New buses

New buses

Four years ago, VGF invested in new buses because, notwithstanding the tender for the bus lines, VGF has retained the bus infrastructure of vehicle fleet and workshop, with purely the transportation service having been transferred to its subsidiary ICB. In 2007, VGF purchased buses from Poland for the first time after Solaris, a manufacturer based in the Polish city of Poznan, won the order for thirty-seven standard vehicles, supplying VGF with the Urbino 12 buses at a cost of €8,500,000. Further investments followed, with the procurement in 2009 of eight Solaris Urbino 12s and sixteen Urbino 18 articulated buses for €7,000,000, followed in December 2010 by seventeen Solaris Urbino 12s and – a first for Frankfurt – twelve AN Lions City articulated buses, for a joint total of another €7,000,000. The entire fleet is now low-floor, and all VGF vehicles are equipped with video, air conditioning and environmentally friendly engines complying with the EEV standard.

It is now standard VGF practice when buying new vehicles of any kind to equip them with cameras. All 146 new U5 underground rail vehicles are thus equipped, as are all buses purchased since 2007 and the upgraded U4 underground vehicles modernised since summer 2010. However, fitting air conditioning in the Type R trams and the fifteen-year-old U4 underground rail vehicles proved impossible because the vehicle bodies would have been unable to bear the weight of the units, which weigh several tonnes.