When King County Metro purchased the set of diesel-hybrid buses needed to operate the new RapidRide G line along Seattle’s Madison Street in 2023, those coaches were said to represent a major step for Washington’s largest transit agency — the last time it was planning to purchase a bus that wasn’t zero-emission. With a 2035 deadline to transition to a fully electric bus fleet, a mandate approved by the King County Council in 2020, the slow process of switching out the more than 1,100 hybrid diesel-electric coaches currently in service needed a long runway.
However, limited options for electric vehicle procurement, immense costs for fleet replacement and bus base conversion, and a changing federal funding landscape could push King County Metro to re-calibrate its all-in electrification strategy. Given a structural budget issue looming in just a few years, county leaders will need to take a hard look at whether purchasing new electric vehicles is set to come at the expense of its long-term plans around providing service for riders.
Councilmember Claudia Balducci added an amendment to the County’s newly approved 2025 budget requesting that Executive Dow Constantine’s administration produce a report on “maximizing climate benefits through transit” by August 28, 2025. The request asks for a full timeline of capital projects planned to assist with electrification goals, details on how Metro is coordinating with the County’s climate office on anticipated emissions gains, and an updated cost-benefit analysis.
Balducci’s amendment notes that in 2020, early analysis by Metro suggested that transitioning to fully electric vehicles would be 42% more expensive than continuing the status quo with diesel hybrids, a cost that translates to the ability of the agency to deliver 237,000 service hours over 19 years — service that could be used to increase ridership on the system and provide transit access to areas of the county where it’s currently lacking.
“The combination of the pandemic’s impacts on transit service and ridership, as well as the technological challenges involved in moving to a zero-emission revenue bus fleet, make it imperative to reevaluate the optimal balance between strategies to achieve King County’s climate goal of reducing transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions through the public transportation system,” the final budget ordinance states.
“These are both climate strategies — more service so that people have the opportunity to be out of their cars is a climate strategy. Electrification is a climate strategy. And we should make sure that we are looking at good data and balancing those two things and not over-committing one way or the other,” Balducci told The Urbanist after introducing the amendment in November. “I believe that we need to carefully look that we’re not throttling back on service that we could be providing in a way that means there’s not that incentive or ability for people to choose to use transit over using their cars.”
After Constantine announced he’s stepping aside next year after his fourth term concludes, Balducci was the first to launch a bid for King County Executive, though fellow County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay also announced a bid, as did King County Assessor John Wilson. (Check out The Urbanist‘s interview with Balducci on her campaign. We also have an interview with Zahilay on the way.)
A false start for Metro’s fleet
Metro made headlines in 2016 when it started testing its first battery electric bus (BEB), a 40-foot model with a limited 26-mile range, manufactured by Proterra. Put in service on the Route 226 and Route 241, two relatively short routes on the Eastside, the Proterra fleet eventually grew to 11 coaches which utilized new charging infrastructure installed at Eastgate Park and Ride near I-90. In early 2017, Executive Constantine announced that Metro would be purchasing up to 73 buses from Proterra, and that other coach models from other manufacturers would be tested out for potential future purchases.
Today, Metro has no Proterra coaches in active use, and the Eastgate charging infrastructure sits dormant. The agency quietly retired its 11 Proterra coaches this past June, following the manufacturer’s declaration of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August of 2023.
“Proterra’s bankruptcy meant that Metro was not able to procure replacement parts for the buses or charging infrastructure,” Metro spokesperson Al Sanders told The Urbanist. “The vehicles used technology that did not become industry standard, which made replacement parts a challenge. This resulted in significant challenges to operating and maintaining this fleet.”
Despite a commitment at that time to expand the fleet to 120 battery electric buses by 2020, today Metro operates just 40 BEBs, all New Flyer coaches operating out of its South Base in Tukwila. Over the next few months, the next phase of BEBs will arrive at Metro and begin pre-revenue testing, part of an 89-coach order from Gillig. That entire fleet is set to go into operation with the opening of Metro’s first all-electric base next door to South Base, a new facility originally called Interim Base but renamed to Tukwila Base, in 2026.
After the 89-coach order is fulfilled, the pace of new BEBs arriving at Metro bases is scheduled to ramp up significantly, with 200 new buses planned to be delivered in 2028 and at least 100 in most years after that. By 2032, Metro expects to have nearly 900 BEBs in its fleet. But there’s still significant uncertainty whether Metro will be able to cover its existing routes with new BEBs while still maintaining current service levels.
Earlier this year, King County’s Auditor Kymber Waltmunson raised serious questions about whether BEB coach performance would be able to stack up against the diesel-hybrids.
“In Metro Transit’s experience, hardware and software technology to support base operations and fleet charging capacity is developing but does not work reliably yet,” the auditor’s office report noted. “Further, Metro Transit estimates utility companies need six- to eight-year lead times on the installation of a new power infrastructure. And the department does not have sufficient data on future energy needs based on actual bus performance to offer utility providers, hindering Metro Transit’s efforts to ensure there is sufficient electricity to charge coaches in the future.”
A report produced by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) in mid-2023 confirms that these issues are not unique to Metro, noting widespread issues when it comes to parts availability for BEBs and the potential need for agencies to modify their routes to accommodate the limitations. It also emphasizes the need for interoperability when it comes to charging infrastructure, with many transit agencies currently trying out BEBs from different manufacturers.
Metro procures new Solaris battery buses
Despite those flashing warning lights, Metro appears to be moving full speed ahead. This week, the agency announced that it would be purchasing four BEBs from European manufacturer Solaris, which it said made it the first transit agency in the U.S. to secure such a purchase. When they hit the road in 2026, the two 40-foot and two 60-foot BEBs will be evaluated on their performance, with an option for Metro to purchase an additional 12 vehicles.
“Metro will put these vehicles through vigorous testing and evaluations including shadow service,” a Metro release touting the Solaris purchase order noted. “This comprehensive testing will allow Metro to evaluate Solaris’ ability to meet the requirements of the North American market and has the potential to add a competitor to the North American battery-electric, hydrogen, and trolley bus market for 40-foot and 60-foot buses.”
As the eighth-largest transit agency in the US, Metro is able to forge a path when it comes to encouraging more manufacturers to enter the US market, a move that could ultimately benefit transit agencies across the country. But being an early adopter does have its downsides, as the early experiment with Proterra vehicles illustrates.
Meanwhile, the electric vehicle technology that Metro has been relying on since 1940 — Seattle’s trolleybus network — has been stagnating for years, with only a modest expansion of the fleet planned in 2027 to coincide with the launch of RapidRide J. New battery packs set to be added to all of Metro’s trolleybuses that significantly expand off wire capabilities could allow the trolleybus network to expand even beyond where new wires are implemented, but there are no signs that the long-term vehicle electrification strategy is set to seriously lean on time-tested trolleybus technology over BEBs.
Bus base retrofits come with a steep cost
In order to accommodate that fairly rapid pace of transition to BEBs, Metro will also need to undertake significant overhauls of all of its bus bases scattered around the county. These overhauls are some of the biggest capital projects that Metro has undertaken as an agency in decades, and are set to disrupt service operating out of each base for several years while construction occurs.
Tukwila Base, under construction right now, will create space for 125 BEBs immediately adjacent to the existing South Base. That $115 million project is set to wrap up in 2026, by which time Metro will already have broken ground on another major electrification project on the same campus, the South Annex Base. Expected to cost $448 million, South Annex base will add capacity for another 250 buses and open by 2028. Then will come planned conversions at Central, Ryerson, Bellevue, North, South, and Atlantic bases, in that order, with staggered openings through 2035. The costs scoped through 2029 to convert the first five bases and to start design on Bellevue Base total over $1 billion, with $101 million in additional funding expected to be required for on-route layover charging over the same time period.
Though federal grant assistance has been able to play a big role in the fleet electrification conversation up to this point, those dynamics appear likely to change with the incoming Trump administration, likely to be hostile to transit broadly and electric vehicle infrastructure in particular.
The base conversions themselves will also bring direct impacts and ongoing costs. Each base overhaul is set to reduce total coach capacity by around 10% to 15% to accommodate space for charging infrastructure. Since each bus will have less range before needing to recharge, Metro will need additional operator hours to maintain the same level of service. With the transition of South Annex base, Metro has included a placeholder for 40,000 additional bus hours that will be required in 2026 just to accommodate construction detours and new battery-bus service patterns. Those 40,000 hours equate to more than 25% of the total service hours that were funded by the City of Seattle’s dedicated transit funding measure in 2023, simply to tread water.
“Metro anticipated increased service hours due to temporary relocation of routes during base conversions and minor changes to how route trips are grouped (‘blocked’) for operations to maintain service levels and transition routes to battery-electric buses with the current available battery range,” Sanders said.
The conversion work on Metro’s SoDo bases close to Downtown Seattle will likely prove even more complicated than in Tukwila, with very little room for new layover space and ambitious plans to utilize King County’s property in the area beyond just bus bases. Conversion work on Central Base and Ryerson Base, eyed for completion by 2029, will coincide with the phased redevelopment of the County’s civic campus that’s slated to create new office space on the existing SoDo bus bases and one of the first steps before King County is able to relocate employees out of Pioneer Square.
How exactly Metro fits into the new SoDo office complex remains opaque. Initial concepts show a new, two-story facility devoted to Metro, with parking on both levels and maintenance on the ground floor, and an operations facility on the second.
“The proposed project would need to respond to the technical challenges of multi-story fleet circulation, emerging battery-electric fuel sources, and a variety of vehicle types,” the Civic Campus Strategic Plan, released this summer, noted. “More detailed facility planning will be required to adequately respond to a wide range of operational, safety, and technical considerations.”
While Metro’s fleet transition plans seem to account for the transition of the agency’s existing buses, it’s less clear how additional coach needs due to service expansion would be accommodated. Metro Connects, Metro’s long-range plan that was last updated in 2021, assumes that a large portion of new service hours added through 2050 will be off-peak service, allowing the agency to utilize existing coaches throughout a larger portion of the day and cutting down on base expansion needs. But the plan still cites a need for 430 additional coaches by 2050 to accommodate increased service — costs for which could potentially come into conflict with those earmarked to transition the fleet, putting service expansion in direct conflict with electrification.
Ultimately, these are the types of questions that the newly requested report in the 2025 budget seeks to answer, with Constantine’s office currently quiet about which pathways are being considered. “Metro is working with the Executive’s office to consider policy and revenue options to address fiscal challenges. We are still exploring all options and no decisions have been made at this point,” Amy Enbysk, a spokesperson for Constantine’s office, told The Urbanist.
“The Executive office and Metro are working to update a comprehensive plan that will outline the best approach to meet the transition goals while continuing to support increased service levels, cleaning, security, and other priorities,” Enbysk continued. “The plan will outline the capital investments and schedule based on technology, vehicle range, and funding. Metro’s goal is to prioritize service, environmental considerations, and customer experience as they transition to a zero-emissions fleet.”
Ryan Packer lives in the Summit Slope neighborhood of Capitol Hill and has been writing for the The Urbanist since 2015. They report on multimodal transportation issues, #VisionZero, preservation, and local politics. They believe in using Seattle's history to help attain the vibrant, diverse city that we all wish to inhabit. Ryan's writing has appeared in Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, Bike Portland, and Seattle Bike Blog, where they also did a four-month stint as temporary editor.