
Donated buses will "age" parked, they still lack comprehensive insurance
JSP "Skopje" has published a public announcement seeking bids for comprehensive insurance for the six vehicles, which is ongoing and will last until January 23. Then the submitted bids will be opened, and the legal period for complaints will follow, which means that the buses donated two months ago will be parked until February.
The six donated eco-friendly buses, which, according to the announcements at the handover ceremony, were supposed to become part of public transportation in a week, have been parked in the garage for two months. Now, as things stand, these buses will not be driving on the streets of Skopje until at least the end of this month.
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Currently, the buses are not yet insured, and therefore cannot be put into service. JSP "Skopje" has published a public announcement requesting bids for comprehensive insurance for the six vehicles, which is ongoing and will last until January 23. Then the submitted bids will be opened, and the legal period for appeals will follow, which means that the buses will be parked until February, unless it is discovered by then that some other required document is missing before they can finally be put on regular routes.
While awaiting offers from insurance companies that should offer, among other things, insurance against rollover, collision, impact, sliding, fire, lightning strike, explosion, consequences of avalanches and other undesirable situations that may befall the bus, JSP usually does not announce why it is dragging on with the procedures for so long. Especially since it is publicly known that every new bus is necessary for the company, in conditions when it has an old and "rare" fleet.
In the past two or three weeks, due to the holidays, but also because of the school holidays, public transport has been functioning better for a long time, the buses were more regular, and there was no congestion, and there was even a free seat in the vehicles. But all that will change from Monday when the children return to school, and the holidays when non-working days were massively "merged" are over, so the waiting at bus stops and the congestion on the buses will return to the old way. When there is nothing else, even the six buses mean minimal relief from the current situation.
However, even after the handover of the buses donated within the framework of the "EU for Clean Air" project, minor and major errors appeared in the documentation that should have been removed in the past period.

The single-decker buses powered by compressed natural gas, manufactured by the Turkish company "BMC", arrived with stickers on which spelling errors were detected in Albanian and Macedonian, so new ones were prepared which, as announced by the Ministry of Environment, will be replaced before their commissioning.
However, a bigger problem arose due to errors in the documentation relating to the wrong chassis number of one of the buses as well as the color of the buses, where blue was written instead of red.
Therefore, at the last session of the Skopje City Council, held at the end of December, two decisions were again voted on to overcome this problem, one is a Decision to amend the Decision to receive a donation from UPOS, and the other to amend the Decision to transfer the right of ownership of six buses with compressed natural gas to JSP Skopje, which resolve these errors in the documentation.
The City of Skopje and UNOPS signed a Memorandum of Understanding on 6.8.2024, agreeing to work together on a project aimed at improving public transport. The donation from UNOPS consists of 6 (six) buses with compressed natural gas (CNG), with the aim of improving public transport for the residents of the City of Skopje. The donor UNOPS submitted a donation request to the City of Skopje, where an oversight was made with the above-mentioned changes, i.e. the chassis number for one bus does not fully correspond to the documentation received upon delivery, as well as the color - the City of Skopje states in the explanation of the decisions.
Whether concluding a comprehensive insurance contract will be the last obstacle to the donated buses finally being on the streets of Skopje remains to be seen in the coming period.
Meanwhile, no one is mentioning anything about the alleged donation from Belgrade of six used buses, after several days of various information and announcements related to the news that arrived from the neighboring country that some of the buses that will not be operating in the capital of Serbia are being considered for donation to Skopje and other cities in Macedonia.
Citizens also expect the Government to announce a tender for electric buses for public city transport, which, as Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski announced back in November, will procure between 100 and 120 buses, most of which will be for Skopje, but also for other cities in the country that have organized public city transport.
There will be a tender, we define the conditions, we scan the market, we see where there is, how many interested parties there are. And all those who think they will have to apply, let them apply, we will also define the payment terms. The payment terms will be such that we start paying them off sometime in the first half of 2028 in eight semi-annual installments, which will be over a period of 4 years or a grace period of 3 years, so I think it will be good. We are preparing the tender, the technical documentation, I expect it to be announced by the end of the year - Mickoski said then.
The public announcement has not yet been made.