The city’s award-winning principal bus operator, Nottingham City Transport (NTC), is working in partnership with Nottingham City Council to launch a project which could see Nottingham become the UK’s ‘greenest’ city for public transport. NTC has applied for a £6.5m grant from the OLEV Low Emission Bus Scheme to complement a £19m investment in order to introduce 82 natural gas double deckers to the fleet over 3 years from October 2016.
“Gas buses have much less of an impact on the environment compared to the diesel buses we would normally buy,” explains Nottingham City Transport Marketing Manager, Anthony Carver-Smith. “Nitrogen Oxides are lower, as are the sooty particulates emitted, and as we will be using biogas, the carbon footprint is incredibly low. This really is a fantastic project that will support the wider efforts and investment made by Nottingham City Council to introduce low emission vehicles to the city.”
“The new gas buses are likely to be the very first gas double deckers in the UK, which is hugely exciting,” added Carver-Smith. “They’ll be ADL Scania buses, so they’ll be of the highest quality and using gas buses will enable our customers to reach the heart of the City on one of the cleanest modes of transport available”.
The Scania chassis for each bus will be assembled in Leyland in Lancashire ahead of the bodying by Alexander Dennis in Scotland. Nottingham based company, Roadgas in Colwick, will supply the infrastructure.
This £25.5m project, rolled out over 3 years, will replace a quarter of NCT’s current fleet, and it’s estimated that there will be 75 million kilograms less CO2 emitted over the lifetime of the vehicles compared to conventional diesel buses. By 2020 Nottingham’s current UK Bus Operator of the Year will aim for every bus to have either a Euro 5 environmentally-friendly engine or be gas-powered, creating one of the lowest-emission fleets in the UK.
Source: Nottingham City Transport
