Commercial Vehicle Electrification

Commercial vehicles like buses are one of the places where vehicle electrification is spreading like wildfire. Climate ideology may have driven the political mandate for developing electric buses, but their adoption is being driven by cold hard dollars. Fuel costs savings were always going to be greatest for the vehicles that spent the most time in motion. But I suspect once we get data on long-term maintenance costs, production of Internal Combustion Engine buses is done. 

Maintenance Crises are Emergent

Fascinating element of visiting the transit museum in NYC was learning that maintenance crises were a recurring problem. Politicians suppressed any increase in the transit fare, starving operators of revenue, resulting in deferred maintenance, until some tragic incident generated sufficient public outcry to support raising additional funding by raising fares. The initial five cent fare was just too low to support safe operations and raising it at a rate sufficient to keep up with actual costs (and inflation) has been a constant struggle. 

Source: Wikipedia, via Reddit r/nyc: NYC Subway Fare over last 120 years adjusted for inflation

Emblematic of infrastructure in America, really. We subsidize use by underpricing user costs.