World’s First Pure Electric Double-Decker Makes its Way to London

London is going green with new Electric buses as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson denies diesel and petrol vehicles in London

The current Mayor of London Boris Johnson is strictly against diesel vehicles and an advocate of cleaner public transport. Ever since he took over the seat of UK’s capital administration, he urged regular buses to be switched to hybrid if not electrical power, but now a pure electric double-decker is making its way to London.
After running a mass level campaign against diesel vehicles in London and taking steps towards greener London, Mayor Boris Johnson has made a huge announcement that this year, world’s first purpose-built double-decker bus, a purely electric one, will be entered into passenger service in London. During the first ever Global Clean Bus Summit, he made the call for the green bus.

How it is made possible?

The purely electric double-decker bus required gigantic battery packs for the power, but that was not possible until, they partnered up with the Chinese at BYD to find a better way around it.

It is the result of Mayor’s continuing efforts to make London greener by reducing the emissions from buses and other vehicles in London. What is worth mentioning is that London’s current bus fleet is already one of the cleanest fleets in the whole world.

When this bus will enter service?

This all-new purely electric double-decker will be running between Cricklewood and Victoria Station on Route 16 from October when it will enter the service. Johnson’s term in office is going to end in 2016, but before that, he has made this huge investment to secure the future which involves halving NOx emissions for the bus fleet as a part of a bigger scale plan.

What work has been done so far for cleaner London?

A lot of work has been done since 2008, the time when Mayor first introduced the concept of greener, cleaner London. The figures provided by the Town Hall shows that the Mayor has more than 1,400 buses tweaked in order to reduce their emissions by up to 88 per cent, rolled out more than 1,300 hybrid electric buses and developed one of the cleanest double-decker buses of its own type in the whole world, known as New Routemaster.

If everything goes as the Mayor has planned, we are sure that we’ll see the cleanest London of all times.