In 2019, the City of Rock Hill rolled out it’s all-electric bus fleet. It followed, just barely, in the footsteps of the City of Seneca, which launched it’s EV bus fleet just a few months earlier.
The two fleets began with a shared noble goal – to provide free public transit where there had been no public transit at all, and to do it with clean, non-petroleum energy. Federal grant money had allowed for the investments and both cities leaned into the emerging electric-powered promise of a manufacturer with an operation in Spartanburg named Proterra.
Part of the promise was that the EV buses delivered to the cities would have a long road life, about 10 years.
It didn’t work out that way.
As had happened to so many companies, Proterra took a beating from the Covid pandemic. So did city bus fleet everywhere, as groups of people grew less comfortable sitting in tight quarters while physical distancing was the order of the day.
By the end of 2021, Proterra’s co-founder, 44-year-old Ryan Popple, had died. Barely two years later, the company declared bankruptcy and its tech and intellectual property were spread to multiple companies, which did not carry on Proterra’s mission to create large-scale electric public transit.
Also, by this time, the fleets in Seneca and Rock Hill had started to break down. Now, with no maker of proprietary parts to replenish stressed vehicles, city transit officials had no way to repair their full fleets – eight vehicles in Seneca, 10 in Rock Hill.
Sixty percent of each fleet would be rendered undrivable – in one case, in Rock Hill, by a damaged windshield that can’t be replaced because no one makes it anymore. Earlier this year, Rock Hill’s fleet had dwindled to two.
“The fleet maintenance crew has done a fantastic job in trying to keep these buses running at the rate they have been,” said Christopher Herrmann, a Rock Hill transportation planner. “They've found ingenious ways to keep these things running. And even with that effort, at times, we're still down to two.”
Those two buses have done a lot of work, covering four bus routes. Lately, the city fleet has climbed back to four.
But city transit officials are aware that maintenance miracles alone are not enough to keep a bus fleet running, especially when those miracles involve vehicles with such high rates of breakdown.
So what are Seneca and Rock Hill to do? Neither city wants to end bus service that gets people to work, medical appointments, and supermarkets. But neither can keep their EV fleets running through sheer will.
The answer in Seneca has been to mostly ditch the EV buses and begin a more à la carte operation.
”We've changed to an on-demand system,” said Seneca City Administrator Scott Moulder. “An Uber service on steroids, if you will.”
This service requires an address in town (the city’s homeless shelter counts) from which a small bus (not electric) or a sedan will come get residents and take them to work, medical appointments, or “life-sustaining shopping,” Moulder said.
The remnants of the city’s EV bus fleet are being sent to Clemson Area Transit (CAT), which operated most of the Seneca EV fleet system. CAT also operates its own EV buses and will “cannibalize” parts for the buses that still work, said Assistant City Administrator Josh Riches.
Both Moulder and Riches acknowledged that the approach puts the working buses on borrowed time.
In Rock Hill, transit officials desperate to save the free public bus service, are down to supplementing bus routes with small (non-electric) shuttles that fill up quickly and, occasionally, leave riders stranded.
“It just gets overcrowded,” said Pauline McCollough, a Rock Hill resident who’s relied on the city MyRide fleet since her epilepsy diagnosis took away her ability to drive. “Especially if people have to buy groceries [or] have carriages or wheelchairs. I mean, there's only so much space you can have on the little buses.”
While Rock Hill (like Seneca) does offer paratransit service, McCollough said the same problems can happen. She said she’s been stranded at the supermarket, with freezer food, because the shuttle bus was too full. She’s grateful to have had a friend be able to come get her.
But where the remaining EV buses can still run, Rock Hill is looking at cutting its downtown loop and merging parts of it with the loop that serves the city’s homeless services sites and makes stops at medical and hospital lots.
The reason for taking way the downtown loop, officially, is due to lower ridership. Route 1, the downtown loop, has reported a third of the ridership of Route 2, which serves places like Pathways Community Center and the Dorothy Day Soup Kitchen.
“We have stories of people that were homeless that couldn't make it to jobs on time or couldn't have any sort of income and now they've got a job and they use the transit system to get there,” said Jeremy Winkler, Rock Hill’s director of government affairs. “Consideration for the homeless is one of the reasons that we decided not to make any changes to Route 2.”
The Route 2 bus will also continue to serve the city branch of the York County Library.
“We certainly know that some people who don't have access to a car come in on the bus,” said Donna Andrews, the library’s reference desk manager. “And also we know some of our homeless patrons are in here. And what all of those different groups of people are doing are things like charging their devices, using their laptop with the library's Wi-Fi, doing some job searching on the computers, and just finding a way out of the elements. And for them to have to walk that extra distance from the transfer station is going to be difficult.”
Something that comes up a lot when talking to MyRide patrons and community activists concerned about how changes to the city’s bus routes will affect vulnerable residents is why Rock Hill put all its faith in an EV fleet. Even critics and questioners acknowledge that the city is in an untenable spot beyond its control – that even if city officials had the money to buy a whole new fleet, there’s nothing to buy that would reach the city for at least two years.
But some residents don’t understand why city officials went all in on an emerging technology system without considering what would happen if electric systems suddenly became unavailable.
“It seems like they didn't have a backup plan,” McCollough said.
Winkler said the city is exploring options for the future of MyRide. There is no consideration to begin charging fares, however. Winkler said the infrastructure needed to collect payments would likely be expensive and not worth the investment.
Correction: It was originally reported that changes to Rock Hill's bus routes would mean no longer stopping at the city public library. Route 2 will continue to stop near the library.
