DAIMLER BUSES TO DELIVER 1,045 BUS CHASSIS TO CHILE
Daimler Buses has secured for itself the biggest order in South America this year. As a result, the world’s largest bus manufacturer delivers 1,045 Mercedes-Benz city bus chassis to Santiago de Chile since October. The vehicles are destined for the Transsantiago public transport system, which was introduced in 2007. Since then the system has been providing Chile’s capital city and the surrounding area with a bus and subway infrastructure.
Around 3,800 of the approximately 6,400 buses used in Santiago are already from Mercedes-Benz, representing a share of almost 60 percent. A total of 5.4 million people live in Santiago’s urban center, and the entire metropolitan area is home to more than eight million inhabitants.
The Transsantiago network of bus and subway lines is operated by eleven private companies, six of which are ordering the new buses to modernize their fleets. A total of 653 Mercedes-Benz O 500 U low-floor buses were ordered by the following five customers: Buses Gran Santiago, Buses Metropolitana, Las Araucarias, Nuevo Milenio, and STP. The remaining 392 vehicles will be delivered to Buses Vule. This large order is the first one whereas all of the vehicles will be equipped with particulate filters, therefore matching the Euro 3 standard. Having these filters build in there is a lot smaller overall particulate emission. The 1,045 chassis will be produced at the Daimler Buses plant in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, while the bodies will be manufactured in Botucatu, Sao Paulo State, by the large auto body builder, Caio. The entire order is being financed by Brazil’s development bank BNDES (Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Economico e Social).
By means of the new contract, Daimler Buses is supporting the integrated transport system in Santiago through its targeted Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) solutions. Thanks to the high flexibility of buses and the low cost of the associated infrastructure, the bus transport concept offers many advantages. In addition to being cost-efficient, BRT public transport systems can be quickly implemented and offer high-level performance. This results in especially big benefits for large, congested cities, which require huge passenger transport capacities. In Chile’s capital, for example, passengers use the transport system doing more than four million rides every day, paying the equivalent of 20 euro cents for a ticket. The Transsantiago transport network has a total of 326 bus lines covering more than 10,000 kilometres, of which 60 kilometres are reserved exclusively for bus use.
