Funding helping CARTA involved projects, electric fleet expansion

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) – A National Science Foundation funded project evaluates the impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had on transit operations.

CARTA has partnered with Vanderbilt University for this project.

“CARTA, as with many other organizations, has been operating on special procedures during the pandemic with a reduced schedule, and understanding how to best use our capacity and better serve our passengers, allowing them to social distance while they’re traveling and ensuring the safety of our operators and our passengers and the public, moving forward,” CARTA Transportation System Planner Philip Pugliese said.

Pugliese said that during pandemic lockdowns CARTA saw “substantially reduced ridership.”

“However, that leveled over fairly quickly and stabilized at about 15 to 17 percent to our pre-COVID ridership, and now, that businesses are coming back online that is trending upward a bit,” Pugliese said.

For around 28 years, CARTA has operated downtown electric shuttles.

“We’re one of the most experienced and long-standing transit operators of electric vehicles,” Pugliese said.

He said last year, they added more electric buses.

They’re planning on adding more soon.

“CARTA has received funding to expand our electric bus fleet and retire older diesel buses to reduce vehicle emissions,” Pugliese said.

As they anticipate expansion, they’re also taking a look at energy use.

CARTA is working with Vanderbilt University and the University of Houston to look at energy use of their diesel, hybrid and electric operations.

“Looking at the energy use of each vehicle such as road gradient, traffic congestion and weather factors and how they affect our energy consumption with a specific interest towards future adoption of electric vehicle technology, and how that might affect battery life and the performance of the bus,” Pugliese said.

This is one of the 55 projects the Department of Energy announced 139 million dollars of federal funding for, last month.

Of the funding, over 1.7 million dollars is slated to fund the project.