Yerevan will switch to all-electric buses, buying only electric from its next purchase onward, and will start building a network of dedicated lanes for public transport this year, as the capital confronts congestion the Prime Minister called a crisis a year ago, reports Zartonk Media.
Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan instructed the city’s Transport Department to announce its next bus purchase tender exclusively for electric buses, and said the capital will extend the operating hours of its electric transport. He spoke at City Hall’s regular executive session on Monday, October 26.
Avinyan said the overall mobility of public transport in Yerevan must increase by 30 percent by 2030, a target he defined as a 30 percent reduction in the average time public transport spends servicing its route. He called it a very realistic task. Electric transport, which currently stops running between 8:30 and 9 p.m., will run until 11 p.m. or midnight.
“I think it’s time we fully switched to electric buses,” Avinyan said. “This means our transport department must announce the next tender exclusively for purchasing electric buses.” He said the Higer buses are the next vehicles the city needs to replace.
Avinyan tied the changes to the number of cars on Yerevan’s streets. “The increasing number of passenger cars creates a problem for the work of our public transport,” he said. “There must be at least one reliable method of moving around the city, and that one method must be public transport.”
He rejected road widening as a solution. “Our roads, excuse me, are not made of rubber, they cannot keep widening indefinitely,” Avinyan said. “Even if they widen, science also says that even more cars will appear on those widened roads. That is why this is the path we must take.”
Avinyan said the same priority applies to residents who can afford to drive. “We must give priority to public transport, and we must have a situation where even wealthy people consider that the most convenient means of transport for them is public transport,” he said. “The day when people who have enough income to buy one, two, even three cars will consider that the most convenient option for moving around this city is public transport.”
Avinyan said the city’s analysis favors dedicated lanes over a larger fleet. Recent data shows that 25 buses running a route in mixed traffic are less efficient than 15 buses on a dedicated lane, he said, and the advantage shows up in frequency, reliability and speed.
“The dedicated lane gives our bus network a significant advantage,” he said. He added that bicycle lanes should be combined with the bus lanes everywhere, either within the dedicated lane or in the general traffic flow.
Avinyan asked Deputy Mayor Suren Grigoryan to present the phased plan for the lanes this year, and said implementation begins in the same period. The first lane will be separated on the right side of the road with cameras installed, followed by a second and a third. If analysis later shows the streets themselves need rebuilding, he said, the city will carry out deeper infrastructure work and move the bus lane from the right side into the center of the road.
Yerevan’s congestion has been a stated government priority for a year. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told a Cabinet meeting in October 2025 that the capital’s traffic had reached a crisis point, saying he had seen the center so congested the previous evening that “you couldn’t even get through on a bicycle,” and ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure and City Hall to form a crisis team. In June, Avinyan told lawmakers that the main cause is economic growth and the rise in car ownership that came with it, and that buses and lanes alone will not be enough without restrictions on private cars.
An interdepartmental commission on traffic, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Khachatryan, met in December 2025 and an action plan was due in early 2026. City Hall’s own pilot study of vehicle flows into the city was due to report between September and October. Neither has been presented publicly yet.
