The city of Detroit was awarded a $30.8 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration to purchase clean energy buses.
Veronica Vanterpool, the acting FTA administrator, said Tuesday at a press conference that the Detroit announcement is the first of many, with $1.5 billion allotted for 117 grants in 47 states in the first round alone. She said 6,500 American-made low-or no-emission buses will be delivered, doubling the number currently in service across the United States.
A time frame for the national level deliveries was not provided by the FTA; 45 replacement coaches for the 2012 fleet should arrive Summer 2025 and the 25 hybrid and hydrogen buses should arrive Summer 2026 to replace the 2014 fleet.
Additionally, the city will receive $5 million in match funds from the Michigan Department of Transportation, allowing the city to continue its conversion to cleaner coaches.
The Detroit Department of Transportation (DDOT) began efforts to replace its aging bus fleet in the summer of 2022, when it received two dozen clean diesel buses, as well as working on a pilot program in May of the same year for testing the efficacy of electric buses for the city’s fleet.
A press release from the city stated that part of the grant funding will be put towards training operators and mechanics on the new equipment as well as installing the necessary infrastructure to charge and refuel the new coaches.
According to an additional fact sheet from DDOT, the hybrid buses are estimated to cost around $1 million each, with the hydrogen buses costing around $1.2 million each. The 25 new buses are expected to enter service in late 2026.
Mayor Mike Duggan said at the press conference that during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of DDOT’s bus operators quit due to the pay being inadequate when compared to the risk that COVID presented. With service reliability and ridership going down, the city failed to maintain its purchasing schedule for bus replacements, and eventually had a third of their fleet out of operation for repairs.
However, Duggan mentioned that DDOT has hired 150 new bus operators since October 2023.
Duggan has hopes that the program can go further.“The only thing stopping us now is the state of Michigan’s SOAR legislation, which is stuck in the legislature,” he said.
The SOAR legislation was proposed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a Republican-led Legislature in 2021 and originally aimed to subsidize manufacturing within the state.
DDOT is also aiming to keep its operators and riders in focus as the new funding comes in.
“It is a lot of investment in our communities, and in our people, not just investments in buses,” said Vanterpool.
Zach Kolodin, the Chief Infrastructure Officer for Governor Whitmer, mentioned that these investments are enabling communities to transform themselves and modernize their equipment, describing it as an “incredible opportunity.”
Kolodin also mentioned that the investment in hydrogen buses is part of a larger effort to create a clean hydrogen economy in the Midwest, and referred to Governor Whitmer’s participation in an announcement of a clean hydrogen hub coming to the region, with Michigan being “laser-focused” on clean transportation.
“When you replace a diesel bus with a hydrogen bus, instead of getting (nitrous oxides and sulfur oxides),the kind of stuff that makes you cough, you get water,” he said.
Detroit frequently ranks low on air quality assessments, and is often amongst the worst cities in the United States for people with asthma. The state even put in a request to the EPA in 2023 to ignore certain air quality data within the city.
Schetrone Collier, the president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 26, matched Kolodin’s sentiment of helping communities.
With the grant providing new, clean, and reliable buses, Collier said that “this is definitely a lifeline.”
He spoke about some of his experiences as an operator, saying that “Nothing was more disheartening for me than when I pulled a bus out of service, and it broke down in the middle of a route. Because it was either old or you know, just got too many miles on it.”
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, this is a benefit to the operators that go out there every day, and to the people who will be standing in a stop waiting on these new coaches,” Collier said.