Zion becomes first national park with an all-electric shuttle bus service

Zion National Park in Southern Utah is renowned for its colorful canyons and arches, and is one of the “mighty five” national parks in the region showing off Utah’s natural beauty.

The park, which is largely situated around a narrow canyon, started getting more and more visitors in the 1990s, leading to traffic issues. This led the park to close off most park roads to private traffic, and institute a shuttle system to bring visitors through the canyon and back and forth from the town of Springdale just outside the park.

Those buses went into service in 2000, and helped to revitalize the park by reducing noise and pollution from traffic, which are always a scourge in beautiful natural areas.

“The remarks we got from visitors in the very first summer were fantastic. They said, ‘You have given us back the canyon.’ They said, ‘We can hear the birds sing and the air is fresh.’ No longer were the traffic jams fouling the air, impacting the soundscape, and diminishing the visitor experience.”

Jeff Bradybaugh, Zion National Park Superintendent

However, those buses ran on propane, so they were still noisy and contribute to the degradation of natural environments due to their use of fossil fuels.

Now, Zion has upgraded its entire fleet to all-electric buses, rather than the previous propane buses, becoming the first fleet at any National Park to do so.

The fleet includes 30 all-electric buses to replace the 39 previous propane buses. The new buses are more spacious, quieter, and include air conditioning and better disability accommodations, which the previous buses did not have.

Best of all, they’re also more efficient, and therefore contribute less to the climate change that has made Zion’s summer days hotter and hotter (as humans apparently refuse to stop poisoning the only home we have).

The fleet’s full conversion was announced this week, but the buses have already been operating and shuttling visitors. Over Labor Day weekend, they shuttled 97,000 riders through the park – saving a huge amount of car trips, exhaust, and noise that would have otherwise been required. Zion says each shuttle replaces 29 cars on its roads.

The buses were largely funded by the US Department of Transportation through a grant program for nationally significant federal lands.

While this is the first National Park bus fleet to go all-electric, the National Park Service is working to transition other large bus fleets, like those at Grand Canyon, Acadia, Yosemite, Bryce Canyon, and Harpers Ferry, to all-electric buses. This is all part of the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to shift the entire federal fleet to electric vehicles.

And Zion hopes that it can serve as a role model for other bus fleets, whether federal or otherwise, and show how successful an all-electric bus fleet can be at reducing both air and noise pollution. “This is the state-of-the-art electric bus fleet in the country. It is going to set a standard for other national parks” said Robin Carnahan, administrator of the General Services Administration.

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