Nottingham City Transport has adopted biogas to meet tough new emission standards and hopes never to buy another diesel. ALAN MILLAR finds out why it is following this course and how it plans to make it work
If Nottingham City Transport has its way, it will never buy a single Euro6 diesel bus for its 335-vehicle fleet. It hopes that its 181 Euro5s will be its last new diesels and that it can switch over steadily to compressed biogas starting with 30 double-deckers coming in the spring of this year.
As a commercial operator, it judges this to be the most practical — in its view the only — way to deliver the city council’s clean air options within a realistic and affordable timeframe.
Nottingham (population 301,000 and rising) is one of five English provincial cities — the others are Derby, Bristol, Leeds and Southampton — that Defra, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, has identified as having particularly poor air quality and has set a deadline of 2020 to establish clean air zones (CAZ) in their city centres.
Together with Bristol, Milton Keynes and London, Nottingham was named in January 2016 as one of the UK’s first Go Ultra Low Cities, with funding for a network of electric veh…
