Austin's transit agency, CapMetro, has opened two park-and-ride stations where electric buses charge from an overhead arm during their layover. If you ride the new Rapid 800 or 837 routes, that means a bus that can keep running instead of limping back to the depot with a low battery.
The stations are Goodnight Ranch and Expo Center. The overhead gear is a pantograph, a hinged arm that lowers onto a contact on the bus roof.
Why charging mid-route matters
CapMetro's chief operations officer, Andy Skabowski, framed the gain in hours. A bus that charges only at the depot gets about 8 hours on the plug, he said, while on-route charging stretches that to 20 to 22 hours. "Every time that pantograph drops, we charge that bus," he said, which is what makes service every 10 to 15 minutes possible. That is a goal, and we haven't seen ridership or on-time results yet.
The depot behind it
The end-of-line chargers sit on top of a bigger build. Camber Charging installed two large charging systems at CapMetro's main depot, enough to charge 48 buses overnight at once, and it also handles software and maintenance at all three sites.
The buses are New Flyer's Xcelsior battery-electric model. New Flyer claims up to 660 kWh of usable battery, but that is a manufacturer figure, not an Austin test result.
What we don't know yet
The only published account we found, from Electrek, doesn't give the project's cost, the power of each end-of-line charger, or the length of a typical top-up. It also doesn't say how many buses will run the two new routes. We haven't been able to confirm those numbers with CapMetro or Camber Charging, and we haven't yet heard from an independent transit engineer on how overhead charging compares with other fast-charging approaches. Those answers decide whether the 10 to 15 minute promise holds on a hot Texas afternoon.
Watch for performance data over the first few months. If you ride in Austin, would a bus that charges at the terminal change how you think about going electric?
Sources
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
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