Bloomberg Proposes Energy Efficient Taxi Fleet

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced today a plan to replace the city’s entire yellow cab fleet with environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles over the next five years.

The proposal is the latest push in Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC to create a more environmentally sustainable city and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. The new taxi standards would be phased in over a four-year period and would lead to a full fleet of hybrids by 2012.

“There’s an awful lot of taxicabs on the streets of New York City obviously, so it makes a real big difference,” Mayor Bloomberg said this morning on the NBC News program “Today.” “These cars just sit there in traffic sometimes, belching fumes; this does a lot less. It’s a lot better for all of us.”

The city has already experimented with using hybrids as yellow cabs in the past. In the last two years, it has added about 400 such vehicles to its fleet, including models like the Toyota Prius, Toyota Highlander Hybrid and Ford Escape. Under the new proposal, that number would increase to 1,000 by October 2008 and would grow by about 20 percent each year after that until the entire fleet is converted.

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