By 2015, Gothenburg, Sweden may be the first city on Earth to have a new form of intraurban bus system that is noiseless, can pick up passengers indoors in bad weather, and is powered by a renewable energy source.
This project is called ElectriCity, and is a partnership between the Gothenburg Transit Authority and Volvo, with whom they have worked in the past. They are currently field testing these new buses to see how well they perform the duties of the existing buses in the cities where they will be deployed.
Gothenburg has tried different bus systems for travel in the city as well; their line of hybrid buses has become very successful, selling over 1,000 units to cities in Europe and South America. This is what Gothenburg has now, but the city doesn’t plan to retire its old hybrid buses. Volvo Busses Division President Håkan Karlsson says that the main function of the old hybrid buses will be to perform long inter-city travel. If someone needed to travel from Gothenburg to Stockholm, the new plug-in buses would be for intra-city travel around Gothenburg or wherever they happen to be used.
This push for vehicles powered by renewable energy is based on Gothenburg’s desire to be a “climate-neutral” city, and in doing so it will use more environmentally friendly transportation options. Volvo CEO Olof Persson sees this as a new frontier in urban travel, which will contribute to a quieter and less polluted urban environment, and will reinvigorate interest in public transportation among Gothenburgers.
Currently, the test buses and the first bus route is only between Johanneberg Science Park in Chalmers and Lindeberg Science Park in Hisingen, but Persson hopes that they will expand this bus system to the entire Västra Götaland region of Sweden (which Gothenburg is in), and then onto more cities in the future.
Edited by Alisen Downey