Editorial: Battery-powered buses could be route to a cleaner T (Boston Globe 5/19/18)

Battery-powered buses could signal a more efficient, cleaner MBTA.
If you’re waiting for the T — and you’re willing to wait a year for a new test bus — you might be able to breathe easier.
A new battery-powered bus set to be tested early next year may bring a zero-emission vehicle to Boston streets and, in the process, help ease the T’s train- and bus-purchasing woes.
Supported by a federal grant, the T is ordering five 60-foot, no-emission, battery powered models that will be used to help develop specifications for the next procurement of hundreds of buses.
​Those include replacements for more than 500 diesel buses now in service that are being slowly replaced by hybrid gas-electric and compressed natural gas models. There are also all-electric trackless trolleys running in Cambridge and Watertown and, peculiar to the T, buses for the Silver Line’s Seaport, Logan Airport, and Chelsea routes, which use a trolley pole for part of the trip and switch to a diesel motor for the rest. (read more)

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