City Profiles / Medium Cities / Tallahassee, FL

Tallahassee, Florida

Tallahassee is going a long way to make its bus system, StarMetro, a popular means of transportation to get cars off the road. Florida State University and Florida A&M University students make up the biggest group of riders on the city buses, and to encourage ridership, buses are branded with school insignias, frequent areas popular with students, offer free Wi-Fi, and run regularly late at night. Old bus shelters are being retrofitted with solar lighting, rehabilitated plastic and a sleeker look. StarMetro has become so successful with college students that a proposal for a new campus parking garage was taken off the table, and 500 to 700 cars a day have been removed from roads around the FSU campus.

For now, the bus fleet is being updated with new, clean diesel fuel. But StarMetro is also working with the Florida Department of Transportation, FSU and federal representatives to develop a local hydrogen-fueling facility for mass transit and possibly other vehicles.

Tallahassee gets 98 percent of its electricity from natural gas, which releases fewer and less toxic emissions than coal (the state has rejected new coal power plants) but is a nonrenewable resource. The city is increasing its use of hydropower with one of two hydroelectric plants in the state and solar power, and is aggressively promoting energy conservation through demand-side management. Tallahassee's municipal-owned utility is making strides toward the smart grid system of the future, upgrading all home systems free of charge for its new Smart Metering Project. The system provides two-way wireless communication in real time between consumer and utility, allowing consumers to monitor their consumption of electricity, gas and water daily, encouraging smarter use, and eliminating the need for meter-reader visits (thereby reducing fuel emissions). The infrastructure to gauge energy for hybrid vehicles will be put in place so that excess energy will be able to be sold back to the grid. The utility is aptly named Your Own Utilities—or YOU.