In the first half of 2026, Poland registered 1,060 electric buses. A year earlier, over the same six months, it had registered 148. Only Italy and the United Kingdom did more. Romania, whose bus fleet is the oldest in the EU, registered 343. Central and Eastern Europe is no longer a follower in bus electrification: in volume terms, parts of it are now leading.
Most of that fleet was paid for with European money: the Recovery and Resilience Facility (Poland's KPO, Romania's PNRR), cohesion funds and national programmes layered on top. The vehicles are new, often built in the region, and highly visible.
What is much less visible is the layer that tells passengers where those buses are, tells dispatchers whether they are on time, and tells the EU's national access points what is actually running. That layer is uneven, often fragmented, and in several countries is only now being funded. With the EU's real-time data obligation landing on 1 December 2028, the gap is about to become a compliance problem.
What the money bought: the verified numbers
- Europe, 2025: 11,607 electric buses above 8 tonnes GVW were registered, up 48% on 2024 (DVV Media Group data, reported by Sustainable Bus). Solaris, the Polish manufacturer, nearly doubled its registrations to 882 units.
- Europe, H1 2026: 8,141 electric buses registered. Poland ranked third (1,060), Romania eighth (343), Lithuania seventeenth (69). The scope excludes trolleybuses.
- Poland, KPO: agreements signed in 2024 fund 902 zero-emission buses and 593 charging or refuelling points, with PLN 2.7 billion from the Recovery and Resilience Facility and grants covering up to 90% of eligible costs (Gramwzielone, January 2025). This largely explains the 2026 registration spike: the buses are being delivered.
- Romania, PNRR: the Ministry of Development reported in September 2026 that 1,147 clean vehicles (buses, trams, trolleybuses and minibuses) had been acquired for local public transport, slightly above the 1,135 target.
Romania is the clearest illustration of a paradox. According to a Ziarul Financiar analysis of ACEA data, 73.6% of new buses registered in Romania in 2025 were electrically chargeable, against an EU average of 23.8%. Yet battery-electric buses made up only 1.4% of the national bus fleet at the end of 2024, and the average bus was 17.8 years old, the highest in the EU. New purchases are electric; the network around them is still largely legacy.
For Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Baltics, consolidated public figures on EU-funded bus volumes are harder to find. Projects exist (IROP-funded e-buses in Czech cities, for example), but no single official tally comparable to the Polish or Romanian ones was available at the time of writing.
The layer that lags: real-time data and AVM
A modern e-bus leaves the factory with a CAN bus, a telematics unit and often a manufacturer portal. None of that automatically produces what a passenger or a regulator needs: a vehicle position matched to a trip in the published timetable, a predicted arrival, a cancellation flag, all in a standard format.
That requires an AVM system (automatic vehicle monitoring) tied to the operator's timetable data, and an export layer: GTFS and GTFS-RT, or NeTEx and SIRI for the EU profiles. In many CEE networks, these pieces were bought separately, at different times, by different entities: displays at stops from one project, onboard computers from another, the ticketing system from a third.
The Bucharest case shows how funding was sliced. A PNRR project approved in October 2022 allocates around EUR 14 million to real-time passenger information at 1,272 stops across the city's six sectors and Ilfov (Club Feroviar). The project funds displays and software at stops. Whether the vehicle data behind them is complete is a separate question.
Fragmentation is the other structural issue. Poland's Ministry of Infrastructure estimates that around 800 entities (operators, transport organisers, station and stop managers) will have to supply data to the future national access point, covering roughly 85,000 stops and 2,700 timetables (CyberDefence24, June 2026). Large urban operators such as Warsaw's MZA or Kraków's MPK have in-house IT teams. Many regional and intercity bus operators, including small private carriers running county services, do not. They are also the ones least likely to have benefited from e-bus programmes, which have focused on urban fleets.
The regulatory clock: 1 December 2028
Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/1926, as amended by Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/490, sets the timetable. For dynamic data on scheduled transport, including "real-time status information, such as estimated departure and arrival times of services, delays, cancellations" and disruptions:
| Network scope | Deadline for dynamic data (Annex point 2.1) |
|---|---|
| Comprehensive TEN-T network | 1 December 2025 |
| Other parts of the Union transport network | 1 December 2028 |
The 2028 date is the one that matters for most urban and regional bus networks. Two points are often misunderstood. First, the regulation requires data to be made accessible through the national access point where it exists in digital machine-readable form; it does not, by itself, oblige an operator to buy an AVM system. Second, in practice, national transposition, public service contracts and passenger expectations are closing that loophole. An authority that has just spent tens of millions on buses will struggle to explain why their positions are not published.
What is already working
The region is not starting from zero, and some of its examples are ahead of Western Europe.
Budapest. BKK has published its timetable in GTFS since 2012 and exposes all three GTFS-RT feeds (vehicle positions, trip updates, service alerts), built on its FUTÁR system. BKK's network runs around 1,900 vehicles on a typical day (MDPI, 2025).
Prague and Central Bohemia. PID publishes GTFS covering Prague and regional lines, plus GTFS-RT and a JSON API (Golemio) with positions and delays of all vehicles on PID lines, including services outside the city.
Czechia nationally. The CIS JŘ national timetable system publishes bus, urban and rail timetables in NeTEx (EPIP profile), updated three times a week. It carries no real-time data, precisely the gap 2028 targets.
Warsaw. The city publishes live tram and bus location APIs, listed on the national open data portal dane.gov.pl. The GTFS feed most widely reused by developers, however, is a community conversion (mkuran.pl) rather than an official publication. Open, but not yet standardised at the source.
Estonia. The national public transport register, maintained by the Transport Administration, publishes a daily-updated GTFS feed covering bus, tram, trolleybus, rail and ferry services across the country, including regional lines.
Bucharest-Ilfov. TPBI, the regional transport authority, launched an open platform (maps.mo-bi.ro) publishing GTFS real-time data with vehicle positions refreshed every five seconds (URBACT, 2025).
Poland nationally. The Ministry of Infrastructure and NASK-PIB are building the KPD MMTIS national access point: PLN 36.3 million, of which PLN 28.93 million from the EU's FERC digital programme, running from 2026 to 2029. The published roadmap puts stops in 2026, timetables in 2027 and real-time data in 2028, with suppliers declaring NeTEx compliance.
The pattern is clear: capitals and national timetable systems are in reasonable shape. The gap sits in medium-sized cities, suburban belts and regional bus services.
E-buses make operational data more important, not less
Electrification adds a constraint diesel fleets never had: whether a given vehicle can complete a given block. Range depends on temperature, load, topography and heating. A study of 40 battery-electric buses in Montreal measured winter consumption at 1.7 kWh/km, 26% higher than in summer, with regenerative braking efficiency falling from 53.4% to 32.2% (Transportation Research Part D, 2025).
Three data flows now matter together: state of charge, actual running times and kilometres from AVM, and the planned block. When a bus is swapped out mid-duty because its battery will not last, the dispatcher needs to know which trip is affected, and the passenger feed needs to reflect it. Without reliable realised data (trips actually operated, real running times by segment and time band, delays, kilometres), there is no factual basis for adjusting blocks, charging windows or timetables, whether by hand or with optimisation tools.
What this means for an operator or a municipality
Use the remaining funding windows for the data layer. The RRF closes in 2026. Cohesion programmes for 2021 to 2027 are still disbursing, and digital lines such as Poland's FERC exist. AVM, passenger information and open-data exports are eligible in many calls; they are simply less visible than vehicles.
Write data requirements into every bus tender. Specify open access to vehicle telematics (including state of charge), compatibility with the operator's AVM, and the obligation for the AVM to export GTFS and GTFS-RT, or NeTEx and SIRI, to the national access point. A bus bought in 2026 will still run in 2038.
Separate the data from the hardware. Proprietary onboard boxes tied to one supplier have been the main source of lock-in. Cloud-based AVM running on standard smartphones or tablets lowers the entry cost for small regional operators, which is where coverage is weakest. Pysae is one example of this approach: a cloud SaaS AVM, mobile-first, with native GTFS-RT export.
Plan backwards from 1 December 2028. Clean static data (stops, timetables, NeTEx or GTFS) is the prerequisite for any real-time feed. Networks that have not audited their stop and trip data by 2027 will not make the deadline.
FAQ
Is AVM mandatory under EU Regulation 2024/490?
No. The regulation requires dynamic data, such as delays and cancellations, to be made accessible through the national access point where it exists in machine-readable form, by 1 December 2028 outside the comprehensive TEN-T network. In practice, contracts and national rules increasingly make it expected.
Which CEE countries publish real-time bus data today?
There is no complete public inventory. Verified examples include Budapest (BKK, full GTFS-RT), Prague and Central Bohemia (PID), Warsaw (city location API) and Bucharest-Ilfov (TPBI). Coverage outside large cities is much thinner.
Can new e-buses supply AVM data on their own?
Only partly. Manufacturer telematics provides position and state of charge, but AVM also requires matching each vehicle to a trip in the timetable, handling cancellations and exporting standard feeds. That link is what passenger information and national access points depend on.
Sources: Sustainable Bus (DVV Media Group European Bus Data, 2025 and H1 2026); Gramwzielone.pl (KPO zero-emission bus agreements, January 2025); Newmoney.ro and Romanian Ministry of Development (PNRR clean vehicles, September 2026); Ziarul Financiar (analysis of ACEA bus data, 2025); Club Feroviar (Bucharest PNRR passenger information project); EUR-Lex, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/490; Polish Ministry of Infrastructure, KPD MMTIS project page; CyberDefence24 (KPD MMTIS roadmap, June 2026); CIS JŘ NeTEx publication note; PID Opendata; MDPI ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. (BKK GTFS and GTFS-RT, 2025); University of Tartu IMO (Estonian Public Transport Register); dane.gov.pl (Warsaw vehicle location API); mkuran.pl (Warsaw GTFS); URBACT (TPBI real-time platform, 2025); Transportation Research Part D (BEB cold-weather energy consumption, 2025).
Before publishing: add the Banana Pro cover; double-check the Romanian ACEA figures (73.6%, 1.4%, 17.8 years, via Ziarul Financiar) and the Bucharest EUR 14M / 1,272 stops figure (single source: Club Feroviar).