The Federal Transit Administration last week announced the selectees for $1.5 billion in mass transit bus grants for the fiscal 2024 cycle, spitting the money amongst 177 projects, some for diesel buses, but more for low- to no-emission buses.

“Today, another 117 communities across 47 states are receiving the good news that their transit buses are being modernized and their commutes improved through President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “The Biden-Harris Administration is helping agencies replace old buses running on dirtier, expensive fuels by delivering modern and zero-emission buses, manufactured by American workers, that will connect more people to where they need to go.”

The grant awards, which are listed here, are a blend of two distinct programs: the traditional competitive bus and bus facility grant program (the old Section 3 program), and the more recent low/no-emission bus program, which was emphasized by the bipartisan infrastructure law (the IIJA) in 2021. In 2016, the two bus programs combined for just $266 million in total funding. In 2024, the total was almost an even $1.5 billion, which was down from the last two years because the Appropriations Committee reduced their supplement to IIJA funding.

Moreover, back in 2016, the low-no grants were just 21 percent of total grant funding. Under the IIJA, that ratio is reversed, and the low-no grants got 79 percent of total funding announced in last week’s round.

And it’s not just the overall funding total that makes low-no a more attractive program. It’s also the size of the individual grants.

In the new announcements, the average (mean) size of a diesel bus grant was $7.1 million (but the median grant was $4.0 million because there were a lot of large and small outliers – of the 55 grants, 14 were under $1 million each but 18 were $10 million or more (and two of those were over $25 million), hollowing out the middle and ensuring a weird-looking bell curve.

For low-no grants, the average (mean) grant size was $17.9 million, 2.5 times the size of the regular program’s mean average, but the median grant on the list was $11.3 million, 2.8 times the size of the median grant in the regular program.

There were some notable outlier low-no grants as well. $99.5 million for a recharging facility at the New Jersey Transit garage at The Meadowlands, $77.5 million for Los Angeles County electric bus upgrades, $76.8 million for low-emission buses in Sacramento, %50.6 million for hybrid buses in Fairfax County, Virginia, and $40 million for electric buses in Boston were only the start of the high end of the low-no list this year.

By comparison, the largest diesel bus grant was $26.9 million for Texas statewide rural bus service upgrades, where electric buses are just not practical yet.