Following âencouragingâ feedback from earlier
tests, the Government will rev up its trials on electric and hybrid
buses, and three bus services will be served wholly by electric
buses, Second Transport Minister Ng Chee Meng announced in
Parliament on Wednesday (March 8).
Bigger-scale trials will be mounted in the next few
years, and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) will call tenders to
procure 60 electric buses and 50 hybrid ones this year, he
added.
These trials will allow a deeper understanding of the
operational challenges that a wider deployment of such buses may
bring, under local weather and traffic conditions, the LTA said in
a press statement.
While carrying a higher price tag, these buses are less
pollutive and make for a more comfortable ride for bus captains and
commuters.
The outcomes of the trials will be used to calibrate
the approach towards adopting buses that run on alternative energy
sources, the LTA added.
Mr Ng said that the Republic has already been shifting
towards a more environmentally-friendly fleet, with models that
meet tighter emission standards. âBut no emission is better than
low emissions,â he noted.
As part of a continuing trial involving Go-Ahead
Singapore, China-based automaker BYD and its local distributor S
Dreams, an electric K9 bus had been trialled on Service 17 and is
being tested on Service 119 now, with âencouragingâ initial
feedback. In 2015, SBS Transit and Volvo also conducted a
diesel-hybrid bus trial.
Meanwhile, the Republic is pressing on with other
efforts on the electric vehicle front. Last September, HDT
Singapore Taxis made its foray with the countryâs first fully
electric fleet of cabs. It will roll out 100 electric cabs
progressively by the middle of this year in an eight-year trial.By
2020, 1,000 shared electric vehicles will also fan out across all
Housing and Development Board towns, as part of a car-sharing
initiative announced last June.
BlueSG, a subsidiary of the Bollore Group, which runs
the worldâs largest fully electric car-sharing programme, will
develop and operate the 10-year programme. The first stable of 125
electric vehicles and 250 charging points will be rolled out by the
second half of this year.
Meanwhile, the installation of the common fleet
management system across the Republicâs bus network will be
completed by this month. It gives operators live updates on the
location of each bus and arrival times, among other things, raising
the efficiency of operations.
As for self-driving vehicles, trials began at one-north
in 2015 and four organisations are testing the vehicles there now.
Efforts are also under way to develop self-driving buses.
Other efforts include agreements inked in January
between the Transport Ministry and PSA Corporation, and automotive
firms Scania and Toyota Tsusho, to develop and test solutions for
autonomous truck platooning. This involves a manned truck leading a
convoy of driverless ones that will transport containers from one
port terminal to another.
The authorities also announced last October that they
were exploring how to develop self-driving multipurpose utility
vehicles that could be designed for purposes such as road
sweeping.
Along with truck platooning, this is expected to cut
the need for manpower and free road space during peak hours by
deploying these autonomous systems at night, for instance.
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