Santa Barbara MTD Marks Major Milestone with New Electric Buses and Charge Stations

Santa Barbara MTD welcomed the first two of nine new 40-foot battery-electric buses into its fleet and 14 charging stations on Monday, October 16. Elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and executives from the bus and charger manufacturers and SoCal Edison gathered to celebrate the accomplishment, which brings the Metropolitan Transit District closer to its ambitious goal of having a zero-emission fleet by 2030.

“This is a milestone for MTD and has been a goal we have strived for for a long time,” said MTD General Manager Jerry Estrada at Monday’s ribbon cutting. Funding from federal grants, Caltrans, Santa Barbara’s Air Pollution Control District (APCD), the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation trust, and more have helped this $11 million project come to fruition.

Since 1991, Santa Barbara has been a national leader for its large electric-battery transit system. Monday’s event also featured the announcement that MTD received an Alternative Fuel Vehicle Leadership Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Clean Cities Coalition. The bus service was recognized for “its many decades of pioneering leadership in the battery-electric transit space,” according to MTD spokesperson Hillary Blackerby.

Now, MTD will be adding to its fleet of smaller buses —14 of the 30-foot electric vehicles — nine of the 40-foot zero-emission buses and 14 Charge Point charging stations. The shiny, blue-and-white “eye candy,” as Aeron Genet of the county APCD complimented the new buses, should be hitting the streets soon.

The Union of Concerned Scientists reported that “while the average 40-foot diesel bus emits 2,680 grams of CO2 per mile (g/mi), an electric bus charged on the average U.S. energy mix emits 1,078 g/mi, roughly a 50% reduction.”

Santa Barbara and Ventura have been the fastest warming counties in the continental United States. Each has been taking challenging steps toward making a change in their public transit systems; half of the carbon emissions in California are caused by transportation. To reach the climate legislation and measures signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022 to reduce emission by 85 percent in 2045, Santa Barbara is walking the walk.