Progress on New York City school bus fleet electrification is slow, advocatess say

As dawn breaks and New York City awakens, Ingrid Espinal is already behind the wheel of her yellow school bus. For nearly two decades, the early hours have been a cornerstone of her daily routine. “I tell everyone: I love my job. The only thing I don’t like is the time to wake up,” she said.

In recent years, Espinal has witnessed first-hand New York City’s efforts to phase in electric school buses. At NYCSBUS, the city-affiliated school bus company where she works, Espinal was the first person to drive an electric vehicle, she said. “Some people don’t like it, but I love it,” Espinal said. “It’s much better for the health.”

As a resident of the Bronx, one of the boroughs most affected by air pollution, Espinal is particularly aware of the health risks posed by diesel bus emissions, which make up the vast majority of school buses in New York City.

She is not alone in worrying about the health impacts of diesel fumes. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, workers exposed to diesel exhaust face higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, and even certain cancers.

Such health concerns, along with a desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, were the impetus for the adoption of Local Law 120 in October 2021, which requires that the city’s school bus fleet be completely electric by 2035.

“They said they were gonna bring more electric buses, and I hope that this is gonna be true, because it is much better,” said Espinal.

But as the law passed its third anniversary this October, very few bus drivers and students have seen its benefits. Only 43 out of the roughly 10,000 yellow buses traveling the streets of New York City every day are electric—a fraction of a percent, according to World Resources Institute data. The city failed to meet its first implementation target of 75 electric buses in 2024, and is unlikely to reach its goal of a 20% electric fleet by the next mandatory report date in 2029, according to the Department of Education’s first progress report, published in June.

Concerned by the slow progress, the New York City Clean School Bus Coalition—a group of a dozen organizations—has requested that the City Council hold an oversight hearing on the law.

“I think one of the main issues is just like, we have a really, really large fleet and we’re not moving fast enough in order to actually comply with the law,“ said Lonnie Portis, policy manager for West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (WE ACT for Environmental Justice), a member of the coalition.

New York City has the largest school bus fleet in the country, about five times bigger than the next largest fleet, operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District. And it is almost double the size of the regular bus fleet operated by the New York City branch of the Metropolitan Transit Authority in the city, which has about 5,800 buses. And the majority of the city’s school buses run with diesel engines.

“Broadly, the consequences of air pollution exposure, including from diesel combustion and other emission sources, are in the cardiovascular system and with chronic diseases,” said Gina Lovasi, an epidemiologist at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “And then for kids, there’s also implications for their healthy development,” she said, pointing to low birthweight, increased infant mortality, as well as allergies, asthma, impaired neurodevelopment, and cancer.

The transition to electric vehicles is particularly important in low-income, Black and brown communities, which experience some of the highest levels of air pollution in the city, said Portis. Part of the clean bus coalition’s mandate is to ensure that the transition to electric school buses is just and equitable.

“I think an oversight hearing on electric school buses is really the next best thing,” said Portis, noting that the coalition has been requesting a joint hearing with both the education and environmental protection committees since last spring. But beyond providing funding and information, the city has relatively little power over the implementation of the law, Portis noted.

The New York City Department of Education, which oversees school transportation, has contracts with more than 40 bus companies. Those companies are responsible for carrying out the electrification of their fleet to comply with the law, a process which has proved difficult for some.

“It comes down to what the vendors are able to do and the challenges they might be facing,” Portis said. “We really need to get a better understanding of what challenges might exist for different bus operators.”

The Department of Education submitted its first mandatory progress report in early summer. The report showed that there were 14 electric buses operating in the city, far from the goal of 75 set by the law. The city estimates that there will be more than 400 zero-emission vehicles operating by the next mandatory report date in 2029. But that would represent under 5% of the city’s total fleet—still only a fraction of the 20% goal set by law.

“Given the uncertainty of our contracting modeling, grant funding and electrical infrastructure requirements, it is difficult to predict when complete replacement will be achieved,” reads the report. The Department of Education did not reply to multiple interview requests.

One of the biggest challenges reported by bus companies is the high upfront cost of purchasing electric vehicles, the report shows. Electric school buses can be up to five times more expensive than their diesel counterparts, with smaller models costing between $230,000 and $250,000, whereas the costs of comparable diesel models range between $50,000 and $65,000, according to the New York City Clean School Bus Coalition.

There are several sources of funding available for New York City bus operators and school districts to fund the purchase of electric vehicles.

In 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law unlocked $5 billion in federal funding through the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA operates grants and rebates programs, which are open to cities, school districts, and bus companies. As of June 2024, New York City vendors had secured a total of $125 million in funding from the agency to support the purchase of 394 buses, and just under half of the funding remained to be awarded.

The state also provides grants through its New York School Bus Incentive Program, which was allocated $500 million through the Clean Water, Clean Air and Clean Jobs Environmental Bond Act in 2022.

But navigating the grants and rebates system can be difficult for school district and bus operator administrators, said Mo-Yain Tham, New York policy manager at Jobs to Move America, a member of the New York City Clean School Bus Coalition.

NYCSBUS is one of the few companies that has been able to effectively navigate this system. With support from the EPA and from the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority, the city-owned non-profit operates eight electric buses, or 1% of its fleet.

Even so, the transition toward a zero-emission fleet hasn’t been smooth. The driving range of the early models of electric buses hasn’t been on par with the rest of the fleet, said Matt Berlin, CEO of NYCSBUS.

“I would not want to be all electric with the eight buses that we have, if we had a cloning machine to clone these buses,” he said, adding that the company is currently not able to run its green buses on all of its routes. “We need to hope for technological advancement.”

The comparatively lower performance of electric vehicles isn’t the only technology-related barrier to electrification, according to the Department of Education’s report, which highlights the lack of charging infrastructure and the insufficient energy supply in many bus depots as major roadblocks.

Tham believes that the technology hurdles are one more reason to keep moving forward with the transition. “In terms of the technology not being there, I think that’s a chicken-egg problem,” she said. “I think with the increased demand, the technology will try to meet it, you know?”

Katherine Roboff, deputy director for the Electric School Bus Initiative at the World Resources Institute, said the same can be true of the high upfront costs of the vehicles, which are expected to fall over the next few years. The institute estimates that operating an electric school bus instead of a diesel one currently results in $100,000 in lifetime fuel and maintenance savings; the projected decrease in the purchasing cost would result in the lifetime total cost of ownership of the electric buses being on par with diesel buses.

As New York City moves forward, drivers are slowly learning how to navigate the realities of this new technology.

Like his wife Ingrid Espinal, Jose Antonio is a driver for NYCSBUS. For a while, he operated one of the company’s electric vehicles on his regular route. And like his wife, he loves it.

“I think it’s better for everybody,” he said, highlighting the reduction in noise and in air pollution.

But he recognized there had been some bumps in the road.

“The first one that we had, the life of the battery wasn’t that long,” he said. “I was a little bit nervous that I was not going to complete my round.” That’s because using the air conditioning makes the battery drain faster, he explained. But Antonio heard there were some technological improvements on the horizon for the buses. “If they keep doing that, it is going to be perfect.”