACOB VAUGHN T he city installed an air quality moni- tor at South Central Park in Joppa (pronounced “Joppee”) on Monday, and another monitor is headed to the south- ern Dallas neighborhood soon. The city is working on installing 40 of these monitors by the end of the year as part of something called the Breathe Easy Dallas Program. The program is paid for through an envi- ronmental justice grant from the Environ- mental Protection Agency, as well as by the American Rescue Program Act and city funds. The $1.7 million program is meant to provide air monitoring throughout Dallas at the neighborhood level. The city now has five active monitors as part of the program. Two have been installed in West Dallas near the GAF shingle manu- facturing plant. Two were also installed in South Dallas’ Dixon Circle community. Neighborhoods chosen for the program get two air monitors. The second air monitor for Joppa is planned for installation at Joppy Momma’s Farm off Carbondale Street. The data collected by these monitors will be accessible to residents through an online dashboard. While the data won’t be used for regulatory or enforcement purposes, it’s meant to inform residents and city officials about local air quality so they can decide if further action is needed. Joppa is a freedman town, settled by freed slaves after the Civil War. Today, it’s one of the most polluted neighborhoods in Dallas. Temeckia Derrough, the environ- mental commissioner for District 7, bought a house from Habitat for Humanity in Joppa in 2006 and has lived in the community ever since. She said the community is sur- rounded by industry. “It’s like an industrial port hub,” Derrough said. She started getting involved in environ- mental advocacy in 2018 when she success- fully fought off the development of a concrete batch plant in the neighborhood. She’s been fighting for better conditions in the community ever since. Now she’s doing so as a member of the city’s Environmental Commission. Derrough said the air monitor installations in her district represent an- other step toward environmental justice. “This data will help the city to understand what their residents are breathing in the air, and help the city to implement and form policies to protect their residents,” Der- rough said. Kathryn Bazan, chair of the Dallas Envi- ronmental Commission, said residents often have anecdotal evidence of poor air quality in their communities, but without any hard data it’s difficult for them to demonstrate and work toward any sort of change. “So, with this data what we hope to do is be able to demonstrate that there certainly are im- plications of bad policy making and bad zon- ing decisions,” she said. The data could be used when considering issues like individual zoning cases. But more broadly, Bazan said it could also be | UNFAIR PARK | The 40-foot Proterra ZX5 Max is a new electric bus in the DART system. Art Credit >> p6
