Rocking the Ministry of Transport

The climate for technological innovations to emerge in Dutch public transportation is rough. An analysis by the Platform Sustainable Mobility’s Clean Buses working group led to an important conclusion: in public transport, transportation companies are forced to deliver at competitive prices.

Biggest bang
The pressure comes from concession holders that want the biggest bang for their bucks. Although this may be good news for tax payers’ wallets in the short run, it also leads to risk-avoiding behaviour on the side of transportation companies. The result: many innovations do not, or only at a much later stage, trickle through to the market.

Shell out
Introduction of innovations at an earlier stage can be achieved if governments acting as concession holders are prepared to shell out the money, explains Mr Alexander Hablé, one of the ministry’s uncharacteristic civil servants. The Clean Buses working group recommended introduction of so-called 'innovation concessions'. These enable concession holders, with support of national Government, to pay for the introduction of innovative technologies.

What on earth?
It was no sinecure to secure the 11.4 million euros needed on the Ministry of Transport’s side to make the innovation concessions a reality.

Hablé explains that not just transportation companies try to avoid risks as much as possible: “Every now and then I ask myself what on earth we are doing here at the Ministry; why it needs to be so difficult to push forward such promising ideas”.

At the same time, this also seems to be what keeps him going: “I’m here to introduce and realise novel ideas and force breakthroughs. That is what innovation is all about.”

Projects
One of the projects that is made possible by the ministry’s support is the development and deployment of a serial-hybrid fuel cell bus that was announced at the annual meeting of the North Rhine-Westphalian Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Network in Düsseldorf last week. Another noteworthy project is the development of a diesel-hybrid bus in the Dutch region of Twente.

Gear up
Mr. Hablé explains that the innovation concessions fit the philosophy of the transport ministry’s Car of the Future programme, which he has helped set up. The programme aims to gear up the country to become a testing ground for new technologies in the realm of sustainable transportation. “We want to use the same approach for other technologies, such as electric drive”, he says.

Let’s see if the Netherlands will indeed become an important testing ground for electrical vehicles as well. The good news is that Mr Hablé won’t back down before this is a fact.