EMT Madrid
EMT Madrid is the company charged with the planning of public urban transport in the city in Madrid, Spain. The organization is wholly owned by the City Council of Madrid and is a member of the Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid. Among the services provided by EMT Madrid are urban bus transportation as well as the BiciMAD bicycle-sharing system.
EMT Madrid, Europe's second-largest municipal bus operator, achieved a significant milestone by completing the elimination of all diesel buses from its fleet by the end of 2022. This transition resulted in a fully modernized fleet consisting solely of gas-powered, hybrid, and fully electric buses.
History
EMT Madrid was established on 12 November 1947 after the dissolution of the Joint Transport Company. Originally a municipal private company, in 1971 it became a joint stock company. It provided trolleybus service until 1966 and tram services until 1972.The company has used several bus colors in its history. When the company was created in 1947, their buses were blue, a legacy of the former Sociedad Madrileña de Tranvías. From 1974 to 1986, the color was gradually changed to red. Natural gas busses were introduced in 1992 with a light blue colour to distinguish them from the existing red fleet. In the summer of 2008, a new bus fleet introduced the current shade of blue, replacing the existing red fleet.
The company has also gone through several different logos. It began with a round E inside which were an M and a T. At the end of the 1970s, this was changed to two red arrows crossed together. In 2010 a blue logo was introduced, mirroring the color change of the buses, with the letters "EMT" above a square with the city's coat of arms and the word "Madrid!". In 2018, the logo was changed again to the current one: a lowercase "e" followed by a ">" sign, which is styled as blue on a white background or vice versa.
Multimodal public transport
City bus lines
The EMT manages a fleet of over 2,000 buses distributed in 223 lines that have an extension of 3,500 kilometers.As part of EMT's added value there is an open data system for the "Smart City", CCTV and free WiFi connection both in the most relevant stops and in the whole bus fleet.
To reduce the volume of polluting gases emitted by its vehicles through the use of alternative energies such as compressed natural gas, biodiesel, electric traction, hydrogen, bioethanol; intensive renewal of the fleet with conventional diesel buses with strict environmental requirements.
The buses in Madrid are the only public transport system available around the clock as the metro network closes down between 02:00 and 06:00 am. The night buses, also known as "Buhos", operate from 23.45 to 06.00 am. The heavy traffic in Madrid can in some cases make the city buses a fairly slow form of transportation but the city of Madrid has more than 90 km of special bus and taxi lines to help solve this issue. Buses serving the outer areas are run by 33 private companies, coordinated by the Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid. This network is fundamentally radial.