PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — SEPTA is hoping for a share of federal infrastructure money, to help it go greener.
If you're going to run electric buses, you've got to have a way to charge them. Speaking at a panel discussion Thursday sponsored by the group Transit Forward, Jody Holton, SEPTA's assistant general manager of planning and strategic initiatives, said the transit agency applied for a $40 million grant under the federal infrastructure bill. That's intended to beef up the electrical systems at its bus depots.
"There is a lot of work to get the actual charging infrastructure in place, and then to roll out the program with our service," said Holton.
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SEPTA's capital budget director Brian McFadden expects grants to be awarded for the low-and-no-emissions vehicle program in the fall.
"We have ten depots that all need this infrastructure, so our approach to this grant application that we submitted was to get half of them," McFadden said.
SEPTA has no all-electric buses on the road now. Most of its 1,400 buses are hybrids. There are currently 153 fully diesel buses in the fleet, and the agency plans to replace all but 35 of them with hybrids next year.