Arezzo, 22 June 2024 – A bus every two days from now to the end of 2024, and then the big leap that will see two new buses every day (including holidays and Sundays) on the roads of Tuscany to guarantee an increasingly effective, efficient and sustainable local public transport service from both an environmental and social point of view.
This, in short, is the plan that the Tuscany Region and Autolinee Toscane are implementing to promote regional public road mobility. A process of profound renewal of the vehicle fleet which will bring the average age of the buses around the Tuscan roads to around 7 years on average. We remind you that at the beginning of AT’s management, in November 2021, the average age of the buses was around 14 years.
The Region’s comments
“The renewal of the vehicle fleet – comments the president of the Tuscany Region Eugenio Giani – is one of the fundamental tools for making road mobility in Tuscany a leap in quality in the right direction, which is that of environmental sustainability and efficiency, for a service that lives up to expectations. The Region invests 630 million euros in transport as a whole. In particular, local public road transport entrusted to Autolinee Toscane involves the Region for 300 million euros. At a time when the ecological transition must be the guiding star of our choices – concludes Giani – Tuscany makes a coherent choice which, to be completely effective, also needs to be accompanied by adequate choices at a national and European level”.
“The acceleration given to the renewal of the vehicle fleet is positive – explains councilor Stefano Baccelli – and responds to a precise urgency which is to make public transport increasingly usable, comfortable, modern and sustainable. From 2025 there will be two new buses every day on the roads of Tuscany and the aim is to improve the quality of life of citizens, facilitating their travel with adequate means, on which people are encouraged to get on, leaving the car at home. This can happen only if the alternative to private transport is valid and efficient and this is what public transport must aim for, as well as eco-sustainability”.
The state of the art
In recent days, some presentations of new vehicles have taken place in Siena, Grosseto, Pisa, Lucca and Florence. Other presentations will continue in the coming weeks. These are essentially two types of vehicles. Urban buses of various lengths (up to 18 meters to cover high-frequency routes) powered by Euro 6 methane engines, recognizable by their white livery. And interurban buses, blue in colour, in some cases even slim in length, to move along extra-urban routes in the municipalities and more peripheral areas where the roads are narrower.
The data
Since AT arrived in Tuscany (1 November 2021), over 400 new buses have already been purchased and put into service by TPL. Between now and 31 October 2024, another 246 will enter service. It means that in 3 years the Tuscany Region will have equipped the TPL fleet with approximately 650 new buses for an investment of around 156 million euros. In practice, from now until the end of 2024, the average will be a new bus entering Tuscany every 2 days.
“Autolinee Toscane is investing important resources to renew the Tuscan TPL – comments President Gianni Bechelli -. In some cases, such as in methane vehicles and soon also hybrid and electric ones, the funds also come from European and/or state funding in favor of the Region and Municipalities, but for the rest these are actions carried out directly with our resources. And we are doing this during an extremely difficult phase for Italian public transport, which lacks at least 1,700 million, 800 to cover post-Covid losses and 900 to renew the contract of the rail and tram drivers. Today this sector, so strategic for guaranteeing collective public mobility as a tool for eco-sustainable transformation, has been in clear debt of oxygen for several years, as not only companies and unions say, but also all the Regional Presidents and the Transport Commission itself of the House in a bipartisan manner. For us, and therefore for the entire public road transport system, in Tuscany it becomes essential that politics and institutions at a national and local level also make consequent and coherent choices. Because there are no alternatives: if we believe that the TPL is the indispensable tool to guarantee more and more collective mobility and less and less cars and smog, then we need to guarantee it the resources necessary to avoid dying of financial asphyxiation”.
The future
Looking to the future, 2025 will be the key year for an even deeper renewal. “From 2025 another 800 new buses will begin to arrive in Tuscany – explains the CEO of at Jean-Luc Laugaa – of these over 700 purchased with own resources and 68 with state and EU funds obtained from the Tuscany Region. We will put on average two new buses on Tuscan roads every day so as to halve the average age of the vehicles and bring it in line with the European one: around 7 years. A big leap forward compared to the 14-year average age of the buses that we inherited in 2021 from the previous operators. Our goal is to build a truly large Tuscan regional public road transport company. And we are doing it with facts and investments, not in words, through enormous resources spent on vehicles, in staff hiring (already over a thousand permanent hires from November 2021 to today) and technologies at the service of users. Tuscany is the only region in Italy where you can pay for your ticket on board anywhere on the buses, without additional costs, with the contactless system: from Zeri to Capalbio, without distinctions between users. All this involves an enormous financial and planning effort that only a large company that is part of a large group like RATP can support, naturally provided that the institutions allow us to do so in balance and sustainability”.
