Electric buses

During our trip to other cities like in Tampere or Helsinki, we have noticed something that isn’t exist in France, I want to talk about electrical public transport Obviously if I told you it, that you would reply “No there is electrical public transport in France like RER or streetcar”, and you might tell the truth, but here we are talking about busses which run at electricity. When we’ve seen that for the first time, we were both impressed and interested about how it could work. So, I have done my little researches about it and here are some couples of information.

There are two main electric bus categories: autonomous in one hand and non-autonomous in the other. Autonomous buses keep the energy stored within the vehicle, meanwhile non-autonomous buses maintain a continuous supply of electric energy from outside of the vehicle.

Majority of autonomous buses are made with battery, which, when the electrical motor runs, collect the energy create from another on-board battery. There is another way to collect energy, such as the “Gyrobus” which uses flywheel energy storage.

Contrariwise to autonomous buses, the non-autonomous buses are dependent to continuous electricity supplied by contact with outside power sources. When we have seen it for the first time, we have seen overhead wires above each non-autonomous bus, but there is another kind of buses that run with non-contact conductors on the ground.

These electrical buses are really recent in Helsinki, it has gone into services on 23 January 2017.Buses are supplied by electric bus manufacturer “Linkker”, consequently, it

creates a new chapter in the bus transport history. Linkker stand out from others by its autonomy, in fact, it will be Finland’s first electrical buses that are automatically fast charged. As a result, the region plans to bring more than 12 of these models, running all around the city.

Nowadays, people in France are discussing about a future contract for buying 1000 electrical buses in “Ile-de-France” (cf. Liberation- “Ile-de-France: la RATP va acheter 1 000 bus électriques en deux ans” – 28/01/2018)

-Nicolas