The Fairfax County Department of Transportation (FCDOT) has the green light to apply for a federal grant to replace dozens of buses in its Fairfax Connector fleet.
However, none of the new buses will be all-electric, despite the county’s earlier pledges to electrify its fleet of vehicles.
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved FCDOT’s request on May 7 to apply for $128.1 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to purchase a total of 72 buses, including 60 hybrid and 12 diesel models.
“I’m very pleased with where we’ve gone and hopefully, we can go to that next level and make them non-emitting,” Mount Vernon Supervisor Dan Storck said before the vote. “But I think, at this point in time, anything we can do with e-hybrid and hybrid is definitely on the right road.”
In February, DOT announced it planned to allocate $1.5 billion for Low or No Emission Grant and Grants for Buses and Bus Facilities programs “to support the transition of the nation’s transit fleet to the lowest polluting and most energy efficient transit vehicles.”
According to the Federal Transit Administration’s website, the Low-No Emission program offers funding to state and local governments for buying or leasing zero-emission and low-emission buses, along with the necessary facilities to support them.
Similarly, Grants for Buses and Bus Facilities helps localities fund new bus projects, including updates, replacements, and purchases of vehicles and related equipment. It also supports building or upgrading bus-related facilities to make them more environmentally friendly.
Aiming to reach carbon neutrality by 2040, Fairfax County introduced an operational energy strategy in 2021 whose goals included ceasing diesel bus purchases after fiscal year 2024, which ends on June 30, and fully transitioning all buses and fleet vehicles to electric or other non-carbon-emitting sources by 2035.
However, the county’s facilities still lack the infrastructure needed to maintain battery electric buses, holding up the transition.
“Funding, engineering design, and construction of infrastructure will be required to move beyond the zero emission pilot phases,” FCDOT spokesperson Freddy Serrano told FFXnow.
He said the county is choosing diesel buses because there are no available hybrid models to replace 12 30-foot buses that need to be retired. The remaining 60 buses will be 40 feet long.
Fairfax Connector operates more than 300 buses, carrying approximately 26,000 riders each day on 93 different routes — some of which will soon be changing.
The county is currently studying bus electrification with a pilot program that added eight battery-powered electric buses to the Connector fleet last fall. According to Serrano, the program will be critical in guiding future decisions about transitioning the entire bus fleet to zero emissions.
Currently, there is no set timeline for completing the pilot program, but FCDOT expects to publish the results of a Zero Emission Bus Study later this year.
“The schedule for transitioning to carbon free buses is dependent on several factors and will be updated continually as the technology advances,” Serrano said.
Fairfax County Public Schools rolled out 42 new electric school buses last month that were purchased using a federal funding allocated through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
The grantees will be announced later this summer or in the fall, per a county staff report. If approved, the county would be responsible for covering 20% for a local cash match requirement of up to $14.2 million.
