From the desk of the Chief Operations Officer Mrs. Lynda Holder, MBA
It has been just over a year that Barbados introduced electric mobility into the public transport industry. At least once a month I am still asked “how are the buses working?” I usually respond “take a ride and tell me”. The buses are on the roads from 0500 o’clock to after midnight each day. Some of them are already at over 115,000km and growing. We now refer to them as our energiser bunnies because they keep going and going.
Apart from the customer-centric offerings such as Wi-Fi onboard the buses, air-conditioning, kneeling technology, onboard cameras, announcer systems and special identifying alerts for various categories of passengers, a number of vehicular improvements were also added to the fleet.
Reversing cameras and separate controls for the lights in the passenger cabin and the driver cabins offered improvements for the operation of the buses and were among other mechanical changes and opportunities for excellence.
The different power supply systems, their performance, the charging type, the battery capacity, and the operating environment were among some of the parameters that had to be addressed for the successful integration of these buses into the then existing fleet of the Transport Board. As such we had to learn new ways of managing our fleet as the State of Charge (SOC) is as important in the electric buses as the fuel levels are in a diesel unit.
To address this we introduced new technologies to manage, monitor and track the performance of the vehicles as we wanted the ability to get trends over time.
So how has the introduction to electric mobility worked in Barbados? We continue to learn, we continue to grow………and we purchased an additional fourteen more buses. We now have 49 electric buses in our fleet.
From the desk of the Chief Operations Officer Mrs. Lynda Holder, MBA
It has been just over a year that Barbados introduced electric mobility into the public transport industry. At least once a month I am still asked “how are the buses working?” I usually respond “take a ride and tell me”. The buses are on the roads from 0500 o’clock to after midnight each day. Some of them are already at over 115,000km and growing. We now refer to them as our energiser bunnies because they keep going and going.
Apart from the customer-centric offerings such as Wi-Fi onboard the buses, air-conditioning, kneeling technology, onboard cameras, announcer systems and special identifying alerts for various categories of passengers, a number of vehicular improvements were also added to the fleet.
Reversing cameras and separate controls for the lights in the passenger cabin and the driver cabins offered improvements for the operation of the buses and were among other mechanical changes and opportunities for excellence.
The different power supply systems, their performance, the charging type, the battery capacity, and the operating environment were among some of the parameters that had to be addressed for the successful integration of these buses into the then existing fleet of the Transport Board. As such we had to learn new ways of managing our fleet as the State of Charge (SOC) is as important in the electric buses as the fuel levels are in a diesel unit.
To address this we introduced new technologies to manage, monitor and track the performance of the vehicles as we wanted the ability to get trends over time.
So how has the introduction to electric mobility worked in Barbados? We continue to learn, we continue to grow………and we purchased an additional fourteen more buses. We now have 49 electric buses in our fleet.
Leading the way for change.
Remember “you are in Safe Hands with Us.”
#opportunities #transport #publictransport #cleanerenvironment