On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams announced $77 million in federal grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to add 180 new electric school buses to the city’s fleet, another step forward towards a greener and healthier New York. At the same time, DOT and NYCEDC won another $15 million grant to build the first-in-the-nation electric truck charging depot at the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center in the Bronx. It will be one of the biggest in the U.S. recharging more than 7,000 vehicles every year. “We are going to use our historic waterways to turbocharge innovation and create jobs from Hunts Point to the north shore of Staten Island”, Mayor Adams said.
“This grant will allow us to put more electric vehicles on our streets and take thousands of pounds of CO2 out of our air. This will allow us to turn one of the world’s largest food distribution centers on the globe into one of the world’s greenest facilities”, Mayor Adams announced. Another box to check towards the “fleet to zero emission vehicles” goal of the 2035 Agenda by Adams’ Administration. This is the second round of Clean School Bus Program grants awarded to the city following an $18.3 million grant for 51 electric school buses last year.
“We should thank President Biden–who championed the bipartisan infrastructure law–Secretary Buttigieg and the EPA as well, because thinking about how transportation and climate can really work together to reinvent our city is important and it starts with our kids,” Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi said. Introducing new electric buses is not only a matter of transportation. “All of these kids riding electric school buses will now think that electric is the norm and they’ll expect that. And I think that culture change is just as important as actually the emissions,” she declared.
Just last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced New York City winning the Historic Reconnecting Communities Construction Grant. It covers a $117 million project to create a park in Queens and $5.6 million more to implement the Brooklyn-Queens expressway.
