Flixbus USA began operating in the U.S. in 2018, and in Oct. 2021 it acquired Greyhound.
courtesy Flixbus
The Germany-based company FlixBus ran an electric bus pilot recently from Seattle to Eugene. The company purchased Greyhound in October, but it has been steadily expanding the U.S. market for intercity travel since it landed here in 2018. Pierre Gourdain is the managing director of Flixbus USA. He joins us to share details about this expansion and the many challenges the company and the industry face in converting to an electric fleet. Meanwhile, in the Portland metro area, TriMet says it has cut its carbon emissions by more than 50% in the last six months by transitioning to renewable diesel and renewable electricity. It’s also trying to grow the number of electric buses in service. TriMet’s JC Vannatta joins us to explain what the future will look like and how the agency is working to expand electricity-powered travel.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A few days ago we talked about the possibility of ultra high speed rail in the Northwest. It’s the kind of transit that gets a lot of people very excited. In general, that’s not the case with buses. But transit experts say that buses, as unexciting as they might seem, could have a big role to play in the decarbonization of our society. So we’re going to start today with two conversations about buses in the Northwest. In a few minutes we’re going to hear what TriMet is doing to cut emissions and to electrify its fleet. We start with the Germany-based company FlixBus. In October it purchased Greyhound. A few weeks ago it piloted the first inter-city electric bus trip in the US, from Seattle to Eugene. Pierre Gourdain is the managing director of FlixBus USA. Welcome to TOL.
Pierre Gourdain: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. Can you give us a sense for how quickly FlixBus has grown since it started in Germany in 2013?
Gourdain: We started in 2013. It was actually a market opening in Germany so it was obviously people were only using only using the train before and now suddenly the bus market open, so very quick growth for the first two years. We probably became number one in Germany by the end of 2014, we launched France, which is my home country. That’s the nature of the company in 2015. And then in very short order, Italy, Spain, Portugal, first of all to the UK, the Nordics, Eastern Europe by the end of [2018] were already very dominant player in Europe. And tens of millions of people have basically rediscovered the best experience through FlixBus. And then we thought, ‘Okay let’s try the US now. That’s gonna be the biggest prize of all’, because what we are about is taking you out of your cars and putting you in a cleaner mode of transportation. And putting Americans out of their cars, that is really hard. So we launched in the US In 2018. That was in California. Then we expanded very rapidly to Texas, the Pacific Northwest end of 2019. We had a bit of a hiccup in our growth trajectory, as you can imagine. You’re in Covid, because even in the FlixBus people don’t want to travel during Covid. And then we started expanding again about six months ago. And we are today FlixBus. I know FlixBus is the second largest brand. Very recently we’re very happy that Greyhound joined us in the FlixBus family as well.
Miller: You’re in the Bay area as you noted, that was the first place that FlixBus started operating in the US. How many existing intercity bus trips were there, before you started operating, and how many are there now?
Gourdain: I can give you a very good example from out here in the Bay area and not so firm when FlixBus started, you had, for instance, Sacramento to San Francisco. You had about 12 trips. Five operated by Megabus, and seven operated by Greyhound, and FlixBus started in 2018. By early 2020. So before Covid obviously, you still have those 12 trips and then on top of those 12 trips, now you had 15 more trips. You heard that right: 15 more trips. That’s more than 1000 people [more] almost today going back and forth between Sacramento and San Francisco. And what we know is that the other trips were actually fine. They still had a lot of people using the other brands. They should actually, my team is not gonna be happy because I shouldn’t mention competitors, so apologies for that. But many of us, and we’re both windbreaks but yet you have a new service FlixBus, which was more than the two others combined. And hundreds of thousands of people rediscovered buses in California over the past four years. It’s a new awakening for the product. Then people always get excited about the high speed train, about the Hyperloop, about space travel, but this, if really if it’s done right, it’s the solution to a lot of our wars as a country and the US, and you can take traffic out of the world, because it’s just more efficient, you can reduce the carbon emissions and more importantly you can reduce the costs. And today travel is still something that many Americans don’t enjoy. And if you do this right, you can go to the price even lower and then everyone can travel. And FlixBus really stands for the 12 and one for the people. We want everyone to be able to travel, and our main competitor is really basically your Netflix and TV, and basically people staying at home and not doing that trip might end up changing your life.
Miller: That’s interesting that you say that. I was sure you were going to say our main competitor is the passenger car .
Gourdain: That’s our second.
Miller: I’m curious how much you know about your customers. So your Sacramento bus numbers are really striking, more than doubling the overall number of people taking bus trips. Not eating into existing ones, but keeping those, and then more than doubling new trips. Do you know if the customers who ended up on your buses, if they were not traveling in the past, or if they were doing those trips, but driving?
Gourdain: So we love our data at Flix. So I think we have a pretty good idea you can with the usual caveats of course. But what we believe and from asking them is about half of them, we managed to take out of their cars. And that’s really the big win. Because basically less emissions, less traffic and cars probably still make up more than 90% or 95% of the trips in the corridor. So there’s still a lot more. We’re still just scratching the surface. But that’s probably half of the first bracket. And then the second bracket, we have maybe 10-15% coming from other modes of transportation. Some people ended up maybe leaving the other buses, or even there’s a train, and actually the bus ends up being a bit quicker and far cheaper. So I know we have a few people who just came over from the train as well, but the second largest markets amount to about 30-35%. It’s really people who say, ‘Hey, I can take more trips now, because it used to cost $25, and now it costs $15 and the quality is as good. You have more stops. We also add stops on each side so we can get closer to home the last mile. Even in long distance travel, the last mile is often the most polluting one. We also want to focus on that one by just taking a little bit closer to your home. And those are also, I think an entrepreneur, those are the ones that make us the most proud. Maybe you hear the stories that someone got to visit his grandma twice as much, as someone maybe went to a job interview and then he nailed it. And then a new life is starting because I was moving to the Bay Area. It’s maybe someone who would just go and see his girlfriend or his girlfriend a bit more often. Right? So it’s a lot of super inspiring and heartwarming stories.
Miller: What are other ways to think about the last mile? Because one of the things about the passenger car lets you do is, it’s not just about arriving in from one city to another, but when you get there, you can obviously very easily go wherever you want. Are there ways to connect bus travel or train travel? Other ways of mass transit that connect to individual ways for people to get to the specific destination, once they’ve arrived in the city. I’m thinking about connecting them to e-scooters or bikes or other ways to speed up the last mile.
Gourdain: Actually, there’s something really interesting that we’ve also piloted in the Northwest to notice- FlixBus pilots everything in the Northwest because you guys are just a bit more advanced than some of these things. And electric, obviously the pilot that we just did. But the one I think I’m even further off, and we haven’t really spoken about it a lot is, we now allow you as a FlixBus passenger to take your own bike in the bus. So now you will basically bike to the Portland downtown station, assuming it’s not rainy or not a rainy day maybe. And then you will go to Seattle and then you can do the last part of your trip, assuming you have a small backpack on your bike. And now you are, if you have ticked the little box on the FlixBus sign that allows you to cover your carbon emissions for your trip, then you are fully carbon neutral. The other way we address this question of the last mile is just by trying to find stations that are very close to the public transit facility. We like to work with the cities whenever we can. We usually have a very good relationship with tens of transit agencies across the country and that they have been really good partners. I think they like FlixBus, because we are very low maintenance. It’s a bit do-it-yourself, right? A lot happens in the app. You know when your bus is coming so you can really come to the station at the last minute, and we don’t take a lot of space on the ground. So it’s quite efficient. We’ve been able to connect with a lot of transit networks and to feed them with our passengers. What we see is that if you arrive in the city and you are not where the public transit has a real node, people will not go and experiment [with] the public transit. Basically if you need to walk five minutes to the subway station or to the bus station, the city bus station, you will just not use it when you come from a trip. You need to have things that are very close …
Miller: Even even five minutes is too long? I want to move on to what you learned from the electric bus pilot. This was on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. It was very recent going, as I mentioned, from Seattle down to Eugene with – I should note – a long battery charging stopover in Portland. [It] was three hours, is that right?
Gourdain: Yes, three hours.
Miller: That’s one example, I guess of one answer to the question I’m going to ask you, which is, what are the challenges right now with electric intercity bus travel?
Gourdain: The main challenge for when we want to basically make this more of a wider product and one at full time. The main challenge is what you just mentioned, the planning challenge. So if you know that every three hours or every four hours your bus needs to go basically down for three hours, then you have to plan completely differently. FlixBus and our partner MTR already runs Seattle to Portland three times a day I think, and then just continues to Eugene and you don’t wait more than five minutes in Portland and it’s efficient. With an electric bus, the way you would plan it is that you would have a driver pick up bus one in Seattle, goes down to Portland and then you have another bus, maybe that comes up from Eugene. Driver two, bus two. And they had another bus before, like once, it’s kind of continuous, which basically the first driver of course, one can jump in bus three and then go down because it’s already charged, right? And by the time the other driver comes up from Eugene, the bus can go back to Seattle. So if you have not understood it, it’s very, very complicated. I don’t think I understand it myself, it’s really like high level tetris and it’s good that we have really good planners to help us with that. But what it’s telling you is that you need a slightly larger operation and this is why potentially electric works much better for transit because they already have those large infrastructures. At FlixBus we work with smaller companies. So asking them to do this ballet of drivers and charging stations and buses, is a bit more complex. They will need to have operations in two cities which are actually in two different states over hundreds of miles. So it’s really quite complex. Then of course there’s the capital investments, besides the planning challenge, capital challenge. An electric bus costs $1 million, it’s twice as much as a normal coach. And then the charging station costs about … if you count it all in, it’s going [to] be around $200,000. You still need to buy the bus, but you can address the charging maybe by doing partnerships, and we have a lot of potential partners in the area. But you need to basically find people who are okay to let you use their charges.
Miller: So if I add all that together, it seems like what you’re saying is you see more potential for electric buses for travel within a city than for major hundreds of miles trips between cities. Is that a fair way to put it?
Gourdain: A fair way to put it is that it’s gonna take a bit more time on the intercity. And that definitely there’s a group potentia,l and I think I just gave you a great segue to your next guest now.
Miller: You did, we did it together. Pierre Gourdain, thanks so much for joining us.
Gourdain: Thanks so much for having me. Have a great day.
Miller: You too. Pierre Gourdain is the Managing Director of FlixBus USA.
If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now about the future of bus travel in the Northwest and in the US As a whole. As Pierre mentioned, we’re gonna turn now from buses that go between cities to those that operate within a city. JC Vannatta is the Executive Director of Public Affairs at TriMet. Welcome back.
JC Vannatta: Thank you so much. I appreciate it Dave.
Miller: So we’ll get to electric buses but I want to start with the announcement you made recently that’s about conventional buses operating with a different fuel. So instead of using conventional diesel, all TriMet buses now are running on renewable diesel. What is renewable diesel?
Vannatta: So we actually just made the switch last week. We filled up the first bus with renewable diesel and it’s 99% renewable fuel made with fats and greases. There is 1% that is from fossil fuel and that’s for the lubrication of the engines. But I will tell you this, that it’s a huge transition for TriMet in that it really helps cut our carbon footprint. And we’re excited to do it because it really means a lot to this region.
Miller: How big a switch, a drop is it in overall emissions for the agency?
Vannatta: It’s around 63% total. Earlier this year, we actually switched to renewable electricity for all of our vehicles, all of our Max trains and all of our TriMet facilities. And then this coupled with renewable diesel for our fleet, we have dropped our carbon footprint by 63% in just six months, which is huge.
Miller: Logistically, how big a deal was it to switch your fuel supply? I imagine that when you have something like 700 buses in a fleet, it’s more complicated than if somebody driving right now listening to the radio goes to a gas station and you know, chooses from one of three options. What did you have to do? And was it hard?
Vannatta: I’m not going to speak for our maintenance folks because they did a great job, but we did run a pilot for some time to figure out what it meant for our industry, for our buses. And we actually had to work with our manufacturer, the engine manufacturer, which is common, to make sure that we didn’t void any warranties or anything like that. In the end, we understood that there were no changes to the engines, no changes that needed to be made to our fueling systems. It was, it was quite an easy switch for us in the end.
Miller: Is there a price difference?
Vannatta: There is, there’s about a nine cent a gallon difference which we pay, it’s a premium. But I would also just say that we expect to reduce maintenance, labor and material costs by about $100,000 a year. So in the end, it’s a good investment for us. This is really a stopgap measure, as we transition to zero emissions buses. So by making the switch to renewable diesel, and reducing our carbon footprint, it buys us some time, so to speak, until we can bring our zero emissions buses online.
Miller: When you say zero emissions buses, are you talking simply about electric buses?
Vannatta: Well, we’re testing right now 10 electric buses, battery electric buses and those require charging. But we’re also looking at hydrogen now in the Portland Metro region. We don’t have a hydrogen supply, so it would need to be trucked in from Sacramento or from some other places. So hydrogen isn’t necessarily on tap for us just yet, but we’re tracking it very closely. Now the electric buses, we’re definitely moving forward with it.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for how those pilots are going for the electric buses? My understanding is there have been five for a while and it’s only more recently that you’ve added five more to make it up to 10.
Vannatta: Yes, you’re absolutely correct. We actually got five short-range buses in 2019 and they have been running on line 62. So we’ve had some good and bad experiences with them. It’s brand new technology, and it’s been really interesting. We’re learning a lot at TriMet, I would say, and we’re working with the manufacturers hand in hand to figure out the problems. I would say, a software update on a bus is very much different than a software update on your iPhone. And that can be good and bad. So we’ve been testing these 5 short range buses and that means that we have to charge up somewhere along the route and we’ve had an on-route charger at our Sunset Transit center. And so for good or for bad, those have been working out. We also have brought on five Gillig electric buses, they’re long range buses and that means that they can go on one charge throughout the day and they usually charge overnight. And so we’ve been testing those. We just got those this last fall and we’ve been putting them to the test. So it’s been a learning experience for us, but I think that we are getting more comfortable with the technology. We’ve been working again with the manufacturers, and we’re positioning ourselves to put in a large order early next year for our next batch of buses. But I would say we’ve made a commitment as an agency, that we were not going to buy diesel buses anymore. And so that’s huge for our region.
Miller: So the next big batch of buses that you’re going to be buying as an agency, they are going to be electric buses of some kind?
Vannatta: That is absolutely correct. And I would say, we have a lot of advocates who want us to move faster, and I think we do too. We want to change over our bus fleet to zero emissions by 2040, but if we had our choice we would do it sooner. Obviously it’s very expensive. You just heard Pierre talk about the cost of the bus and the charging infrastructure, and, and we’re doing the same thing. The charging infrastructure is not necessarily easy. It’s very expensive. And we’ve been working with PGE on our Powell garage to really install all the charging equipment that’s needed. And when you start to think about transitioning 700 buses, let’s say we were to transition them all over to battery electric, we would need charging infrastructure beyond compare. New substations would need to be built, so it’s a lot of work for us. We’re learning a lot and I think that we’re becoming more comfortable with the transition.
Miller: One of the basically hard to fathom list of infrastructure projects that are going to be provided by the recently passed infrastructure bill, is charging stations and charging infrastructure. Could that mean infrastructure for TriMet?
Vannatta: Absolutely. We are eyeing that pot of money as well, as [are] others from around the nation. There’s a lot of money in there for zero emissions buses, for charging infrastructure. And I think for us at TriMet, it is incredibly complex. Because when you think about electric buses going out on routes, it’s a little bit different than diesel, because you can potentially get fuel anywhere. Charging is a little bit different for a bus and we really have to map out our routes, what electric buses could go on them, what are the distances they need to drive, where do we need charging stations? So it’s really putting together that comprehensive plan, what that looks like. Once we have that, and we’re getting to it, I think that we will be in a very, very good position to start applying for those funds. And so yes, we will [audio cuts out] … both local funds, state, national: we will need all of those funds to help us make that transition.
Miller: I want to go back to that 700 vehicle fleet that you’re dealing with right now, is it possible to retrofit those? And is that a cost effective option, or are you basically just waiting for them to break down, and at that point you’ll replace them with native electric vehicles?
Vannatta: So, we actually undertook a pilot project where we have four buses that began life as a diesel and they’re now electric. It’s just a phenomenal thought to take something that was diesel and, and transition it to electric, but we’ve done it for four of them. We actually just got them and we are now testing them. When you think of it, that could be a cheaper solution for us, as well as a quicker solution to transition us to a zero emissions bus. So the results are not in just yet, but we are, they are cheaper to, to convert and uh, and we’re testing them so we’ll see. I’ll have to be back to give you an update in the months ahead.
Miller: Which city or mass transit authority is leading the way in the country right now in terms of electrification?
Vannatta: That’s a good question. I would say, there are a lot of systems that are doing pilot projects, even just north to us. I think a system that has had a lot of experience with electrification is Sound Transit and King County Transit, because they have the overhead wires. For them, understanding electricity and electrification of buses is top of mind for them. And I know that a lot of folks around the country have been doing pilot projects, much like us and experiencing much of the same, learning, growing pains so to speak. But I would say this, that we, with our tests, have been in conversations with so many of those transit agencies, learning best practices and understanding how they’re planning to make the transition.
Miller: JC Veneta, thanks very much.
Vannatta: Thank you so much.
Miller: JC Vannatta is the Executive Director of Public Affairs for TriMet.
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