"Baku needs 5,000 buses"

A new electric bus has been delivered to the city of Baku, marking the first electric bus with an electric motor to operate in the Azerbaijani capital. The 12-meter bus was purchased from the Chinese company BYD and will be tested for its feasibility in the city's transit system.

Despite efforts to modernize the city's public transportation, complaints persist about old and unusable buses on certain routes, and increased shuttle bus prices this year. Passengers report waiting for buses at stops for extended periods, sometimes up to 30 minutes.

A report by the Accounting Chamber on the financial activities of BakuBus LLC for 2019-2020 indicates that over the past five years, an average of 25.4 percent of buses purchased with public funds were stored in depots without use. The report also highlights the termination of operation of 198 of the 303 Iveco passenger buses on the balance sheet of BakuBus LLC due to untimely repairs of various malfunctions.

The Baku Transport Agency (BNA) reported that the city's bus fleet has been updated by 61 percent over the past seven years. The agency stated that, in line with the president's directives, 1,044 modern passenger buses of medium and large class have been purchased and put into operation in Baku's transit system. In 2022, 255 buses were imported into the country, with 76 percent equipped with an environmentally friendly compressed natural gas engine that meets the Euro 6 standard.

Transport expert Arshad Huseynov told Radio Azadlig that the electric bus brought to Azerbaijan is still undergoing testing and that its operation requires appropriate conditions, including a charging system, specialists for maintenance, and determining which streets it can freely move on.

Huseynov stressed that Baku needs 5,000 buses to create a modern transport infrastructure and that about 70 percent of the 2,100 buses currently in operation in Baku are old and have expired service lives. The situation is even worse in other regions of Azerbaijan, with the bus fleet in deplorable conditions in large cities such as Ganja, Sumgait, Sheki, Lankaran, and Shamakhi.

Huseynov recommends studying the experience of other countries, such as Spain, where public transport in Barcelona is 70 percent funded from the state or city budget and works perfectly. It is imperative that Azerbaijan's approach to public transportation be reevaluated, and international best practices should be considered to create a modern, efficient transit system that meets the needs of the country's citizens.