A shortage of cash could force Sadiq Khan to put the brakes on his ambition of having only “zero emission” buses in London by 2030, his own transport chiefs have warned.
Diesel buses are due to be removed from the capital by 2034 but the mayor wants Transport for London to accelerate the switch to greener vehicles by four years, in line with his vision of London being a “net zero city” by the end of the decade.
However the aim of “greening” the bus fleet could be one of the highest-profile casualties of TfL’s failure to secure all the Government support it sought for major projects.
TfL wanted £500m a year in capital funding for the next four or five years but the Department for Transport only awarded it £250m in a one-year deal for 2024/25.
Rachel McLean, TfL’s chief finance officer, said: “If we were able, we would accelerate the procurement and deployment of more zero emission buses faster [than 2034].
“Ideally we would prefer to go more quickly, and have the fleet fully zero emission by 2030, but we are not able to provide all the funding for that at the moment.”
The first zero-emission buses started running in London a decade ago, on routes 507 and 521. Now 73 routes are zero emission.
There are now more than 1,235 zero emission buses, the majority either electric battery-powered or using hydrogen fuel cells.
A few electric buses are charged using a pantograph on their roof. London has the largest zero emission bus fleet in western Europe.
Overall, 14 per cent of the capital’s bus fleet is zero emission. More than 500 of these buses are operated by Go-Ahead, London’s biggest bus firm with 26 per cent of the market.
In an interview with the Evening Standard, Go-Ahead London’s managing director David Cutts said he was “fully on board” with the mayor’s aim of converting the capital’s bus fleet by 2030 - but admitted it depended on how much money TfL had to spend.
“I think it is achievable if the political desire and the funding are there. We would certainly want to be supporting the mayor in that ambition,” Mr Cutts said.
“That is where we are aiming at the moment and all of our contracts are aligned to that sort of timeframe.
“If that is what the mayor wants and what Londoners want, we are fully on board with that.”
London buses typically have a 14-year life cycle. Most bus routes are contracted on a seven-year basis.
TfL is exploring whether it can “cascade” or sell thousands of second-hand buses to other UK towns and cities to enable it to part-fund the purchase of more electric buses.
It also has to get rid of about 1,000 “Boris buses” by the end of the decade. Most of the “New Routemasters” are about seven years old but run on hybrid diesel and battery power, meaning they are not zero emission.
TfL commissioner Andy Lord said Government funding for more zero emission buses would have to be secured “within the next couple of years” to enable orders to be placed in time with bus manufacturers.
He said: “The official target is 2034. We still have strong desire to bring that forward and accelerate it to 2030.”
Mr Cutts said that while electric buses were more expensive to buy, they tended to be were cheaper to run, due to electricity being cheaper than diesel.
“Because you have got fewer moving parts and less of an engine, the maintenance costs also should be less over the lifetime of the vehicle,” he said.
“Overall they shouldn’t be more expensive than a diesel bus [while having] all the environmental benefits.”
He added: “This is clean technology. There are no pollutants and nasty gases that are going to poison Londoners.
“We believe that over 40,000 tonnes of carbon have been saved from going to the atmosphere as a result of us operating electric buses. That is equivalent to around 24,000 cars off the road.”
Converting London’s bus fleet to zero emission is a priority for Mr Khan because half of TfL’s emissions come from buses.
Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall said that if Mr Khan had instead spent the £160m cost of installing 2,750 Ulez cameras in outer London on electric buses then the capital’s air would have been cleaner.
Electric buses need more garage space because they take hours to charge – compared with a few minutes to refuel a diesel bus.
Go-Ahead said it was also “quite a significant challenge” getting electricity from the grid to its depots to power the buses.
