Why Do Transit Agencies Keep Falling for the Hydrogen Bus Myth?

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In recent months I’ve assembled a long, long list of hydrogen bus trials that ended up with the transit agencies realizing what should have been obvious before they started: hydrogen buses are a lot more expensive and battery electric buses are much cheaper and more reliable. More come out of the woodwork regularly, for example Essen and Munheim in Germany, stuck with 19 buses that they have to drive a long way to refuel at great overall expense, something I wrote about this week.

The head of CleanTechnica, Zach Shahan, was stunned by this as he was finalizing the story for publication, asking:

How is the hydrogen bus market not completely dead by now?

Having had the discussion with multiple transit professionals now, I can tell you what I consider the reasons.

First, transit agencies excel at keeping buses moving and commuters satisfied, mastering logistics through decades of practical experience. They are extraordinarily good at moving their passengers reliably day after day, month after month, and year after year on low budgets. Yet, when it comes to evaluating novel claims — especially around emerging technologies — they can be surprisingly vulnerable.

As Daniel Kahneman highlights in Thinking, Fast and Slow, decision-makers often default to intuitive judgments (System 1 thinking), which can leave them susceptible to accepting persuasive narratives without adequate critical scrutiny. Agencies typically lack deep internal expertise on technical innovation or energy alternatives. Without robust analytical capabilities, they become reliant on compelling yet potentially misleading stories.

Next, transit agencies pay meticulous attention to day-to-day details — like the repeatedly vandalized bus stop on route 47 — but rarely pause to reconsider the bigger picture. Their thinking, shaped by decades of routine, reflects the intuitive, narrow focus of Kahneman’s “System 1.”

The last significant shift most agencies faced was replacing trolley buses with diesel models decades ago — a transition largely driven by persuasive suppliers, not rigorous analysis. Since then, their attention has stayed fixed on immediate, local issues rather than broader strategic choices.

Transit agencies suffer from what Kahneman calls “what you see is all there is” (WYSIATI): they’re deeply aware of familiar, visible problems — like the route 47 bus stop — but don’t know what’s happening in the next town’s transit agency, never mind China. To future-proof transit, agencies need to look beyond familiar horizons and question comfortable assumptions, moving past intuition and local crises toward evidence-driven, strategic thinking.

Then transit agencies are often told a compelling but deeply misleading story: hydrogen buses are a simple drop-in replacement. Just swap the vehicle, change the fuel, and everything else magically stays the same. It’s a seductive idea. Agencies, already focused heavily on daily operational challenges, rarely probe beneath the surface. The promise of easy solutions taps into their intuitive desire for minimal disruption, bypassing critical analysis and masking significant technical and logistical realities.

Without deeper scrutiny, agencies risk investing in a solution that seems frictionless but, in reality, demands costly and complex infrastructure changes. Understanding this cognitive bias can help transit leaders resist appealing oversimplifications and pursue genuinely effective, evidence-based solutions.

Then there is the reality of range. Hydrogen fuel-cell buses often promise impressive 1,000 km ranges, appealing directly to transit managers who feel pressured to decarbonize their longest routes immediately. Yet most urban transit routes don’t require that kind of extreme range. While some available battery-electric buses offer limited ranges (200–300 km), many already comfortably serve average daily needs. Today’s battery buses routinely deliver 300–400 km, with leading-edge models like Solaris and BYD already exceeding 500 km — more than sufficient for the vast majority of urban routes.

Back to WYSIATI. Transit operators see the gap between the longest route and current battery ranges and conclude they must immediately adopt hydrogen buses. They overlook the steady, rapid progress in battery range and falling costs, which will close this gap entirely within just a few years. A smarter approach would involve electrifying average routes first, capitalizing on battery technology today, and phasing in longer-range electric buses as technology inevitably improves.

Then there’s winter range. Transit managers accustomed to diesel buses rarely think about winter heating. Diesel buses effortlessly heat passengers and drivers with abundant waste heat from their inefficient engines — free warmth, no extra cost, no fuss. Fuel cell buses do produce sufficient waste heat, but here’s the problem: it’s exceptionally expensive heat. Every degree of warmth comes from hydrogen — a fuel that’s costly to produce, store, and transport. Unlike diesel, heating with hydrogen’s waste heat is technically easy but economically painful.

Battery-electric buses face a different challenge. The ones with limited range see further range issues further as batteries power heating directly, cutting operational mileage precisely when range is already tightest — in winter. That makes today’s battery buses less forgiving during cold snaps.

Traditional bus makers mostly aren’t insulating their buses more and investing in heat pumps, so they are again inefficient. As I noted recently, Harbin in northern China, which has a two-month ice city festival which is an international attraction, gets by just fine with electric buses that are insulated, have heat pumps, and have radiative electric heaters in with the passengers.

Of course, this is a double-edged sword, because fuel cell and diesel buses have to power air conditioning in the summer with range hits as well, and both lose range in winter too, just less impactfully. This isn’t all a one-way bus route. But once again, long range buses exist, more will arrive, and they’ll get cheaper. All bus companies, not just BYD and Yutong, will figure out insulation and heat pumps.

To be clear, there have been some notable failures among electric bus manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic, which hydrogen lobbyists have been quick to amplify.

In North America, Proterra’s bankruptcy left several transit agencies wary of battery-electric buses — though, perhaps their skepticism should have focused on the risks of purchasing critical fleet infrastructure from startups.

Similarly, in Europe, Keolis Nederland faced substantial reliability issues with 250 BYD electric buses delivered in late 2020. Quality concerns and frequent breakdowns caused operational disruptions, again giving hydrogen proponents ammunition to cast doubt on battery-electric solutions. Lots of work was done by Keolis and BYD to resolve them, BYD stood behind its contract, and compensation to Keolis was agreed to, with the amount undisclosed. The fixes and BYD standing behind its products don’t get reported, but the initial problem does.

This was also a relatively isolated issue for BYD. In 2013, Schiermonnikoog introduced six BYD electric buses, marking one of Europe’s early adoptions of such technology. An independent survey in 2014 rated this fleet as the best in the Netherlands, highlighting passenger satisfaction with low noise levels, ease of boarding, and overall comfort. ​In 2015, Amsterdam Schiphol Airport incorporated 35 BYD K9 electric buses for passenger transfers between terminals and gates. There have been no significant reports of operational problems with this fleet. But transit teams and hydrogen lobbyists don’t talk about all the successes with battery electric and its dominance in markets globally, they talk about the relatively rare problems.

Finally, transit agencies have been consistently misled by credible organizations — such as the IEA, IRENA, BloombergNEF, the Hydrogen Council, and CSIRO — which have repeatedly understated the real-world costs of hydrogen electrolyzers and green hydrogen itself.

These optimistic projections began around 2020, promising a future of cheap hydrogen, but they’ve been repeatedly revised upward each year. Despite these corrections, even the latest figures from these reputable organizations still significantly underestimate actual project costs. Transit agencies, relying on these authoritative but flawed analyses, were led to believe hydrogen buses would soon be economically competitive with battery-electric alternatives.

Research by Visa Siekkinen and Andrew Fletcher shows that real electrolyzer projects consistently cost significantly more than forecasts from respected groups. Fletcher highlights that current real-world system costs average around $3,000 per kW, nearly double CSIRO’s projections. The consistent underestimation stems from ignoring balance-of-plant expenses, infrastructure requirements, and overly aggressive assumptions on learning-curve-driven cost declines.

Transit agencies have fallen victim to anchoring, a cognitive bias described in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Anchored to early, overly optimistic hydrogen cost projections from seemingly credible sources, these agencies made procurement decisions based on unrealistic expectations. Hydrogen lobbyists reinforced this bias by continually referencing these low estimates, effectively preventing agencies from adjusting their expectations upward, despite clear evidence that real-world costs are far higher. This anchoring has resulted in wasted resources and delayed transitions to proven, more cost-effective solutions like battery-electric buses.

Organizations like BloombergNEF have started admitting previous projections were far too optimistic — recently tripling its 2050 hydrogen cost estimates — but even these updated numbers remain unrealistically low. The result? Transit managers continue chasing the mirage of cheap hydrogen buses, misallocating investments instead of moving forward with demonstrably cheaper, proven electric alternatives.

We urgently need these major forecasting institutions to openly acknowledge their errors, recalibrate forecasts based on actual data, and transparently communicate realistic costs. Otherwise, transit agencies and policymakers will remain trapped in decisions driven by wishful thinking and cognitive biases rather than rigorous economic analysis.

Of course, in Canada there’s another problem, which is that the transit “think” tank which is supposed to look around the world at leading practices, is supposed to be analytical, is supposed to be good at transformation and is supposed to avoid bias, the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC), is riddled with conflicts of interest and bias toward hydrogen.

So, the answer to Zach’s question is that transit agencies repeatedly stumble into the same trap due to overlapping cognitive and institutional blind spots. Anchored to early, overly optimistic hydrogen cost projections from trusted but flawed organizations, they fail to adjust expectations as real-world costs become clear. Their operational focus on day-to-day logistics creates tunnel vision — WYSIATI — leaving them vulnerable to persuasive lobbying narratives promising easy drop-in replacements. Simultaneously, their lack of in-house expertise and analytical rigor leads them to trust reassuring external sources rather than questioning overly optimistic claims.

These reinforcing factors — anchoring, limited analytical depth, and susceptibility to appealing narratives — lock agencies into repeating costly mistakes instead of pivoting rapidly toward genuinely effective electrification strategies.