Oakville, Ont., is planning to have 74 electric transit buses on the road in two years — out of a fleet of 135 vehicles

There is a new kind of hum of activity at Oakville Transit’s depot in southeastern Ontario these days.

While the usual grinding rumble of diesel buses going in and out of the building continues, there is a quieter area where careful work — the precise placement of decals and fiddling of wires for electronics installation — is being carried out on 15 shiny, 40-foot-long Nova Buses.

This is the transit agency’s latest battery-electric bus order preparing to go into service next month. It’s a milestone moment for Oakville Transit after years of work on bus fleet electrification.

“When I speak with my colleagues, there are a whole bunch of agencies that are still in pilots, really trying out the technology and the vehicles themselves. But no one’s expanded like we have — other than TTC,” says Adrian Kawun, director of Oakville Transit, in an interview with Electric Autonomy.

“In terms of jumping in and doing this fairly quickly, the opportunity was there,” says Kawun. “That we’re going to have 50 per cent of our fleet electrified over the next few years is massive.”

Bus electrification support

In Canada, Oakville stands out as a community with particularly high passenger EV adoption rates.

This is due to a few factors: it’s a higher income community, it’s location offers EV-friendly commute distances to many employment hotspots and, in 2019, it became the 47th municipal government in Canada to declare a climate emergency.

It’s the last factor that was the catalyst for Oakville Transit to begin electrification of its bus fleet.

“Council has a vision and that vision enabled us to go ahead and start implementing these projects,” says Kawun.

“We are seeing that there is a change in how transit is viewed.”

The change first became noticeable in early 2023 when Oakville Transit’s 15 20-foot-long Karsan e-Jest zero-emission buses hit the streets.

“People literally stop in their tracks and start taking pictures. There’s a huge excitement about it,” says Kawun.

“Our implementation of the small Karsan fleet, pretty much, is a huge pilot. But it doesn’t stop, right? It gave us a taste and it really helped us understand the impacts of operating [EVs]. So that was a huge learning opportunity for us.”

The Karsan vehicles are, so far, says Kawun, performing well. Not only are refuelling costs lower, there have been fewer mechanical issues than their diesel counterparts and the community is responding positively.

“They’re actually calling in and saying ‘it’s great to see these buses out there,'” says Kawun. “People notice.”

How to electrify

The arrival of the Karsan e-Jests and Nova buses are the culmination of years of discussion and planning.

To get to this point Kawun and his team had to undertake an electric needs assessment, invest in software upgrades, identify buses to purchase, find and engage a partner to install and maintain their charging equipment and train support and operational staff.

Of course, as in any project of this scale, there was also funding to apply for. (that occurred before Kawun entered his current role).

In all, Oakville received more than $48 million from the federal government’s Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP).

In addition to the purchase of 74 electric buses, the funds covered the full gamut of costs from the initial needs assessment, to custom scheduling software, depot charging infrastructure to support a 100 per cent electrified fleet, IT upgrades, accessibility improvements and public communications systems.

Today, 30 of the 70 buses are at the depot.

Financing the Oakville bus transition

A critical piece of the electrification puzzle for large fleets is access to grants to help fund zero-emission vehicle purchases.

“These vehicles, they’re not cheap,” says Kawun.

In October, Kawun appeared before Oakville’s Town Council Budget Meeting to explain that the funding Oakville Transit received under ICIP would be used up by 2026, at which time 50 per cent of the fleet will be electric.

At that point, Kawun’s budget report recommends the city pause future electric bus purchases.

The reason for this is two-fold says Kawun.

“That report had many factors. It’s not only the funding piece, but it also has to do with the industry and where we are,” says Kawun.

“Funding, yes, is always huge. It’s always something that we’re looking to get to help us move forward in these different projects. But also being the first on the racetrack there’s a lot of things that we’re learning and as we learn, we bring in the industry to help them understand so that we can build a network that will be able to be relied on and provide service to customers.”

Kawun says his intention is to treat 2026 as an intermission for the transition, not a hard stop.

However, of the three post-2026 adoption scenarios Kawun laid out in his report, council opted for the cheapest, which is to stop completely.

Council voted that, should no further funding be obtained, Oakville Transit will purchase only diesel vehicles in future to replace its aging bus fleet or to expand the fleet, which will not result in 100 per cent electrification.

(Kawun also presented a scenario in which there would be a 50/50 split in bus purchases post-2026, with half being electric and half being diesel as well as a 100 per cent electric option. Those solutions would have resulted in 100 per cent bus electrification in Oakville beyond 2050 or by 2036, respectively.)

In the meantime kawun and his team will continue to seek funding.

“If we get that funding, we’re ready to go. We [are] prepared for additional zero-emission fleet vehicles.”

Future of electrification

Kawun says that in his entire 20-year career in transit he has never experienced anything like the push for fleet electrification.

“There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of learning for everybody,” he says. “Buying the buses was the easy thing. It’s everything behind the scenes that needs to happen, which is the hardest part to do.”

To go along with taking the challenges and learnings in stride, Kawun is adopting a long view of the role he and Oakville Transit are playing in decarbonization.

It’s not going to be solved by 2026 or 2030 or, even 2040. But getting to a 50 per cent electrified fleet by 2026 will be a significant improvement over what the fleet was just five years prior.

“It really is exciting to be a part of the transition from from diesel to zero-emission,” says Kawun.

“The more more electric vehicles you get out there, it just becomes part of the the landscape. This will be the norm in the future.”