Development of a driving cycle for a supercapacitor electric bus route in Hong Kong

To reduce the vehicle emission problems, electric vehicles with different technologies have been increasingly and widely adopted in recent years. As a city with public transport modal share of over 90% of daily passenger trips, adoption of electric buses in the franchised bus sector is still at the trial stage. Limited information on the evaluation of driving characteristics of the adopted electric vehicles has been published. Therefore, a driving cycle for a selected bus route with supercapacitor buses deployed has been developed. On-road speed-time data were collected with smartphone applications using the built-in GPS functions. In particular, vehicle specific powers (VSP) were included in the selection of best synthesized driving cycle. Results shown that driving characteristics of buses was significantly different from other worldwide bus driving cycles. This reflects the unique driving patterns of buses in Hong Kong characterised by the long idling proportion due to the long dwell times at bus stops, and very frequent stop-and-start operations due to individual bus stop and closely spaced signal junctions.