The UK now has air-filtering buses driving down its roads. One of the nation’s most giant bus and rail operators – the Go-Ahead Group – launching the initiative in 2018 to tackle air pollution.
It retrofitted a set of its Bluestar buses with a new air filtration system attached to the top of the vehicle and let them loose in Southampton. That city was chosen because the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that its air quality is at the brink of an unsafe level. As the buses drive around, the filtration system cleans the air in the city.
When the company launched the trial, Go-Ahead chief executive, David Brown said:
We are going a step further in the potential for our buses to actively clean the environment. It’s a huge development in our environmental leadership and we are also proud to be pioneering the prototype in the UK.
The system consists of a fan fitted on the roof that draws air into a filter at a pace of one cubic meter per second. The screen then removes ultra-fine particulate pollution from the sky, and clean, pollution-free air exits out the back.
The trial proved successful, and the company is going to roll out more of these buses this summer in six regions across the UK and five more buses in Southampton. The other areas where the single-decker buses are expected to start operating include Manchester, Brighton, Newcastle, Crawley, Plymouth, and Oxford.
Manufacturer Pall audited the tests, and the University of Southampton is responsible for the assessment. They found that the buses cleaned 3.2 million cubic meters of the city’s air and removed approximately 65g of pollutants in the process. According to Brown, the system exceeded the company’s expectations. He hopes that the city council will aid in funding more routes. To convert one bus costs approximately £20,000, and the trial cost the operator about £100,000.
Brown added:
We think it’s part of the solution [to air pollution], along with getting people on public transport anyway. The buses have the cleanest Euro VI engines, whose nitrogen oxides emissions are now less than a single diesel car, so it’s a double-whammy.
For all local authorities who have an issue with air pollution and clean air zones, I genuinely believe this is part of the solutio. These are small pilots, but if you could put it on every bus it would actually make a difference.
He said the bill to convert Go-Ahead’s entire nationwide fleet of over 5,000 buses would be around £100m.
