After Stopping of Tender for 20 Trams, Purchase of 50 New Ones Announced – Procurement of Trolleys Also Considered After All

Just as the public procurement procedure for the purchase of new trams for the purposes of public transport in Belgrade was opened for the first time after more than a decade, the procedure for the purchase of these rail vehicles was soon stopped. The Belgrade public transport company GSP Beograd soon gave the explanation according to which the tender for the procurement of 20 trams had been stopped because the Secretariat for Public Transport had notified them in the meantime that it could secure a more favorable form of financing for the purchase of trams than GSP, and with the support of the Government of Serbia at that, so the purchase of a much higher number of vehicles could be secured that way.

Regarding the opened and then stopped procurement procedure, the president of the Temporary Organ of the City of Belgrade, Aleksandar Sapic, said for Euronews “that the finances for the procurement of the new public transport vehicles are practically secured and that it has been agreed with the Government of Serbia that the carrier of the procurement of the trams will be the Secretariat for Public Transport, and not GSP, so that twice as many as planned would be bought.”

– The expectations are that, at the end of this year or the beginning of next one, the public procurement procedure for three hundred buses and maybe up to fifty trams will be opened, and considering that the trolley electrical network was renewed several years ago, in which nearly EUR 10 million was invested, the procurement of trolleys is also being considered – Sapic said.



The stopping of a recently opened tender for the purchase of new vehicles for GSP and the announcement of a new one is nothing new. In the past years, there have been such situations when bus and trolley purchases were planned. Two and a half years ago, the city stopped the published tender for the purchase of a hundred low-floor articulated buses and then opened a new one, because, as clarified at the time, it had been determined that there was a more favorable way of financing the procurement of these vehicles, that is, that a “green line” of financing had been found. The buses were eventually bought under the other financial model.

A similar thing happened with the tender for the procurement of new trolleys. It was published and carried out and, just when it seemed like Belgrade was to get new trolleys after more than a decade, the procedure was fully stopped and hasn’t been repeated as of today, and the city authorities have started reconsidering whether Belgrade will need trolleys in the future (although plenty has been invested in the past years in the construction and development of the trolley network).

As a reminded, not that long ago, in mid-2021, the city announced that, over the next five years, 500 buses powered by natural gas would be procured (100 each year), as well as 40 trolleys in 2022. The sum of it all over the past two and a half years is that only 100 articulated buses were bought, whereas said published tender for the purchase of not 40, but as many as 80 trolley was stopped in the spring of 2022. The explanation was that the only bid sent was a billion dinars higher than the estimated value of the procurement.

D. A.

Vlada Republike Srbije

Grad Beograd

Sekretarijat za javni prevoz Beograd

JKP GSP Beograd

Government of Serbia

City of Belgrade

Secretariat for Public Transport of the City of Belgrade

PUE GSP Beograd

Aleksandar Šapić

Goran Vesić

public transport

rail vehicles