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Biden admin can't keep pace with demand for clean bus grants
DOT has more money than ever to help transit agencies buy cleaner buses, but it was forced to reject $7 billion in funding requests.
CLIMATEWIRE | The Department of Transportation was forced to reject a staggering 345 applications from transit agencies seeking $7 billion to buy cleaner buses even after Congress allocated record funding this year for two transit grant programs.
The large number of transit agencies seeking money to retire their diesel fleets reflects decades of inadequate federal funding for new buses powered by electricity or natural gas, said Beth Osborne, advocacy director for Transportation for America and a former DOT acting assistant secretary.
Transit agencies could have bought new non-diesel buses over several years to smooth the transition to lower-emissions vehicles if more federal money had been available in the past 10 or 20 years, Osborne said.
“We tackled this decades too late,” Osborne said. “People are rushing to get this done because many leaders understand how far behind we are. We waited until the last minute to take this seriously.”
DOT’s Federal Transit Administration received 475 proposals from transit applicants seeking a total of $8.7 billion for lower-emission buses through the Low or No Emissions Vehicle Grant Program and the Buses and Bus Facilities Program. The two competitive grants pay for new natural gas and electric buses, charging facilities, and a workforce training in driving and maintaining the new buses.
Drawing from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act of 2021, Congress gave FTA roughly $1.7 billion a year for five years starting in 2022 to spend through the two grant programs.
The money is more than triple the funding that two programs had on average from 2017 through 2021. But the 2023 allocation paid for only 130 of the 475 project proposals.
Two big winners are the Washington-area transit agency, which got $104 million to buy 100 electric buses, and King County Metro Transit in Seattle, which got $33.5 million to buy electric buses and charging stations.
Deputy FTA Administrator Veronica Vanterpool said the agencies that were denied “can receive useful information in this debrief from our team. And what we've seen is that debrief often results in very successful applications the next time around.”
The huge demand this year is driven in part by the growing number of local governments that are requiring their transit agencies to set zero-emission targets, said Joshua Schank, a former chief innovation officer at the Los Angeles County transit agency and a transportation consultant at InfraStrategies in California.
Local governments nationwide are facing huge pressure to adopt similar mandates because transit fleets are one of the few areas where governments can influence transportation emissions, Schank said. The transportation sector accounts for 29 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to EPA.
Every transit agency in California is now required to reach zero emissions by 2040. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority moved the deadline to 2030 after its board pressured the agency for an earlier date, Schank said.
Transit agencies in New York City, Washington and its Virginia suburbs are also transitioning to all-electric fleets.
“It is not just LA Metro that has bumped it up,” Schank said. “There are [zero-emission] goals everywhere — Florida, Ohio and so many places across the country.”
Another cause for the spike in demand for the FTA grants is the budget deficits facing many transit agencies. With many office workers continuing to work from home, U.S. transit systems are operating with 60 percent to 80 percent of their pre-Covid-19 ridership, which has cut revenue, Schank said.
The ridership decline has forced the agencies to look for new funding opportunities to fill the fiscal gap even if they don’t have a mandate or goal for net-zero emissions, Schank said.
“Buses are eventually going to need replacement, and it’s going to cost money,” Schank said. “They're going to look at opportunities that they might not otherwise have looked at.”
