Development of Low-Floor Electric Community Bus For Public Transportation and its Demonstration in Toyama City

Electric vehicles (EVs) have been developed with the aims of saving energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, as a single bus can transport many people, buses produce low carbon dioxide emissions per person in comparison with cars. In recent years, community buses have been introduced nationwide to ensure the mobility of senior citizens. Therefore, a low-floor vehicle was adopted as the base vehicle in our latest project. The bus was demonstrated around the center of Toyama City. It was followed a circular route of distance 7.2km, the number of bus stops on the route was 27 and the driving time was 40 minutes per circuit. This demonstration was repeated three to four times a day for 14 days. During the 86 circuits of the demonstration, a total of 1,110 passengers used the bus and the total running distance was 776km. From these results, we concluded that the quantity of carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced by 37% using our proposed bus in comparison with that of a conventional diesel-engine bus.