Good practices exchange on electric public transport.

In Semester 3, project partners finalized the ZCI Good Practices Register and identified the practices they are interested of. Discussions and initial plans for study visits has begun.
First project good practice exchange was held on-line between City of Burgas, Bulgaria and Business Support Center, Ltd, Kranj, Slovenia.
The objective of the meeting was to share the experience of Burgas in electrifying its public transport, which is the aim of Kranj and the region.
About 10 years ago Burgas managed to completely transform its public transport by replacing its buses with new ones EURO 6 standard, developing bus rapid transport (BRT) corridors in the whole city, introduce traffic management system and establish several multimodal transport hubs.
In the last couple of years the local administration and the public transport company BurgasBus ltd. managed to secure financing from EU structural funds and purchase 56 electric buses and 56 charging stations. In this way the entire public transport of the city became electrified. Let by the ambition to be sustainable in 2023, 1 MW PV installation was constructed and generated energy is directly used for charging the buses.
City of Kranj are in the process of planning investments for step-by-step modernization of their transport scheme, including purchase of electric buses. From the discussion it became clear that currently electricity is the cheapest “fuel” and from economic point of view it is worth investing in electric buses.
From the experience of Burgas, there are a few doubts related to how batteries will perform in long term. Electric buses in Burgas have been running for 3 years now and so far there has been no issues, but it is not known what would be the situation in 10 years and more. Diesel buses, which Burgas used to operate have more than 1 million kilometers and still perform well.
Partners agreed that a study visit in Burgas will be organized in the second half of September, 2024.