Project Overview

This project aims to document and critically evaluate Metro Transit’s January 2022 - June 2024 experience of implementing Battery-Electric Buses (BEBs) on a Metro C-Line while accounting for the context of North American emission reduction policies and transit funding priorities. We build on the existing metrics that Metro Transit (public transit operator in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area of the U.S. state of Minnesota) already uses for reporting and monitoring the implementation of BEBs and expand them into longitudinal trends that help to document and disseminate the agency’s knowledge to the broader audience of industry professionals and researchers who support similar transit electrification efforts in the North American context.

To critically present these operational trends, this project seeks to contribute to the limited body of literature that explores the real-world operational experiences of BEBs. While substantial research exists on global planning for BEB adoption—covering topics such as optimal charging strategies, energy consumption modeling, scheduling, and fleet planning—our focus diverges to performance evaluation and monitoring of BEB implementation, using the Metro Transit data provided to us. The underreporting of how BEBs perform during actual operations highlights a significant gap in the literature, which this paper aims to address.