BY JOANNA D. UNDERWOOD
It’s a tough challenge figuring out how to move hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers from Brooklyn and across Manhattan when the L subway line shuts down next April for 15 months of repairs. But there are better solutions than one, in particular, that the city is now proposing: namely, putting another 200 diesel buses on our streets.
Diesel engines are powerful (certainly in comparison to electric engines) and diesel buses are relatively cheap to buy. Yet, diesel buses pollute our air and damage our health and climate. Four years ago, New York City committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 40 percent by 2030 and by 80 percent by 2050. Buying and running hundreds of diesel buses, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority intends to do (it plans to order a total of 600 new buses this year, 590 of which would be diesels), would take us in the opposite direction.
That makes no sense, especially when there are better alternatives. State Senator Brad Hoylman advocates experimenting with electric buses. It’s a good idea to see how the technology can work in New York City, and how the high upfront costs of electric buses can be addressed.
But there’s an even better and more practical solution, which is not experimental but fully commercial and scalable today: buses powered by “biomethane,” also called renewable natural gas (RNG) fuel. Using these buses along the L train route during the subway line’s outage would allay residents’ concerns about increased noise and air pollution, while helping the city move toward its ambitious climate-change goals.
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