8 Ways to Make Your Transit Maintenance Facility More Efficient
Maintenance facilities are the operational backbone of transit agencies, helping wash, clean and maintain thousands of buses, railcars and ferries each and every day. This regular maintenance makes them huge consumers of water and energy (and money). Many cities across the country are mandating transit agencies create more efficient facilities not only as good stewards of the environment, but also to help the bottom line.
The first step to making an existing maintenance facility more efficient is looking at its meter system.
4 min to read
The first step to making an existing maintenance facility more efficient is looking at its meter system.
(This blog was co-authored by Dave Walsh, a project manager with Sellen Sustainability)
Maintenance facilities are the operational backbone of transit agencies, helping wash, clean and maintain thousands of buses, railcars and ferries each and every day. This regular maintenance makes them huge consumers of water and energy (and money). Many cities across the country are mandating transit agencies create more efficient facilities not only as good stewards of the environment, but also to help the bottom line. The first step to making an existing maintenance facility more efficient is looking at its meter system.
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Traditionally, meters were simply tools to help business pay their utility bills. Today, they provide the forensic data for energy usage — tracking where heat, water, electricity is going, how much is being consumed, by what and from where? Trouble is, most existing buildings’ meter systems are a maze of tangled data.
These are some ways we help our clients untangle them:
1. Investigate how the base is metered. You can’t improve what is not measured. Older bases may not have meters that separate buildings or separate lighting from process loads like vacuuming. Often, portions of the base are built at different times and the meter address does not match the building address. The goal is to separate the process load from the lighting, plug and mechanical loads.
2. Add meters if major uses cannot be tracked with existing meters. Temporary meters can save money but they require more staff time to monitor and move. Permanent meters provide historical trending. The concept of long-term and permanent metering plays into the Environmental Management System (EMS) goal of continuous improvement
3. Identify major energy users. There are many activities at transportation facilities (like CNG fueling, bus/train washing, vacuuming, other process activities) that aren’t part of typical building’s energy uses (like traditional heating, cooling and lighting). The key is to do some up-front estimating on which areas should be metered separately and how this metering will be used for current or future energy reduction measures.
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4. Use Portfolio Manager to track energy and water usage. Use Energy Use Intensity (EUI) as the yardstick and not an Energy Star score. Maintenance bases are non-ratable for Energy Star. There is not a comparable bus or rail maintenance category. Special considerations in Portfolio Manager (PM): Shift work is difficult in PM. Even though there is not a national comp or a category in PM, use PM to create computer historical data and define the baseline from which to improve. Staff understand this concept if they have an EMS.
5. Consider using LEED EBOM to document and measure performance. This can be a tool to keep stakeholders accountable. It is a widely understood metric to demonstrate (internally and to the public) the level of performance and commitment.
For example, Campus Certification for LEED projects can certify a project as a block or as a campus. Campus makes sense because you can group the occupied buildings (which are LEED-eligible) with the non-occupied spaces into one campus certification.
6. Keep it Clean: Storm water at maintenance bases. Big areas have the potential to collect oil and other pollutants. Regulatory mandates lead to sustainability performance.
7. Engage employees as sustainability allies. Employee engagement helps incorporate sustainability training into standard procedures for everyone from bus operators to janitors. Look at operational waste management beyond office paper such as with waste oil, metal, bus parts, etc. – common in transit maintenance. Also, maintenance folks are judged on two things: Is the bus clean? Did the bus go out on time? We suggest a third metric: Track the EUI and reward staff if the base’s EUI has gone down!
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8. Take Sustainability on the Road. Take green cleaning on the bus by utilizing policies and procedures for buildings to bus cleaning; from risk management to human health issues. These tips helped us achieve a 27% savings (over a standard baseline) in our work with a large transit agency in southern California. We were even able to document that the process load at the maintenance division was using more than 42% of the energy coming from the meter.
(The next post will cover: Maintenance facilities and efficiencies for New Construction.)
Sustainable transit continues to be a hot topic among city leaders and transit officials, but more often than not, equitability is left out of the conversation.
Volkswagen was found guilty and agreed to pay up to $14.7 billion to settle allegations of cheating emissions. As part of the lawsuit, Volkswagen is required to establish and fund an Environmental Mitigation Trust, known as EMT. Over the next 10 years, $2.9 billion from the VW settlement will fund environmental mitigation projects that reduce emissions of NOx.
Rating systems have become the currency of sustainability. The right sustainability ratings system provides an important third-party verification of your agency’s commitment to creating facilities that reduce carbon emissions, save water, create healthier work environments for your employees and have a positive impact on the communities they serve.
Everyone needs to take a mental and physical break at some point in the workday, whether they’ve been concentrating on a computer screen, the road, or the underside of a bus, truck or train car. The tricky part for transit agencies is that each of these activities takes place in different surroundings, lighting conditions, room temperature and noise levels. With that in mind, consider the following factors in your facility design.
Shifts are long and varying, and facilities are often inadequate for transit employees to truly recharge and stay sharp on the job. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The quality of the environment within facilities can be designed to support shift workers and those with jobs that don’t follow traditional 9-to-5 schedules. Two key elements that can be utilized to support vehicle operator health; creating spaces with adaptability for varied activities and quality lighting that supports the adaptability of the space.
Most transit facilities have a break room for operators to use between shifts — typically an artificially lit space with a TV, vending machines, and cafeteria-style tables and chairs. The trouble is, every person has a different way of relaxing. Besides exposure to daylight and nature, key components of wellbeing are social cohesion and a sense of empowerment. The key here then is to empower employees to choose the best way to relieve their own stress around shifts.
A health and wellness revolution is underway in America. Concurrently, there is a growing public health initiative to promote safer, more accessible recreation facilities and active transit options. Transit agencies are uniquely positioned in the overlap of these two movements. By promoting health and well-being, agencies have an opportunity to show leadership and innovation in a truly holistic approach to total worker health, while benefiting workforce productivity and happiness.
GRTC is a member of the Virginia Clean Cities (VCC) coalition, which over the years has hosted a variety of workshops, webinars and other training opportunities for fleets interested in transitioning to CNG. Another coalition member — the City of Richmond — inaugurated its fleet of CNG refuse haulers in 2011, which set the stage for GRTC’s transition. View the YouTube video to see how VCC helped the city implement its CNG fleet.
