Study Trip in Coburg (Germany)
Omnibusverkehr Franken (OVF) is a bus company owned by Deutsche Bahn which is a state railway and bus company owned by the Republic of Germany. It offers services in on 17,000 kilometres of bus lines in the north of Bavaria. In the County of Coburg it serves all the local bus lines which also supplement the city public transport in the city of Coburg.
The system in County was significantly reorganised in 2016. Most of the lines were set to be on-demand transport. The old system had 11 lines, while the new system has 5 lines, but the rest of the County is covered with on-demand services that can be used every hour and drives people to bigger bus and train stops and stations.
The old system had 1,245,222 bus kilometres per year. It carried 5,000 passengers on workdays. The number of passenger during one year way about 2.4 million. The new system has 1,198,960 bus kilometres per year, but the possible number of on demand kilometres is 683,701 kilometres per year.It takes 40 buses to cover all the lines during one workday.
The new on-demand part of the system is generating more and more passengers. In 2016 the numbers were 541 passengers in September and 698 passengers in October. The five lines remaining run on hourly intervals on workdays from 6 to 23:30 hours. On Saturdays, Sundays and holidays the system runs on two hours intervals from 8 to 22:00 hours. The garage (maintenance) and office building are shared together with SÜC Coburg in Coburg.
SÜC Coburg is a bus company, part of the SÜC Coburg city company (owned by the city) which is also supplying the city with gas and water. The company runs urban bus lines through the city (size 41.000 inhabitants) and also to the smaller communities (plus 7,400 inhabitants), small villages outside the city. Besides this the company takes care of bus shelters, two bus terminals, traffic light management and passenger ITCS management for region. It also provides passenger data for the info state system that offers passenger info for all the Bavaria.
The system has 9 bus lines operated daily, mostly with 30-60 minutes intervals when it comes to departures. Operating times of the system are on workdays 5:00 – 20:00 (departures every 30 minutes), on Saturdays 6:00 – 20:00 (departures mostly every hour) and on Sundays: 11:30 – 19:30 (departures every hour).
After 20:00 hours until around midnight the system is replaced by on-demand transport (taxi) service which supplements it. On demand service is also available in the night, Saturdays to Sundays, until 3:45 AM and on Sunday morning from 6 to 11:20 hours and between 19:30 to 23:45 hours. On demand transport carries around 10,000 passengers per year.
The system has 40 low floor buses, 15 of them run on natural gas. The buses in the system carry around 4.5 million passengers per year, they travel around 1.5 million bus kilometres per year, the system overall operating costs are around 2.8 million Euros per year and around 57% of incomes comes from fares. Approximate cost of one bus-kilometre to maintain the whole system is around 1.87 €. The rest is, of course covered by subsidies. The system serves 350 stops, 90 of them have shelters. Modal share inside the city of Coburg is: 50% by car, 13% by bus, 8 % by bike, 23% walking and 6% rail.
The garage (maintenance) and office building are shared together with Omnibusverkehr Franken (OVF), the bus company that covers local lines in the entire Coburg County and it is the subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn (DB).
