Clean and green were the bywords at an Alternatively Fueled Vehicle Fair in Discovery Park earlier this month. Among other attractions, the event featured electric cars and scooters, a van run on compressed natural gas (CNG), a Segway scooter and a Toyota electric-gas hybrid Prius used by Seattle Parks and Recreation.
"The most exciting thing was a backhoe and a dump truck that were fueled with biodiesel," said Jennifer Knight, a park staffer who organized the fair.
The idea behind the fair, she said, was to educate the public about alternative transportation options in a non-threatening setting, as opposed to a car lot, for example.
In all, between 100 and 200 people showed up at the fair, and they were already true believers for the most part, Knight said.
So is city and county government for that matter.
"It's on the mayor's environmental agenda," Knight said of the green approach to transportation. "The city of Seattle is really one of the leaders of using alternatively fueled vehicles."
"We have a pretty substantial commitment to a clean and green fleet," agreed Kim Drury, a strategic advisor with the Office of Sustainability and Environment.
In fact, Mayor Greg Nickels launched a Clean and Green Fleet Action Plan last spring, she added. There are approximately 3,200 vehicles in the city's fleet, Drury explained, and the plan's goal is to reduce fuel use and vehicle emissions through the use of cleaner fuels and more efficient vehicles.
Some of the approaches, such as the city's purchase of 10 gyroscopic Segway scooters for its meter-readers, are fairly novel. But the city also has 154 CNG-powered compact cars and 51 gas-electric hybrids, she said. "So about 25 percent of our compact-car fleet is considered to be clean and green."
A large number of city vehicles use diesel, but even filling them up has an environmental edge to it in Seattle. About 90 percent of the diesel used in the city's rolling stock is a mixture of 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent diesel with an ultra-low level of sulfur, Drury said.
In addition, heavy-duty trucks using the diesel blend are being retrofitted with emission-control systems that reduce toxic emissions by 50 percent, she said.
At the county level, deliveries of 235 GM electric-diesel-hybrid articulated buses will begin in June, said Metro spokeswoman Linda Thielke. According to a full-page ad General Motors took out recently in the daily papers, the hybrids will save 750,000 gallons of fuel a year.
They will be used primarily on the routes that go through the bus tunnel, where buses switch from diesel-powered to electric-powered using overhead power lines, Thielke said.
The tunnel connection is significant because it is being retrofitted for Sound Transit's light-rail system, and the power lines are coming down, she explained.
Metro is getting 212 of the hybrid buses, while the others are going to Sound Transit, Thielke added. "By the end of the year, we'll have all 235 in service."
The Port of Seattle has also jumped on the green bandwagon at Sea-Tac International Airport. There was a good reason for that, according to airport spokesman Bob Parker.
"The air quality is affected as much by vehicle traffic around the airport as the airplanes," he said.
The airport has no hybrid vehicles, and there aren't any plans to buy any, Parker said. Instead, the Port authorities have gone the compressed natural gas route.
The airport has 16 CNG-powered employee buses, two CNG runway sweepers, three regular CNG passenger vans, five CNG Honda cars and 11 Ford Crown Victoria cop cars at the airport powered by natural gas, Parker said.
Making life a whole lot easier, the airport has also set up its own CNG fueling station south of the airport. It not only serves airport vehicles, but also vehicles from other jurisdictions and the general public who own one of the CNG cars or trucks.
Sea-Tac is also using its contract leverage to spur changes in the taxis and Shuttle Express vans that serve passengers at the airport. "When we redid our taxi and shuttle contracts (last summer), we put benchmarks in there for them to convert their fleets," Parker said.
All 160 cabs in the Seattle Tacoma International Airport Taxi Association will be converted to CNH-powered cars within three years, according to the contract. The association gets something out of the deal, too.
If the association converts the taxi fleet in less than three years, its exclusive contract to pick up passengers at the airport will be expanded from five to seven years, Parker said.
The contract also calls on the taxi association to work on licensing changes at the city and county level, changes that would allow the cabs to pick up passengers downtown for trips to the airport, he said. That's not allowed currently, meaning the cabs have to deadhead back to the airport from the city without any passengers.
The contract with the Shuttle Express fleet of vans calls for the company to make at least 70 percent of its trips to the airport in CNG-powered vehicles by 2006. "Under the two contracts, the amount of airborne pollutants released by airport taxis and shuttles will be reduced by several tons annually," according to a press release.
Reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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