In the next five years, the city will purchase 1,680 new buses with the total funding of VND2 trillion ($100 million), according to a newly-approved plan for 2011-2015.

In details, the southern metropolis will buy 571 80-seat buses, 409 buses with 55 seats and 700 others with 40 seats. The plan will be carried out in the form of encouraging private firms to buy buses and offer public transport services under the state’s assistance (soft loans, subsidy policy).

The new vehicles must meet Eur III exhaust standards upwards or use CNG.

To have capital for this project, the HCM City Department of Transport asked the local authorities’ permission to sell nearly 2,000 old buses.

The city will assist investors by paying 30 percent of the bus value. The remaining 70 percent will borrow from banks for seven years. The city will subsidize the lending interest rate of 6.48 percent/year. The total subsidy for interest rate is estimated at VND300 billion ($1.5 million).

Local officials said that this project aims to curb environmental pollution.

The city will also implement other projects to improve the quality of public transportation services, including testing buses with low floors for disabled passengers and exempting fees for those people; expanding the automatic ticket selling system; installing GPS on buses and using more bus fueled with CNG.

The city will temporarily halt the two-deck bus project because the road quality is not suitable for the vehicle. Moreover, many roads have low overhead electric wires which hinder the operations of the two-deck buses.

HCM City has a fleet of over 3,200 buses at present, including over 1,300 buses purchased by the state budget in 2003. The remaining are invested by private firms. Most of them are outdated and pollute the environment.

PV