SIEMENS

From the top floor of the brand-new 60-meter- high Swedbank building, Lithuania’s second-largest bank, CEO Antanas Danys has a spectacular view of Vilnius’ historic city center. Magnificent Baroque, Renaissance, and Gothic buildings form a historic ensemble that is unmatched in Europe. It’s beautiful, but not very practical for Swedbank, whose 800 employees used to be scattered among ten different locations - but now all of them work in the most modern building in Lithuania’s capital city.

Architect Audrius Ambrasas has designed a workplace that values transparency, with glass offices and conference rooms that seem to float between the building’s floors, as well as a huge lobby with a bistro. But there’s also plenty to smile about when it comes to costs. Siemens building technology regulates the building’s air conditioning and ventilation system, with sensors measuring the temperature and the air’s CO₂ content. If values are too high, parts of the glass facade open up automatically to let in fresh breezes from the Neris River. This has decreased power costs by a fourth, even though the office space is now 20 percent bigger than before.

Lithuania has many advantages for business. Its people are highly educated. Although the country has a population of only 3.4 million, it boasts 49 institutions of higher education, including 15 universities. Vilnius, which has 550,000 inhabitants, occupies 13th place on the European Green City Index (see p. 17) - the highest rating of all the Eastern European cities on the Index. There are many reasons for that. A city ordinance protects its surrounding forest, extensive parks and plantings. Several international hotel chains have opened branches in Vilnius. Many of them use Siemens building technologies. Traffic is strictly managed. "Our historic city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its narrow alleys are not suited for motorized traffic," says Vilnius’ mayor, Vilius Navickas. One-way streets and pedestrian zones keep drivers out of the city center. However, the number of private cars has increased about fourfold since the country gained independence in 1990. This has caused traffic jams around the city center and a relatively high level of CO₂ emissions.

The city’s environmentally-oriented traffic management strategy has a number of components, including smart traffic management. Here, a Siemens system uses loop & video detectors at some 200 intersections to measure traffic density and adjust traffic lights accordingly. "On average, this saves drivers about 30 percent of driving time and ten percent of fuel," says Kestutis Ciplys, who is in charge of the Siemens traffic management system in Vilnius. The traffic lights use ultramodern LEDs that need only one fifth of the energy required by their predecessors.

The city also intends to expand its ring roads and keep the historic city center as free of traffic as possible through tolls and stringent parking space management. Although plans for a subway or streetcar system are far from fulfillment due to the financial crisis, 60 buses of the local transit company already run on environmentally-friendly natural gas, and 100 additional buses will be converted this year. Freight traffic also plays a major role in Lithuania, and Vilnius is a major hubs.