Best Practice

GreenStep City Best Practices: Transportation
Efficient City Fleets {BP No. 13}

Implement a city fleet investment, operations and maintenance plan.

Best Practice Actions

1. Efficiently use your existing fleet of city vehicles by encouraging trip bundling, video conferencing, carpooling, vehicle sharing and incentives/technology.
2. Right-size/down-size the city fleet with the most fuel-efficient vehicles that are of an optimal size and capacity for their intended functions.
3. Phase-in operational changes, equipment changes including electric vehicles, and no-idling practices for city or local transit fleets.
4. Phase in bike, e-bike, foot or horseback modes for police, inspectors and other city staff.
5. Document that the local school bus fleet has optimized routes, start times, boundaries, vehicle efficiency and fuels, driver actions to cut costs including idling reduction, and shifting students from the bus to walking, biking and city transit.
6. Retrofit city diesel engines or install auxiliary power units and/or electrified parking spaces, utilizing Project GreenFleet or the like.

Optional Best Practice for Step 3 Recognition

Category A cities: implement this best practice by completing any two actions.

Category B and C cities: implement this best practice by completing any one action.

 

Step 4 Recognition Metric for Category A, B and C cities

Metric # 3: City Fleets

 

Summary

Whether a city - or other taxpayer-funded entity such as a park or school district - leases or owns vehicles, or contracts for vehicle services such as road grading, planned city fleet actions can cut costs per taxpayer and cut total mobility costs and carbon emissions per employee. Additionally, the phasing in of electric city vehicles helps prepare the city for adding public charging stations, and raises awareness among community members of the benefits of EVs.

Greenstep Advisor

Evan Pak, Emissions Reduction Specialist, MN Pollution Control Agency: 651-757-2816, evan.pak@state.mn.us

Connection to State Policy

The state agency goal for reducing state fleet consumption of fossil fuels is 30% by 2027 relative to a 2017 baseline. A 5% annual reduction in city fleet fossil fuel consumption is consistent with this state agency operations goal. City fleets are encouraged to adopt this 5% goal and may, in 2020, be able to benefit from implementation tools being developed for state agencies by the Minnesota Office of Enterprise Sustainability.

Benefits

Major Benefit

  • Calculators to determine a fleet's emissions and cost savings from changes in vehicles and fuels are available from these sources: the Center for Clean Air Policy and the U.S. Dept. of Energy - their fleet footprint calculator called GREET (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation). EVs in Minnesota usually provide a greenhouse gas reduction of at least 65% compared to gasoline vehicles.
  • Electric vehicles have several advantages over vehicles with internal combustion engines. Most impressively EVs convert 59%–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels; conventional gasoline vehicles convert only 17%–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels. With battery prices coming down, Drive Electric MN reports that EVs are already among the lowest total cost of ownership vehicles in the passenger car market and will continue to become more affordable for the average consumer and city fleet user. Electric buses now have a lower total cost of ownership over the life of the bus, thanks to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel and maintenance cost savings. And this is taxpayers money saved even before considering the public health and environmental benefits. Ongoing life-cycle research on EVs is dispelling various myths about EVs.
  • A city fleet study to assess the cost/benefits of phasing in EVs typically includes telematics -- gathering vehicle data on average miles/day, average MPG, average engine on hours/day, percent idle time, average speed -- to identify, by calculating total cost savings over a vehicle's use life, the best existing vehicles to replace with electric vehicles.