AVTA, a transit agency serving mostly suburban and rural communities in Southern California, is the first in the country to go all-electric. Photo: AVTA In the northeast corner of Los Angeles County known as the Antelope Valley, the roughly ten-mile trip from Lancaster to Palmdale by city bus is fast, frequent, and disarmingly quiet. Out the large windows, Joshua trees gesture like cartoon characters and California poppies bloom in a bright orange blur on distant foothills.
There are lessons in much of what went right — and wrong — in the Antelope Valley. In 2018, when California’s air-quality agency set an ambitious goal for the state’s public-transit agencies to go 100 percent zero-emission by 2040, AVTA had gotten a head start a decade earlier. In 2008, R. Rex Parris, Lancaster’s Republican mayor, was among the elected officials, including then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made trips to China to lure BYD, a Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturer, to town.
The zero-emission fleet includes 57 BYD buses, 20 MCI commuter coaches, and 10 GreenPower microtransit vans. Photo: AVTA The deal struck by Parris and others also included a contract for AVTA to buy up to 85 of BYD’s electric buses, and some of the first BYD buses made in the U.S. were tested as part of AVTA’s fleet. Agency operators were skeptical at first. In the Antelope Valley, extreme temperatures were of greatest concern, with 100-degree summer days and below-freezing winter nights.
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