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Transport & environment alliance for urban sustainability

Deliverables

The project aim is to optimize the use of the river Nieuwe Maas/ Nieuwe Waterweg by enhancing the passenger transport systems over water. Through introducing newly designed taxi-boats, running with a maximum speed of approximately 70 km s/h, connecting a network of 30 landing stages. The speed of the boat, direct connection over water and lack of traffic congestion results in innovative and time saving means of individual public transport. The network of 30 Watertaxi-landing stages includes 8 Waternet-landing stages. The Watertaxi landing stages are being constructed and connected to the quays. The total project is a close co-operation between the city of Rotterdam and a private entrepreneur. The city authorities will design the infrastructural works (i.c. the landing stages and pontoons) Maastaxi b.v. will operate 5 boats in the first year and 10 boats the following year. (provided a sufficient market volume will be generated by the entrepreneur).
Low emission vehicles have been on the market for many years, but the demand has remained sluggish. Through incentives, parallelled with technical developments and marketing, the market share can be increased. The project works on developing the methods for the promotion of clean vehicles, which will result in approximately 1500 new private clean vehicles on the streets in the city and 250 in the municipal fleet. Today there are 2900 clean vehicles (which meet the demands for a clean vehicle in Göteborg) running in Göteborg and within the municipal fleet there are currently 900. The city has established a goal that until 2008 90% of the municipal fleet should be clean vehicles (50% today), 5% of all new cars sold in Göteborg should be clean vehicles (2-3% today). To reach this goal, new methods and more active information strategies need to be developed.
The project introduces new clean filter system for waste trucks, to test if EURO IV is feasible for this specially developed filter system for this type of truck use (working at low exhaust temperatures). These waste trucks will function in the new logistic service for waste collection, reducing the total vehicle kilometres of waste trucks in the inner city, combined with the clean vehicles. In the present situation, no waste collection vehicles with particle filters are in use, due to the fact that until very recently these filters were not available.In the city area the coming year over 3000 extra underground containers for waste collection will be realised, bringing the total to 4600.
An Automated People Mover (APM) is an automated electric vehicle without driver that moves on a dedicated infrastructure. The general idea behind the APM is that it offers a high frequency connection from one place to another. When the APM connects for instance a Public Transport station to a busy city area it is supposed to stimulate people to use the Public Transport. The ParkShuttle started in 1997 as a first trial with an APM in Rotterdam connecting the subway station and P&R site Kralingse Zoom to the business park Rivium in Capelle aan den Ijssel. The user acceptance was good but the most important disadvantages were the low technical quality of the shuttles, their low speed, the long waiting times due to the single track and in the end insufficient capacity due to the growth of Rivium. The experiment was finished at the end of 2001 and it was decided to establish a full scale and improved APM project at this location within CIVITAS. The idea behind this measure is to promote the use of Public Transport and to improve the accessibility of Public Transport by integrating Automated People Movers in a business district and future residential area. Therefore it was planned to replace the Rivium singletrack infrastructure by a double track infrastructure. Also it was planned to extend the infrastructure by one kilometre and to have 5 instead of 2 stops. Furthermore it was planned to implement a travel information system, camera monitoring system and smart vehicle dispatching software in order to improve overall service to passengers. The existing three shuttles with a capacity of 12 persons each, were to be replaced by six 20-person shuttles. Furthermore it was aimed to integrate an APM in the planning of the redevelopment and building of a medical and university complex at Hoboken. The Automated People Mover at the Rivium location will connect the business and future residential area with the Public Transport station. Therefore this projects fits the local policy to support projects that contribute to a modal shift from private cars to public transport. The start of the Automated People Mover at the Rivium location was on December 1th 2005. Officialy opened by the Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
A new technology for on-street parking management with time adjusted pricing and eased parking enforcement was to provided to increase cost efficiency of parking management and to make parking transactions easier for the users. The demonstration measure "Tele-Parking System/Mobile Parking" aims at introducing a new parking management system in Berlin. Introduction of the new supplier Mobile Parking GmbH will focus on implementation and demonstration (field trial) of a system using innovative cellular phone technologies. Drivers as well as enforcement agents will use mobile phones. A service centre will register the parking duration times of the users and will charge them in accordance to the time they have parked. City officials receive all the anonymous statistical data of parking transactions that have occurred within their jurisdiction. The parking proceeds collected with this new system are virtual, i.e. instead of coins collected from parking meters, the proceeds arrive once a month by bank transfer. The parking system was supposed to be realised in a specified area within the city centre to demonstrate its practical use and acceptance. As a further part of the demonstration a suitable public-private partnership should have been constituted to prepare the wider introduction after successful demonstration.
Introduction of minimum 100 CNG-powered lorries in different weight classes (>1,3 to.) for inner-city freight distribution achieving Euro IV or EEV-emission standard for utility vehicles. Nine CNG-powered busses for public transport in Berlin shall be additionally introduced, and one CNG filling station for public use will be set up. In closed co-operation with the local government and the Berlin Energy Agency, a programme has been developed to set incentives to fleet operators for purchase and leasing of CNG utility vehicles. The co-financing scheme provided was helpful to bring down extra-prices for CNG propulsion technology offered car vendors, to stimulate the development of competition between car vendors. Special attention has been given to the fact that about 40% of utility vehicles are leased. A leasing contract model for CNG utility vehicles has developed and has been anticipated for own product developments by several leasing providers.
Introduction of a new type of CNG/CBG heavy vehicles for waste collection. Four vehicles will be bought and will run in the central parts of Göteborg Collection of municipal solid waste in Sweden is usually performed by diesel-fuelled trucks. Conventional waste collection with diesel-fuelled trucks is noisy, polluting and hence, adversely affecting the environment and disturbing many people during operation. Conventional diesel-fuelled trucks entails inefficient use of the main engine during the waste collection procedure i.e. loading the waste into the vehicle and compacting it. Only 40% of the time during a work shift, the truck�s main engine is used for transportation. During 60% of the time, the truck is standing still at the pick-up sites. Only half of the stop-time, the truck s main engine is used for the actual waste collecting procedure, the rest of the time the main engine is running on idle. This will in turn cause excessive noise and emissions at the pick-up sites.
Based on the good technical experiences in the PREVIEW project, it is decided in the framework of the new environmental policy plan, to introduce a large number of (hybrid) electric vehicles extra in the municipal fleet. This decision is partially based on the coming availability of the Renault Kangoo EV extend range, provided with a very small ICE engine and generator (the range extender) in order to charge the batteries in case the on-board energy supply becomes insufficient (a psychological advantage). Furthermore the use and the availability of hybrid electric vehicles are becoming more and more generally accepted. The price of these vehicles however, will remain a high barrier for potential customers in a long term and can only be directed in the right way with the support of successful large-scale demonstrations like this project. This measure therefore consists of several steps: - Procurement and introduction of 50 (hybrid)electric vehicles and charging infrastructure; - Advise and training of the drivers; - Demonstration of the use of these vehicles in the municipal fleet; Apart from CIVITAS, the city of Rotterdam will also take action for a possible extension of the municipal fleet with 50 extra vehicles in a national program. The innovative aspect of this measure is to demonstrate that a large fleet of (hybrid) electric vehicles is possible when the procurement and introduction is sufficiently accompanied with communication activities, training and awareness campaigns.
In the city of Göteborg there is a large quantity of distribution transport and transport through the city. This leads to high emissions of NOx and particulates. The increased heavy and distribution traffic is a major problem for the city planners, both from a pollution and health aspect, and from a congestion aspect. Already many substances are over the air quality norms that will be legally binding from 2006. One of the purposes with this measure was to influence the private sector to open opportunities for an environmentally sound transport concept. To achieve this the following tasks were to be performed within the measure. The objective of the measure is to decrease emissions of NOx and particles for heavy traffic and distribution traffic in the city of Göteborg by influencing private companies to choose clean HD and distribution vehicles instead of conventional HD and distribution vehicles. From the start year 2002 the project was oriented towards the Göteborg harbour. The target group was the transit transport back and forward to the harbor. The demonstration measure measurable objective was to exchange 10 heavy vehicles to CNG heavy vehicles. A fuelling station was supposed to be built in the harbour area to meet the increased demand.
This project aims at designing and introducing incentives for increased load rates in the inner city of Göteborg. These incentives will be implemented as a pilot in the most central part of the already existing Environmental Zone. The criteria for entering the inner city zone for distribution vehicles should be a combination of a 70 % load factor and the time comparison between stop time and running time. This is a complement to the demands on emission levels in the existing environmental zone (TELLUS project 5.7). In the pilot project there will be ten vehicles involved for testing the system. Each vehicle will have a GPSinstalled for registration and control of the routes. The most important and interesting part of this projectis that the actors are given positive incentives to encourage them to res pect the criteria for improvingthe load factor. The proposed incentives are better accessibility by dedicated loading zones, less traffic congestion and possibility to use their time more efficiently by looking at the possibility to give access to certain public transport lanes. The scheme started in December 2003 with 8 distribution vehicles in the inner city area. The vehicles are in different sizes (weight and volume capacity), with different customers and truckers to get a broad picture of the situation. During the first period of the scheme, there were no demands on load rate. During this time measurements were made on current load rate, distribution routes, number of stops, etc. The second step of the scheme will started in April 2004,with demands on load rate and measurements of this. For this part of the meassure an "electronic pen" was developed that records from the freight manifest and submits this information electronically for control of load factor and number of stops. Next step is to work on the contacts with authorities concerning possible incentives (loading and unloading zones, using public transport lanes) for the second part of the scheme. The final result of the pilot project will be a suggestion for how the load rate can be measured and controlled in the best way, but also how the distribution vehicle owners are willing to work for an increased load rate and how much the accessibility incentives are helping those improvements. The long term results of the project are expected to be a reduction of vehicles operating in the area and a reduction of NOx, SOx and PM emissions from the distribution vehicles in the area.
At the start of the project the bus fleet of Rotterdam consisted of 181 buses in EURO I standard and 4 buses with CRT filter in EURO II/III standard. This leads to emissions of hazardous substances such as small particles (dust, soot) and NOx. Although emissions of both small particles and NOx have decreased in recent years, the transport sector is the main polluter for these emissions. Currently (2001) the air quality levels in Rotterdam for these substances are only just compliant with national directives. Converting of the whole bus-fleet to EURO IV/V standard using the DNOx filter technique would be a step to decrease emissions to air and improve urban air quality. Furthermore the city of Rotterdam prepared policies to decrease the burden by road noise. Currently (2003) some 3800 dwellings suffer from road noise up to level of 65 dB(A). The introduction of silent vehicles by using hybrid techniques could be first step to address this policy issue. At the start of the TELLUS project 1 prototype light weight hybrid bus with EURO IV standard was available for testing purposes but not yet in operation. The measure aims to convert the whole bus-fleet to EURO IV/V standard using the DNOx filter technique; 138 existing buses will be converted with a complete DNOx system and 74 new buses will be improved with an additional DNOx system. Such a systems consists of three parts, an oxidizing catalyst, a particle filter and a low-pressure Exhaust Gas Regeneration system. The demonstration design was to retrofit 7 buses with DNOx filters. The 7 buses should been put into normal operation by the Rotterdam Public Transport Company (RET). The filter system supplier Erland Nilsson (EN) was responsible for the monitoring of the DNOx filter. After this first operation, the filters should be evaluated and assessed in order to prepare a decision for the conversion of the remaining bus-fleet. In the course of 2004 the design was changed into installing active SCR (Selective Cathalytic Reduction) filter systems supplied by ETG (Emissions Technology Group) in 7 new buses. The lightweight hybrid bus should be tested for 3 years in this project. The evaluation and dissemination of this bus experience will have to result in further improvement for new developments in this field. The innovative aspects are the introduction of DNOx filters (and especially SCR filters), lightweight hybrid bus concept and extremely silent and energy efficient rail vehicles.
Operate an alternative for truck traffic on the road, leading to less congestion and less air pollution Tube logistics is a new organisational concept that aims to promote tube transport of smaller amounts of chemicals. Although several companies have showed their interest, a demonstration project is necessary to stimulate the use of the concept by these companies. The demonstration project is expected to deliver results on the pricing strategy, management and communication and make a wider implementation of the concept possible

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