Imagine how many people $1.7 billion could feed.
But no. It must go to the Biden administration’s pipe dream (pun intended) of forcing electric and low-emission transportation on everyone.
The latest money grab will give 46 states and territories $1.7 billion to invest in electric and low-emission buses:
The grants will enable transit agencies and state and local governments to buy 1,700 U.S.-built buses, nearly half of which will have zero carbon emissions. Funding for the grants comes from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by President Joe Biden. The Democratic president has made it a priority to put more electric vehicles on the road — especially for schools and public transit — in an effort to contain the damage from climate change.“Every day, millions of Americans climb aboard over 60,000 buses to get to work, to school, doctor’s appointments, everywhere they need to be,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a call with reporters. “These are unprecedented levels of investment when it comes to putting modern cleaner buses on the road.”
Seattle gets $33.5 million. Washington, D.C., gets $104 million. Money will also flow to Iowa City and the Seneca Nation in Western New York.
“Importantly, this funding also invested more than 1,700 American-built buses that would be manufactured in America factories with American workers. That means that as we are building these clean buses with cars that are made in America, we’re creating good paying jobs along the way,” claimed Mitch Landrieu, the Senior Advisor to the president and White House Infrastructure Coordinator. “The grants even put money into training and workforce that will operate and maintain these buses. There are millions of dollars set aside for workforce programs, the people servicing diesel buses need the skills to work on clean buses. We can’t leave them behind as we make this transition, and we can’t run our transit systems or keep the buses running on time and safely without the workers.”
The Biden administration has already handed out $3.3 billion in these projects. They’ll probably give $5 billion MORE within the next three years.
In April, Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public School District said its electric school buses hardly work after spending millions on them:
During an April 19 presentation to the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education, the district’s environmental sustainability director, Emile Lauzzana, highlighted a number of issues with the district’s electric bus fleet. Those buses, Lauzzana said, have “a lot of downtime and performance issues” and aren’t “fully on the road,” despite the fact that they are “approximately five times more expensive than regular buses.” The infrastructure upgrades required to use the buses, meanwhile, were “originally estimated to be only about $50,000” but “ended up being more like $200,000,” according to Lauzzana. “I have a number of colleagues in different states who are facing similar challenges,” the district official lamented. “For the school bus market, it’s been challenging for us.”
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