TUMI E-Bus Mission

In 2020, buses made up roughly 7% of global transport emissions. Electrifying buses could pioneer a new age of cleaner, more accessible urban transport. However, adoption is not accelerating fast enough to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees C. WRI’s e-bus adoption studies revealed six key barriers to adoption: lack of operational knowledge, technical limitations, inflexible procurement practices, non-scalable financing, institutional limitations and pilot paralysis.

The TUMI E-Bus Mission brings together six partners to systematically dismantle the barriers to electrification and advance mass e-bus adoption. This mission is part of the Action Towards Climate Friendly Transport (ACT) initiative and Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI), an implementation initiative on sustainable mobility.

Overcoming electrification barriers to create large-scale change will require “upward” and “outward” action. To facilitate upward action, the program will begin by working closely with 20 “deep transition” cities where the partners will provide deeper technical assistance to create localized momentum, driving subnational and national action. Simultaneously, the program will create outward action by training these cities to accelerate scale-up in hundreds of additional cities through a city-to-city mentorship program.

The TUMI E-Bus Mission works in three areas:

1. Building Coalitions

At the global level, the TUMI E-Bus Mission requires a broad coalition of stakeholders to address the challenges in e-bus adoption. WRI will build this coalition through mapping existing TUMI and ACT networks and developing outreach strategies to engage with new stakeholders.  At the city level, each deep transition city will establish “sub-coalitions” that will provide locally relevant support to cities and develop capacity among key stakeholders.

2. Deep Technical Assistance

WRI will help define e-bus adoption targets that are timebound, ambitious and achievable in each deep transition city. To help cities achieve these targets, WRI and our partners will create an acceleration plan for each deep transition city that includes tailored technical assistance and a long-term strategy to execute 100% electrification after the project concludes.  

3. Scaling

To scale e-bus adoption, WRI will extend best practices to at least 500 cities over five years through training materials and a workshop for deep transition cities. These materials and the workshop will explore overall planning for e-bus mass adoption, operations and logistics, financing, procurement strategies and training requirements for bus operators and maintainers.