Executive Brief

• Companhia Carris de Ferro de Lisboa
• The Operations Support System
• New Projects
• Project Results

Carris– The Company

The City of Lisbon, of approx. 84 square kilometres in size and with 565,000 inhabitants, is the centre of a metropolitan area of approx. 3,120 square kilometers and with over 2.68 million inhabitants, which covers ten councils to the north of the Tagus and nine to the south. Within the metropolitan area of Lisbon, four million trips are made daily, of which three million are by motor vehicle. Motor vehicle use has increased steadily, which in turn has caused an increase in the congestion of city access routes and a worsening of mobility management.

The increase in the use of private motor vehicles has led directly to a reduction in the use of public transport. This reduction is in direct contrast to what has happened in other European cities.

The principal public transport operators in Lisbon are Carris and Lisbon Metro. Carris operates a fleet of buses across 101 routes covering about 300 kilometres, a fleet of trams across 5 routes covering about 25 kilometres, 1 passenger lift and 3 funicular trams, all transporting approximately 300 million passengers per year.

A company undergoing change
Within the last few years, Carris has aimed to adjust its services to the needs of the market, improving efficiency and providing a better quality of service, together with controlling the quality of the environment.

Carris sees itself as a modern company with an organisational culture oriented towards productivity, providing quality of service to the customer, optimising usage of resources and maintaining its role of public service responsibility. With a view to responding to this commitment to customer service, Carris launched an international tender for integrating a real time information system into the Operational Support system, providing the public with information on next bus times at principal stops.

In order to improve service regularity through planning, an Operational Support system was acquired, providing automatic vehicle location through GPS, and using a digital TETRA network, providing more efficient network management and improved security for passengers and crew.

A traffic regulation system (GERTRUDE) was developed in cooperation with Lisbon City Council, to permit public transport vehicles to flow more smoothly through traffic light systems.