New buses, but not just new buses, new new energy buses, says 新京报/The Beijing News. I’m feeling too lazy to translate the whole thing, I’ll just summarise- which will amount to little more than repeating a few numbers:
It says that Beijing Public Transport Group/北京市公交集团 will buy 910 new energy buses this year, of which 50 will be purely electric powered and 860 hybrid. The first 50 of these new buses should hit the streets at the end of March, and will mainly be used on downtown routes. They will mostly be made by Foton and Jinghua, and two prototypes have already left the factory. The purely electric buses cost 2 million yuan each, while the hybrids cost 1 million.
In addition, Beijing will buy 30 new energy environmental protection vehicles- I assume that means rubbish trucks. Apparently there are already 60 purely electric and hybrid vehicles on Beijing’s streets (obviously that number does not include electric bicycles), so these new purchases will bring the total number of such vehicles to 1000 by the year’s end.
And some more impressive numbers: Since 2005, Beijing has retired 11 thousand old buses and replaced them with 13 thousand environmentally-friendly buses, and currently has a total of 20,877 buses.
