São Paulo is looking to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions through the improvement of the transportation system and is ready to launch a fleet of all electric buses. Ideally, the entire municipal bus fleet will use renewable fuels by 2018.
In 2011, SPTrans began testing various technologies including sugarcane diesel and biodiesel, trolleybuses, and ethanol buses as part of an Ecofleet program that lead to a 9.5% reduction in GHG emissions when compared to 2010.
“The new bus lines have already reduced diesel consumption by 8.8 percent a day. In specific bus lines, the commercial speed operation improved 87 percent. Besides that, the electric buses are also reducing energy consumption by 81 percent compared to the diesel buses,” says City Director Adalberto Maluf.
São Paulo’s bus fleet is one of the largest in South America, operating more than 16,000 buses.