Keith Kerman, Chief Fleet Officer & Deputy Commissioner, Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), City of New York
The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS)’s mission is to ensure that city agencies have the critical resources and support needed to provide the best possible services to the public.
The New York City Fleet is the largest municipal fleet in the United States with an annual budget of $1 billion. NYC Fleet operates over 31,000 owned and leased vehicles which are maintained at over 150 locations and fueled at over 420 in-house fueling stations. There are 80,000 city employees authorized to drive fleet vehicles, and the fleet is maintained by a full-time staff of over 2,000 working in dispatch, coordination, fueling, repair, procurement, and other areas.
The NYC Fleet includes public works vehicles such as the Department of Sanitation’s garbage trucks, the Department of Transportation’s road surfacing and bridge repair trucks, and the Department of Parks and Recreation’s forestry and maintenance vehicles, as well as emergency vehicles such as police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances.
The NYC Fleet’s sustainability efforts are guided by Mayor de Blasio’s NYC Clean Fleet, a part of OneNYC, which includes a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fleet 50% by 2025. In addition to GHG reductions, additional fleet goals include:
- Advancing a citywide Green Fleet program
- Reducing fleet size and right-sizing vehicles
- Investing in tailpipe emissions reducing equipment
- Furthering advancements in use of electric vehicles as well as biodiesel and renewable diesel
- Operating at least 2,000 on-road electric vehicles by 2025
- Enacting fuel tracking and car sharing initiatives
The NYC Fleet is the greenest in the nation. It includes 1,724 on-road electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, including Chevy Volts and Bolts as well as Nissan Leafs and 600 off-road electric vehicles and solar units. The city maintains 525 charging stations at city garages and parking locations around the city, including 37 solar carports. The solar carports allow the electric vehicles operated by the city to be independent from the grid and fossil fuels. 
Ribbon cutting at the Thomas Edison High School solar carport
where the driver’s education program utilizes electric cars
The city has been investing in hybrid vehicles for 15 years, and began piloting biodiesel blends in 2007. The city now runs 11,000 diesel vehicles which all use biodiesel blends as a standard. The city also owns 158 CNG (natural gas) vehicles, including sanitation trucks and sweepers, passenger vans, and sedans. The city operates 3 CNG fuel sites to support the natural gas fleet.
The NYC Fleet produces an informative weekly newsletter along with daily reports which can be found on the DCAS website: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcas/html/employees/fleet.shtml
What do you actually do all day?
First and foremost, I focus on daily performance management. We’re a very analytically based organization so a lot of my day is spent managing an extensive set of performance reporting and tracking. We are second only to the police department in terms of the amount of reporting that we do.
We use an AssetWorks software product called NYC Fleet Focus to manage the fleet and that works with the 16 different systems we use to maintain our performance measurements. Our daily service readiness report for the fleet is available live on the mayor’s office of operations website. In addition to service readiness, we report daily on:
- Auto parts inventory
- Fuel usage
- Crashes
- Vehicle Acquisitions
We also have a Fleet Office of Real Time Tracking (FORT) which uses GeoTab as our telematics system, which monitors the status of our vehicles real-time as they move around the city.
All of these reports and controls support my primary task of making sure the fleet is constantly available to serve police, fire, sanitation and other public services provided by our agencies.
The second major part of my role is budgetary analysis and savings initiatives. I was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg to focus on efficiency and shared servicing and we have expanded that under Mayor de Blasio. We recently completed a consolidation between DCAS Fleet and NYCHA, the New York Housing Authority. Our focus is to invest in what matters, such as equipment acquisitions and technical staff, while reducing and consolidating where we can. Savings projects include things like finding ways to use less fuel, storing fewer auto parts, running the auctioning of decommissioned vehicles more efficiently, and reducing the number and cost of operating our repair garages.
A third part of my time is spent on major mayor de Blasio mayoral initiatives such as NYC Clean Fleet, and Vision Zero, which is a safety initiative focused on reducing traffic crashes, injuries, and deaths.
Another key component of my role is managing our extensive partnerships with other agencies, companies, and nonprofits. New York is a complicated place, and the city’s vehicle fleet impacts just about everyone. We serve 50 different client agencies and work with important partner agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Mayor’s Office of Operations. We also have to maintain our relationships with dealerships and parts vendors, and our nonprofit partners such as CALSTART, the National Biodiesel Board, Empire Clean Cities, the US Departments of Energy and Transportation, New York State DEC and DMV, Transportation Alternatives, among many others.
Presenting to the National Biodiesel Board
and farmers in Central Park
One important piece of our partnership work is the interagency group we call the Fleet Federation. Representatives from twelve of our client agencies meet with us every two weeks to ensure we’re coordinating all our work appropriately. A great example of the work we do with them is our shared vehicles services. We’ve installed Zipcar sharing technology on 800 city vehicles so they can be used by employees from any city agency. In addition, various agencies provide shared services such as the Department of Sanitation servicing DEP and some Parks Department vehicles, Parks servicing some Department of Environmental Protection vehicles, and NYPD servicing DEP and DOT light duty vehicles. This type of daily inter-agency servicing and coordination simply wasn’t possible before and we’re very proud of the barriers we’ve been able to break down.
The last important part of my role is the daily management of the unknown. It’s dealing with something like an unexpected power loss at a facility, or a fueling operations issue, or an urgent press inquiry. There’s always something that comes up that requires time and attention beyond what you have planned for your day.
What are some of the key skills for success in this role?
I am a non-traditional fleet manager in that I do not have a technical automotive background. Many people in similar roles are Certified Fleet Managers or have degrees in this area, but I do not, and I’m incredibly thankful to have people with those credentials on my team.
My background is in operations with the Parks and Recreation Department, and my core strengths are in city operations, finance, management, and partnerships. From my perspective, operations management is inseparable from fleet management. The trash can’t be collected without garbage trucks, firefighters need fire trucks to put out a fire, and EMT’s don’t take the subway, they need ambulances!
My team has a diverse set of skills as well. I mentioned how core to our success reporting is, which is why our Deputy Chief Fleet Officer has a very strong IT background. Our Chief of Staff relies heavily on her fiscal management skills in order to balance our $1 billion budget and our Director of Fleet Operations has a background in fleet servicing. All of these skills are required in order to keep our operation going, so if you have an interest in fleet management you can approach it from a lot of different perspectives. I’d encourage anyone with effective management and partnership skills who is active and smart and interested in operations to consider fleet as a possible career path.
DCAS internship program with
the Department of Education at NYPD
What is your favorite part of your job?
Improving the sustainability of our portfolio is absolutely the most important thing to me. I worked in the Parks and Recreation Department for seventeen years because I cared so much about its environmental mission. For me, the ability to transform the fuels we use and the overall sustainability of our fleet, and to serve as a model for other fleets all over the world is an extraordinarily exciting part of what we do. I’m incredibly proud to be running one of the largest hybrid, electric, and biodiesel fleets in the US, and working with a mayor that has prioritized electric vehicles and sustainability by putting resources behind them is simply amazing.
EV announcement at City Hall with DCAS Commissioner Lisette Camilo,
NYC Director of Resiliency Dan Zarrilli and
NYC Director of Sustainability Mark Chambers
I’m also incredibly thankful to have been able to work with such a smart, dedicated team of public servants for twenty-five years. Many of the people on our team at DCAS worked with me at Parks and we have developed so much trust and experience together. It’s an honor to work with such decent, honest, hard working people who keep things fun and reliable.
What is the hardest part of your job?
With over 80,000 operators there’s always the possibility of collisions or misuse of vehicles. The vast majority of our drivers are honest and careful people, but if someone has a crash or abuses the vehicle, we have to deal with that. With an operation of this scale, people can sometimes forget that it’s not their car.
Also, the government can be a complicated space to operate within. There are a lot of procurement, personnel, legal, and budgetary rules that you have to work within in order to get things done. Sometimes members of the public wonder “why can’t you just do X?” without realizing how challenging something can be within the context of the government.
What is your proudest professional achievement(s)?
I’ve spent my entire twenty-five-year career re-engineering fleet operations and working to ensure that our city officials recognize the importance of fleet operations to overall city operations. I’ve worked for three different administrations and I’ve worked on countless efficiency initiatives and I’m incredibly proud to say that I feel as if fleet finally has a place at the table and is receiving the prioritization and support it deserves.
I’m also proud of my role in building and maintaining both the electric car and biodiesel/renewable diesel industries. I’ve been a very public supporter of these industries; every gallon of fuel that powers the city’s fleet includes some biodiesel and we’re starting to move into renewable diesel which is very exciting. Biodiesel gets trickier to use when it makes up more than 20% of a fuel mix, but renewable diesel can be 100% of the fuel used and could very well allow us to stop using diesel fossil fuels altogether.
Lastly, I’m excited about our team’s leadership role throughout the world. We’re constantly partnering with other cities such as Paris, London, Montreal, LA, Detroit, Chicago, and Boston. In January of 2018 we hosted our first international fleet forum with the city of London and plan to host another in Montreal in June of 2019. These forums promote sustainability and partnership with other fleets and organizations such as CALSTART and the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
Electric truck at the International
Fleet Forum in London
What are the game changers in your world?
The first is a large-scale expansion of renewable diesel. While renewable natural gas is exciting, it requires new plants, new infrastructure, and new regulatory frameworks. Renewable diesel can be used with existing vehicles, fueling infrastructure, and laws. It also is turning our waste stream into a fuel source, which is what we want to move towards, as we’ve got to stop taking resources out of the ground. If you think about it, there are 269 million registered vehicles in the US. Despite our hopes, those won’t become electric anytime soon. Even if we stopped making gasoline powered vehicles today, gasoline and diesel engines would still be around 15 years from now. Sadly, as many people are trading their sedans for SUVs instead of getting electric vehicles, though that is starting to change. Still, we need an alternative now to change the fuel we use in existing vehicles, while we look to long term changes in the vehicle stock.
The second is continued development of electric vehicle and hybrid markets. When we started in 2000 there were only two models available, the Honda Natural Gas Civic, and the Toyota Prius, and that was it. Today we operate over 40 different models, but we need continued development of these options, especially on the trucking side. Today’s electric trucks don’t yet have the reliability, power, cost, range, or maintenance requirements they need to be attractive. An electric cargo van costs between $80k – $100k, but diesel vans only cost around $22k, so going electric is cost prohibitive. Moving to a hybrid or electric model for a sedan usually adds only about $3k – $5k in cost, so that’s much easier to do. We need the market to do better, and sooner.
The third is automatic braking for all vehicles. We have over 5,000 collisions per year and 50% of those that result in injuries are rear end collisions. Automatic braking is the single most impactful technology that could increase safety and save us money. Most light duty cars have it now, but we need it for every vehicle. Auto manufacturers also need to separate safety from luxury. Right now, if you want to buy top of the line safety features from most auto makers, you can only get that as part of the luxury package. We need to be able to get vehicles with automatic braking without also having to pay for luxury extras such as leather seats or chrome. Safety should not be considered a luxury.
At the NYC Annual Fleet Show with
the Together for Safer Roads team
What was your path to this role?
I’m a Harvard College graduate; after graduation I stayed to work in operations for the athletics department. That led me to work in operations for the Parks and Recreation Department in New York. Most of my time there was spent in operations, finance, and management, which included fleet. I was doing some innovative things in fleet management for Parks, so when Mayor Bloomberg was looking to establish Fleet as a central, city-wide organization instead of siloed within the agencies, it was the perfect opportunity.
What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?
Government is a great place to have a career. There are good jobs, you can have a nice life, raise a family, and do good work. I love that I get to be involved with what happens with the city and with things that affect the quality of life in the place that we live.
Think about careers in public service where you can make a difference and help achieve important changes. Yes, you should vote, but public service also gives you the chance to get involved in the day to day and to influence policy or craft change from the inside.
For those who are interested in working in the fleet industry, if you’re an auto mechanic, look to do more to grow and develop leadership, communication, and management skills. If you’re not an auto mechanic, don’t be afraid of fleet. You can learn all the other elements such as environmental issues, traffic, road safety, and transport. Good energy and dynamism can do a lot in this industry. Cars and trucks are everywhere and are huge part of our lives and we need skill sets from all over.
What are your favorite resources?
There are several publications I subscribe to:
We also partner with some great nonprofits:
National Association of Fleet Administrators(NAFA) has been helpful in introducing us to other managers across the country. They also offer degrees in Certified Fleet Management and offer industry promotion, networking, and educational opportunities.
NTEA – The Association for the Work Truck Industry, we also present at a lot of their conferences.
The National Biodiesel Board has been a tremendous technology resource for us, and we’ve co-run a number of events with them such as the Renewable Fuels Forum in May of 2018.
At an event with CALSTART
Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?
Al Gore. It feels a bit like saying Tiger Woods is your favorite golfer, but he’s played such a critical role in the sustainability movement, he deserves it. I remember reading Earth in the Balance in the mid-80’s and being heavily influenced by it. He didn’t have to devote his Vice Presidency or his senatorial career to sustainability, but he did. He’s been influential to all of us.
