Objective
The main objectives may be summarized as follows:
- to demonstrate, on a sufficiently large scale and over a sufficiently long period, the viability of the hybrid electric bus technology in ordinary operating conditions and its positive effects on urban public transport in technical, economic, social, energy and environmental terms.
- to encourage the modal transfer away from private motorised traffic and towards public transport by installing an attractive service so as to overcome the problems caused by private motorised traffic in town centres (congestion of roadway system, energy consumption, polluting emissions, noise, etc.)
- to provide this service by means of hybrid electric buses combining energy efficiency and low zero emissions.
- to propose a high quality service so as to make urban public transport more efficient and more attractive (schedule, speed, frequentation, waiting times, security, timetables, intermodality, etc)
- to carry out a common procurement for purchase of the technology.
- to demonstrate user acceptance of the hybrid-electric bus technology.
- to establish guidelines and formulate recommendations for a wide-scale penetration of the hybrid electric bus penetration.
The project "kick-off meeting" took place in Luxembourg on April 14th and 15th 1997 with emphasis on a detailed presentation of the project as well as on the presentation of each partner's city, it's expectations and contributions to the project. The procurement of the buses was decided to be achieved by a public tender procedure on a European level. Each city determined the technical specifications of the buses it wishes to order.
The political Governing Board, together with a representative of the Commission, solemnly signed the 'Luxembourg Resolution', such starting the official start of the project on June 13th.
A technical delegation was created and immediately started with its working programme:
- a large part of all European bus manufacturer's programmes of HEV were analysed, either in the constructor's plants, either at the UITP-congress exhibition in Stuttgart, or on the occasion of bus demonstration during the PGB, ESG and TWG meetings in Luxembourg, this in order to get a general overview of what the constructors are able and willing to propose to the market at that present moment or in the nearer future. Discussions with the manufacturers were taking on several meetings. This was the case mainly during presentations in Luxembourg on April 15th 1997, during a prospecting trip of the technical working group in Mannheim (DE) on June 16th, in Stuttgart (DE) on June 17th and in Pilsting (DE) on June 18th, as well as on a constructors meeting together with the technical working group in Luxembourg on June 11th.
- Based on the knowledge of what the manufacturers could be able to perform on the one hand, on the requirements of the project partners on the other hand, the specifications in the Official Journal of the EU on June 11th 1997. Deadline for the participation was on July 31st 1997.
Technical meetings and discussions with the manufacturers took place in Luxembourg on November 24th, 24th and 27th 1997.
- As most products offered in the call for tender didn't meet the criteria of the technical specifications, the Sagittaire partners encouraged the manufacturers to improve their products. They were invited to introduce a revised proposal concerning their hybrid vehicles.
- Due to internal policy, several manufacturers were not able to introduce their new offer until end of June 1998, so that the latest of them introduced his new offer during the ESG-meeting in Brussels in October 1998.
The deployment of demonstration projects in several European cities using advanced hybrid-electric buses fitted with innovative batteries is a step to improve the overall efficiency and attractiveness of public transport. The setting up of this demonstration project will allow to draw guidelines for future developments in urban transport organisation and technology.
The cities involved in the project are : Luxembourg, Besançon, Alicante, Sintra, Stavanger, Savona, Trento, Athens and Brugge. The following organisations will also take part in the project for management, dissemination, evaluation and reporting. - Agence de l'Energie du Luxembourg
- Energie-cités, (FR)
- CITELEC, (BE)
In each city, the hybrid-electric buses will be tested under different operational and practical conditions :
- analysis of the energy usage of the hybrid buses and comparison with conventional vehicles
- analysis of the impact of the use of electro-hybrid buses in connection with links between interchange points facilitating
intermodality such as :
- railway stations
-P & R facilities
- City centres
- including associated infrastructure
- evaluation by practical methods of different infrastructure measures like acceleration at traffic lights and extension of special bus lanes. Heavily used bus lanes may cause inconvenience for local residents; therefore less noisy vehicles should be considered.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineering
- social sciencessocial geographytransportpublic transport
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
DEM - Demonstration contractsCoordinator
1648 Luxembourg
Luxembourg