MTA To Buy 500 Hybrid Electric Diesel Buses for $249M

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The New York Sun

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to buy 500 new low-floor hybrid electric diesel buses for $249 million, its largest order of the fuel-efficient buses and one that will more than double the city’s fleet of hybrids.


Orion Bus Industries, a subsidiary of automotive giant DaimlerChrysler based in Greensboro, N.C., will deliver the first buses in mid-2006 and complete the order a year later, a spokesman for the company, Patrick Scully, said. The MTA has the option to purchase an additional 389 buses, according to MTA records.


The majority of the new buses will be serviced in two depots in northern Manhattan, where area residents have long complained that diesel fuel emissions have helped increase the incidence of asthma. Environmental advocates and the MTA have been embroiled for years in lawsuits over the health effects of bus pollution.


The executive director of an environmental group in Harlem, We Act for Environmental Justice, Peggy Shepard, said the group supports the purchase but will not rest easy until the new buses actually arrive at the local depots.


“We think that’s important because we have the highest burden,” Ms. Shepard said.


Transit officials said the rising cost of natural gas is one reason hybrids are a more economical choice than buying additional natural gas buses, which have similar emissions. Compressed gas also poses safety risks. “With comparable emissions, better fuel economy, and no infrastructure costs, it’s a pretty good way to go with hybrids right now,” the director of research and development at New York City Transit’s Department of Buses, Gary LaBouff, said.


The purchase will add 216 buses to the current fleet of 325 hybrid electric buses in service with New York City Transit. The number of low-emission vehicles remains a mere fraction of the 4,600 buses in the city’s fleet.


The remaining 284 buses will be used by the MTA Bus Company, a subsidiary created last year to run the seven private bus lines the city is in the process of taking over.


The hybrid buses, which cost $500,000 each – about $150,000 more than conventional diesel buses – are used exclusively in stop-and-go traffic, as in Manhattan, where buses make stops every other block. Hybrid electric diesel buses are 25% more fuel-efficient than conventional diesel buses, averaging about two-and-a-half miles a gallon.


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