King County Metro plans to increase transit service in the next five years, and it plans to do so without adding more greenhouse gas emissions.
Already, 70 percent of Metro’s fleets use new technologies that help with that. On Monday, members of the King County Council passed a resolution directing Metro to find out what more can be done.
The council’s transportation committee chair Rod Dembowski says gas emissions have a direct impact on air quality and on people’s health.
“In this county 67,000 children and 345,000 adults have been diagnosed with asthma,” he says. “What we put into the air is a contributor to that.”
The resolution asks Metro to analyze options and costs of making changes to its fleet service by mid-August.
King County’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions comes from transportation. That’s according to the county’s Strategic Climate Action Plan, a working document to address climate change.
