by Andrea Bernstein

Politicians in the Bronx, NY are unveiling an electric truck, the first of its kind in New York City, to transport goods from the city’s food hub.

Hunts Point in the Bronx is a peninsula, home to lots of wholesalers. “It’s a food hub. We feed the city food here,” says Lee Taylor, who owns Down Home Seafood. “There’s a vegetable market here, the fish market, the meat market, and there’s a lot of trucks.”

About 16,000 a day. The asthma rate is also high — seven times the national average. So when Congressman Jose Serrano called Taylor and said he could get a grant for a zero-emissions truck, Taylor jumped. “We call her ‘Big Green’,” he explains. “We plug her in.”

An electric truck costs over $200,000, about four times what a regular truck costs. Sounds expensive, but if gas runs what it did two summers ago, it pays for itself.

Taylor says he has another motivation: independence from oil in the wake of the BP oil spill. That has Congress’s attention, too. Serrano says he’ll push for funding for thousands of such trucks nationwide.