Buses World News

7.10.10

FLOWERED BUSES * USA - Living garden on bus rooftop to add some rolling green to city streets

New York,NY,USA -Gizmag, by Darren Quick -October 6, 2010: -- Finding room for green spaces in more and more crowded cities isn’t easy but NYU graduate student Marco Castro Cosio, has hit upon the idea of planting gardens on some previously wasted space found on city streets – the roofs of buses. With New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) running a fleet of around 4,500 buses, each with a surface area of 340 square feet (31.5 m2), Cosio says that if a garden was grown on the roof of every one, there would be an extra 35 acres of rolling green space in the city... It might sound a bit far fetched but Cosio’s Bus Roots idea has managed to take second place in the DesignWala Grand Idea Competition and a prototype has already been installed on the roof of a vehicle dubbed the BioBus. The prototype garden only covers a small area at the rear of the BioBus’s roof and is mostly growing small succulents, but it has been traveling around New York for the last five months and has even ventured as far as Ohio... Cosio says the purpose of the Bus Roots project is to reclaim forgotten space, increase the quality of life and grow the amount of green spaces in the city. Amongst the benefits of bringing plant life to the city listed by Cosio are mitigation of the urban heat island effect, acoustical and thermal insulation and CO2 absorption – although you’d have to wonder whether the amount of CO2 soaked up by the bus’s rooftop garden is enough to offset the extra fuel the bus will burn through carting the extra soil and plant life around... (Image: Marco Castro Cosio - Digital mockup of a bus-top garden)

Labels: bio-buses

28.10.07

BIO-BUSES * UK - Chip fat buses take to the road

A fleet of buses fuelled by chip fat is taking to the roads of Ayrshire in a trial green transport project - "I believe it's win-win for people who will be able to take their cooking oil along and have it turned into tickets"

London,Scotland,UK -BBC News -26 Oct 2007: -- Stagecoach's Bio-Bus scheme also offers a 20p discount for passengers who bring along their used cooking oil... The scheme featuring the eight-strong fleet, which will run between Stewarton and Darvel, aims to cut harmful emissions by more than 80%... The initiative will run for the next six months and operators hope it could roll out nationwide. It is hoped the chip fat fuel will reduce emissions... For the first 10 minutes of the morning, the buses run on diesel until normal engine operating temperature is reached and then the system automatically switches over to bio-diesel, which powers the vehicles all day... (Picture right: Passengers on the route are being given containers to collect fat)

* Buses may run on sugar beet fuel
Berkshire ,UK -BBC News -27 October 2007: -- A fleet of buses in Berkshire looks set to be run on sugar beet fuel - in an attempt to cut carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions... Six million passengers who use the busy Tilehurst to Reading route each year could be travelling on 14 buses run on bio-ethanol from March 2008... The fuel, derived from a renewable source of sugar beet in East Anglia, proved successful during recent trials...

Labels: bio-buses