Study Sought on Lighter Buses, Trains : Transportation: County agencies want $4 million in federal monies to develop energy-efficient vehicles. Plans could help ailing aerospace industry.

County transit agencies are seeking a $4-million federal grant to begin studying whether buses and trains can be manufactured with carbon-fiber composites and other exotic materials--an idea that could revolutionize mass transit and revive the local aerospace industry.

In a joint proposal, the Southern California Rapid Transit District and Los Angeles County Transportation Commission have offered to fund the first year of research by using money allocated last fall to design a Long Beach rail transit line that is no longer needed.

The two agencies plan to spend at least $25 million during three years to build prototype bus and train shells that are as much as 40% lighter than today’s vehicles. Besides being easier to maintain, lighter vehicles would consume less energy, lowering fuel costs and making it easier to switch to non-polluting electric propulsion.

Transit officials said the money for a multi-year research project could come from a hodgepodge of local, state and federal programs dealing with transportation, air pollution and energy. The transit program could give Southern California a significant head start toward becoming the center of the growing transportation research field.

“It’s a small first step, but a significant step toward exploring how to transfer the knowledge and experience of the space and aerospace industries to the surface transportation industry,” said LACTC Executive Director Neil Peterson. The $25-million figure mentioned by RTD officials is “only one component of a much larger agenda,” he said.

“Until now, we’ve only been talking possibilities,” said Nikolas Patsaouras, an RTD and LACTC board member who has long championed the development of local transit design and manufacturing industries. “This shows we can bring home the bacon and start trying to build an industry from the ground up.”

Funds for the first phase of research must be approved by Congress, but officials in Los Angeles and Washington said the proposal appears to have enough support.

Rep. Glenn M. Anderson (D-San Pedro) has added the plan to a package of amendments being proposed for the sweeping Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act passed by Congress last October. The technical amendments could be introduced by the end of the month.

“I’m quite concerned that the aerospace industry has taken quite a beating lately,” said Anderson, whose retirement this fall will end a long career in support of local transportation projects. “This is a marvelous opportunity for the aerospace companies to start to shift over to a post-Cold War economy.”

Peterson, Patsaouras and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley have spent months talking with local aerospace executives, gauging their interest and answering their questions. Patsaouras and Peterson said that several companies expressed interest in the transit business, but that it is premature to name any company as a potential partner in the enterprise.

Different companies have different skills, Peterson said. Eventually, defense contractors outside the area may also decide to jump into the transit field. “I see this as a nationwide program,” Peterson said, “but I hope the majority of the money will be spent here.”

Difficulties experienced by bus-making aerospace companies in the past--unreliable vehicles, unprofitably small production runs and parts that could not stand up to the pounding suffered by big-city buses and trains--could be avoided by making sure that the aerospace designers work more closely with bus operators, Patsaouras said.

Taxpayers also could benefit, Peterson said, because expensive defense-related research would not go to waste.

“This is a great opportunity for us to use all the money that we as taxpayers put into the defense industry and apply it to the surface transportation industry,” Peterson said.

News of the high-tech research proposal surfaced a week before the LACTC is to host a forum at which it will bring together private companies and public agencies to explore a range of potential transit-related industries that could be developed in Southern California.

The all-day conference, scheduled for Friday in the Davidson Conference Center at USC, will address immediate and future industry needs, unfilled niche markets, financial incentives and the relatively large numbers of buses and rail cars to be ordered in Los Angeles County and the rest of the state in the next 10 years.

Among the speakers scheduled are James G. Roche, Northrop Corp. vice president for advanced development and planning; Lon Bell, president of the Monrovia electric car manufacturer Amerigon Corp., and Rick Davis, RTD director of equipment maintenance.

Davis was key in securing federal support for the local research program. He has been working with the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Ontario, Canada, Ministry of Transportation on research of the use of lightweight aerospace materials to build a low-floor transit bus.

Low-floor buses, which allow easier boarding by people in wheelchairs without costly and unreliable mechanical lifts, are seen by many people in the transit business as the future industry standard. Many such buses are used in Europe, and Long Beach operates low-floor buses as downtown shuttles.

The research being proposed would expand on that structural research to find new ways to build buses and trains. New types of cleaner-burning alternative fuels also would be studied, Patsaouras said.

The RTD is a world leader in fueling buses with methanol. But that fuel, although it burns cleaner, gives poor mileage. Patsaouras said the district wants to investigate low-pressure natural gas as a fuel, finding a way to use that pollution-free substance without having to equip buses with heavy high-pressure fuel tanks.

Hybrid electrical propulsion--electrical motors fed by an on-board, clean-fuel generator--is another potentially fruitful area of research, the RTD concludes in a proposal it has prepared for the Federal Transportation Administration.

“Based on discussions with various aerospace corporations (and others) . . . it appears that there is a potential for a breakthrough in the design of a vehicle with hybrid electrical power technology,” the RTD’s proposal states.

It also says those discussions indicated that aerospace materials, more powerful engines and other space technology-driven improvements could shave 12,000 pounds off the weight of a transit bus. They typically weigh about 28,000 pounds.

“Our buses have the electronics and technology of the 1960s, I’m told,” Patsaouras said. “What we want to do is bring all that into the 21st Century.”

According to legislation authorizing the reallocation of funds, at least half of the $4 million would go to the RTD to help pay for design, research, testing and construction of lightweight buses built with aerospace materials and assembled in the United States. The rest of the money would go to the LACTC for similar research and development of a lightweight rail car.

Some research could be conducted jointly, Patsaouras said, because the objectives are similar: designing passenger vehicles that are light but strong, difficult to vandalize while easy to clean, and affordable as well as comfortable.

Such optimism is warranted, the RTD asserts, because the technologies it wants to examine are not new.

“The transit industry is currently relatively small,” the district’s proposal states. “Thus, the advances introduced either in aerospace or the automobile industry have been slow in being adopted.”

The proposal cited such lightweight materials as carbon-fiber panels.

“Carbon-fiber material is virtually corrosion-free, so that the bodies of these vehicles should have a very long life, potentially as high as 25 to 30 years,” the proposal states.