Mayor Rhodes-Conway's Remarks at the USDOT Transportation and Climate Symposium

Last week, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway was invited to discuss Madison’s work to reduce climate pollution as part of the USDOT Transportation and Climate Symposium. She delivered the following remarks:  

“In Madison, we have a goal of a hundred percent renewable energy by 2030 for our city operations and part of that is looking at transportation. We know in Wisconsin that transportation is about 40% of our climate pollution and so we have to put a lot of energy into making sure that we're reducing those emissions. We, like the federal government, are taking a whole-of-government approach.  

We have a bunch of different work that we're doing to reduce emissions across our community. I talked this morning a little bit about some of the land use stuff that we're doing. I think it's important to just say up front that that is a key part of reducing emissions from transportation. Another key part is that question of choice. Making sure that people have a choice of modes and that they can choose to walk or bike safely in our community. We put a lot of energy to that. We're a Vision Zero community and really appreciate the support from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) for that.

I do want to start with our electric bikeshare. We have BCycle. They went all electric in Madison and we are very pleased that they're expanding across our community. I see people riding them all the time. And we actually have a program that I'm really proud of because as you know, bikeshare is not free for people and you have to have a credit card. You can actually go into a library, and you can check out a BCycle membership for a period of time. No extra charge. It's just your library card, which is free, and you can get a BCycle and you can ride it around town. So, we're trying to make sure that everybody has access to electric bikes even if they can't afford one themselves.  

The other thing I want to talk about is our fleet. We have about 900 light duty vehicles. Over 150 of them are hybrid electric and over a 100 are fully electric. We are committed to — by 2030 — converting all of those to either hybrid or fully electric vehicles. And we're on track to do that.  

This fall, we’ll be opening our first bus rapid transit (BRT) line and we are already working on our second. It’s going to be all-electric vehicles and the buses have about 50% greater capacity than the standard buses that we run now. So not only is it going be electric, but it's also going to be bigger buses that can fit more people and get them to where they are going across our community.  

As of the end of this year, we anticipate that about a third of our transit fleet will be electric vehicles and we're going to keep working on that number going forward. We also have installed solar on our transit facilities so that when we're charging these electric vehicles, at least some of that charge is coming from the sun. I want to say a big thank you to [Federal Transit Administration] FTA because none of the work that we've done on BRT or these electric vehicles or the solar would've been possible without funding from FTA and DOT. This is a partnership and I'm incredibly grateful for those funds.  

We're also looking at heavy duty vehicles in our fleet. The one that I am most excited about, and I talk about everywhere I go, it's called the Volterra. And it is an all-electric fire truck. In fact, we had the first functional all-electric fire truck in the United States of America.  

It's a partnership with Pierce, which is a Wisconsin company. This fire truck is made in Wisconsin, which makes it even better. They were kind enough to give us the prototype to test. We have been testing it for them. They actually have it back right now; I think they're on their third or fourth generation of this vehicle. [Pierce has] sworn to me that Madison will get the first one off the production line. So, we'll be converting our fire fleet to electric as well.  

And by the way, [the truck] is great. The firefighters love it. Your communities should all of the adopt these as well. We're looking at electric trash trucks. We've got electric forklifts. We're doing whatever we can on the electric front.

But I think most of you know that it's actually really difficult to electrify heavy duty [vehicles]. So, we are looking at biodiesel and renewable diesel as well. Right now, all of our diesel trucks are running at least 5% biodiesel. That's year-round. In favorable conditions they're running at least 20% biodiesel. And we have an experiment running with a 100% biodiesel. Our street guys will have the final say, the ones who actually drive the trucks. If they think it works, we can take that fleetwide.  

We're also experimenting with renewable diesel, which is now cost-competitive for us. We're going to compare that to biodiesel and do whatever makes the most sense. But we will transition our heavy duty fleet in addition to our light duty fleet.  

I also want to just say a word about our fleet building. We built a new fleet facility recently. It’s a LEED platinum-certified building. We think it's maybe the first public, platinum fleet facility in the country. It has five different kinds of solar on it. You can ask me about that later if you're interested.  We are also looking at how we make charging available to our community and that's a whole other conversation.  

But I know that there are DOT geeks out there that would very sad if I don't mention this last thing, which is in addition to biodiesel, we are buying and installing soy-based tires. Did you know that was a thing? I did not know that was a thing. It is totally a thing. You can get them. We have installed 828 soy tires on our vehicles. The drivers actually say they are better than petroleum-based tires. And so, check that out. 

We're recycling our batteries and we're doing everything we can to make transportation sustainable in Madison. And it's working. Thanks to our EV work, we've already reduced 6.38 million pounds of carbon since 2018 and biodiesel has given us another 13.4 million pounds of reductions.  

I just want to close by saying thank you to President Biden, to Secretary Buttigieg or as we know him, Mayor Pete, and to the entire DOT. Because this work literally would not be possible without the support of the federal government. I am really happy to be in a position to do this implementation, but it does take a partnership. Thank you.”

Remarks delivered on Friday, July 12 in Washington, DC. This transcript was lightly edited for readability.