The single-decker AFBs will be deployed in Brighton, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Plymouth and Crawley/Gatwick from this summer.
Each vehicle has an air filtering system comprising three fans on the roof that suck pollutant particles into filters, cleaning up to 99.5% of PM from the air as the bus travels through an area. The air filter takes in one cubic metre of air per second – in one hour, it is said to filter the same volume of air as 6,000 people breathing.
Go-Ahead Group is also introducing five more AFBs into Southampton next month to cover an entire city centre route.
The UK roll-out follows the successful trial in Southampton, which showed that a single bus could remove as much as 65g of pollutants from the air in a 100-day period.
It was initially deployed on a Euro VI bus run by Go-Ahead subsidiary Bluestar in Southampton (TE reported on the trial in December 2018: see link below for more details).
“We want to play our part in tackling the crisis in urban air quality and show that buses can be integral to cleaning up our cities,” says David Brown, Go-Ahead’s chief executive.
“Our air-filtering system has exceeded all expectations in how it can benefit the environment, and it builds on our track-record as operator of the UK’s greenest bus fleet.”