Belgrade to officially cancel trolleys after 78 years

What Sinisa Mali and Goran Vesic announced in their time, while there were mayors of Belgrade, but never carried out, will be carried out by the city administration led by Aleksandar Sapic – in Belgrade, 78 years after the first trolley started operating during the May 1 parade in 1947, this form of transport will be entirely canceled, to be replaced by electric buses.

According to unofficial information that eKapija has gotten to, at the last moment, ahead of today’s session of the City Assembly of Belgrade, the item related to the cancellation of trolleys and the project of the introduction of electric buses instead of them was included in the agenda. As we were told, the plan is for the trolleys to be withdrawn as their “life cycle” ends, while, on the other hand, their successors will be introduced through a public-private partnership project.

The topic of the survival or removal of trolleys in Belgrade has been current as long as SNS has been in power in the capital city, because, in the past ten years or so, the Old Palace has, on several occasions, announced either their removal, the renewal of the trolley rolling stock, but also their replacement with electric buses. All these ideas were current back during the mandate of Sinisa Mali as the mayor, so at one point, as these announcements were being made, one of them said that trolleys would be removed, especially in the city center “where their network negatively affects the appearance of streets in the center”, and that either electric buses or trolleys that could function without the overhead line would be introduced.

That the city authorities have not been sure what to do with the trolley subsystem in the past ten years or so is also shown by the infamous sudden removal of the trolley lines 19 and 28 in the autumn of 2019, when the controversial reconstruction of the Republic Square was finally finished following the infamous turning of the cobblestones. Let us remind that, before the cobblestones were turned over and rearranged, when the square had opened in the summer of that year, the trolleys were returned to their old routes without a problem. However, only several months later, both the city and the Public Transport Secretariat made an announcement saying that “the analyses have shown that the existing bus line routes largely match the trolley line routes and meet the needs of the citizens.” Unlike this official announcement, unofficial information from the city indicated that the trolleys across the square were being removed because the new cobblestones couldn’t withstand that kind of traffic volume. Whatever the case may be, some citizens decided to do something about it, so the trolley line 28 was brought back to its old route following a series of actions and protests.

The dilemma of the city authorities regarding whether the trolley system was to be retained continued in the following years. In early 2022, the city opened the tender for the renewal of the trolley subsystem, that is, the purchase of 80 trolleys, whose dynamics of delivery was supposed to be 20 each year by 2026. It was requested at the time for the bidders to secure vehicles with at least 10 kilometers of autonomous driving, and the city announced that the new trolleys would also be an opportunity to extend some trolley routes. However, just as it opened, the tender was quickly terminated.

To make the paradox regarding the “planning” of the trolley traffic in Belgrade even worse, not so long ago, during the coronavirus period, works on the expansion of the trolley overhead lines were being done in central city municipalities.

There has been no lack of various announcements regarding the trolley subsystem since Aleksandar Sapic became the mayor of Belgrade either. Not so long ago, talking about the renewal of the rolling stock of Belgrade’s public transport enterprise GSP, he announced the purchase of 100 trolleys among other things.

D. Aleksic

JKP GSP Beograd

GSP Beograd

Siniša Mali

Goran Vesić

Aleksandar Šapić

removal of trolleys in Belgrade