In the city’s largest borough, we see iconic yellow school buses everywhere, morning and evenings. Thousands of school bus routes track in and out of Brooklyn neighborhoods on the daily, transporting kids from home to school to extracurriculars and back, sometimes for hours at a time. And when the day ends and the buses have completed their trips, thousands head back to the more than 20 different school bus garages clustered in communities like East New York, Red Hook, and Coney Island.
School buses are a fixture of everyday life in our borough, but so too is the toxic pollution they carry with them. Most of the buses that fill our fleets are old and outdated. They’re loud. They break down. They devour gas and diesel and spew out soot, nitrogen oxide, and carbon dioxide as a result. These school buses not only harm the children and drivers they carry every day but pollute the air of entire communities — most of them Black and Brown — living alongside bus routes and near large bus garages and schools. This November, however, New Yorkers have a chance to change that.
