The Future of Urban Mobility: The case for electric bus deployment in Bogotá, Colombia.

Abstract: Electrifying municipal bus fleets presents a unique opportunity to reduce local pollution, improve respiratory health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector. Despite the promises of electric buses (e-buses), their implementation faces many challenges, especially in Global South cities such as Bogotá, Colombia. To help overcome challenges and plan for e-bus infrastructure on a large scale, transit officials in Bogotá partnered with the World Resources Institute to use a new cost–benefit analysis tool, the Future Mobility Calculator. Siemens and the World Resources Institute, with support from the Coalition for Urban Transitions, developed this calculator to support decision-makers to assess the costs and benefits of shared, electric urban transport options. This paper highlights the preliminary outputs from the calculator in Bogotá and how these results guided efforts to plan for the integration of e-buses into the TransMilenio fleet. The calculator was used to provide analysis on a variety of transport electrification scenarios ranging from a large-scale electric fleet (1,661 e-buses) down to a smaller-scale transition (117 e-buses). The preliminary analysis estimated that, in all four examined scenarios, the selected benefits of bus electrification outweighed the selected costs. The cost–benefit analysis provided to the planning department at TransMilenio for the next phase of Bogotá’s bus fleet helped them to assess the impact that different levels of electrification would have on the city. This preliminary analysis done for Bogotá helped inform the development of the city’s bus tender for 2019, which led to the procurement of almost 500 e-buses