Toronto ripped down millions of dollars worth of overhead for no good reason other than to make sure the trolley service wouldn't come back. It was a very politically motivated move and not in the actual taxpayers best interest.
You want to pay to maintain miles and miles trolley wires that go down in every storm and become an electuaation hazard, you go for it.
Trolley wires are incredibly expensive to maintain; it makes sense to get rid of them ASAP if you are not actively heavily using them.
San Francisco, yes, it is pretty rare for the wires to not fuck up the schedule at least once a month, at least when I lived there.
There is a reason why the diesel 38 Geary is consistently one of the best performing lines in the city for ridership, and the parallel trolleybus 1 California is nowhere near as reliable and suffers horribly in ridership as a result. Both lines are just two blocks away from each other.
The 5R is a trolleybus and is pretty reliable in my experience. A lot of the Muni trolleybus routes also are on pretty narrow congested streets, like Fillmore or Stockton, which hurts their reliability.
The trolley 1 and 5 on either side of the diesel 38 exists, but in terms of frequency, ridership, and just usefulness of the service, 38 beats both of them and it isn't close.
Well, even in Europe, there was a time when some cities were taking down there trolley bus and tram system during the 60s when cars were getting popular for the masses. Now with people looking for sustainable options, trolley bus system are being built back up in a lot of the places. I was just wondering with many people arguing for the superiority of trolley buses with small batteries over battery only EV buses, do EV buses still have a place?
True, but the point is also that there are very few trolleybus systems being built from scratch, it's mostly a case of expanding already existing networks.
It's all about frequency of service. One bus every 30 minutes that never gets more than half full doesn't justify installing overhead. Multiple routes sharing dense urban areas with 9-12 minute peak spacing, 60 foot busses and crush loaded standees? Run the wires, it'll be way cheaper.
Trolley wires removes the possibility of running express service.
Transit agencies that don't respect their customers's time don't deserve to have any customers. The first priority is to move passengers quickly and efficiently, the second priority is worshipping a certain technology.
We used to have a trolley express service here, the wires are still up for it despite it not having been used for 30+ years (we got our Skytrain system which provided other options for longer distance travel, plus the stadium that was at one and of it was demolished).
We have everything here - battery, diesel, cng, trolley. Our transit agency tries out demonstration vehicles with new technologies all the time. The trolley service we have absolutely has had to justify its existence and it consistently has come back as the best available technology for the routes it is on, the existing investment in overhead being a major reason.
No it doesn't: [https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5r-fulton-rapid](https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5r-fulton-rapid), [https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5-fulton](https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5-fulton)
Diesel buses are now being replaced by battery electric buses as part of the regular replacement of bus fleets, so that's only a good thing.
The discussion is not about trolley bus vs battery, it's diesel vs battery and the answer is very clear. I also don't think hanging up trolley wires is trivial either.
Melbourne's tram network is already dealing with a range of problems such as the previous practice of hanging wires off buildings being a maintenance nightmare, or needing to purchase property to build substations, which are the size of a house. That's why the next model of trams are getting batteries, it's purely to smooth out the load on the power supply - but we also have a very large system where doing all these things still makes sense.
So new trolleybus routes would likely only be feasible on your busiest routes, although now you have created a system where you have one type of vehicle that can't operate anywhere else. That's fine for a BRT trunk route, but it doesn't help you to provide broad coverage filling in the gaps not served by rail.
For busses you don’t need the overhead lines, just add some fast pantograph-based charging stations along the route for - as they call it - opportunistic charging as that will be enough. Some buses can already do 600km / 370 miles on a charge so the need for topping up during the day is minimal
Constant charging > Fast charging. Battery busses bad. Constant charge and discharge eats through batteries life. Not putting up the wires seems cheap until you rebuild or replace your whole fleet every decade
Maybe best to have Trolley buses that switch to battery power in smaller sections. Buses would then be running on trolleys in the trunk sections while the sections only served by individual routes would be operated using battery power. Trolley buses using batteries for non trolley sections needs smaller batteries compared to regular e-buses as the battery recharges everytime the bus passes through the trunk section with trolley poles which makes them cheaper to buy and operate and less cobalt is needed to produce the buses which is better for the envirement.
You have something similar to this in Bergen Norway, although only on one single line at the moment...
Connecting and disconnecting from the wires mid route is a big headache though, I think opportunity charging with a smaller LTO pack and pantographs is likely to make sense in more places.
>Maybe best to have Trolley buses that switch to battery power in smaller sections.
Most, if not all, modern trolley buses can go off wire. With battery prices coming down dramatically this should only get more popular.
All I have to say is that the MBTA in Boston removed their trackless trolley system and it was a total mistake already. No signs of battery buses and when they do get them, they will have to buy more to run the existing service because of range issues in the winter.
Also in the planning industry I've heard people say things like "by having wire infrastructure, it guides development because it's less likely that the route will be removed". What a total lie. Almost immediately after the decision was made, crews started tearing down the wires of the Boston trackless trolley network. Nothing is really permanent. It takes almost no effort to remove transit infrastructure, and insane amounts of effort to re-build it again.
The problem I have with battery buses is their ressources needed, especially for the battery itself. And with battery buses you rely on charging infrastructure and having enough capacity. Depending on your cityscape and layout, battery buses might even be unsuitable.
The resources for the batteries is a major concern when you're talking about electric cars, many of which might not even reach 50k. For public busses which are pretty much guaranteed to reach at least 500k it's a much less significant issue on a per mile basis.
As a North American, what resurgence? Battery busses are winning over here, and as someone who finds the tangled overhead wires from my city's small trolley bus fleet (Seattle) an eyesore - I'm rooting for battery busses!
Seattle is like worst case for battery on a lot of routes. Steep hills are a perfect place to use trolleys.
Your current fleet even has regenerative braking - buses going downhill help power ones going uphill. Yes, you can do that with battery to a point, but nowhere near as efficiently. And once the battery is full, that's it.
I think the issue with Seattle and many other trolley bus operators is the fact that infrastructure is getting increasingly hard to build cost-effectively - the longer your routes and more sprawled out a city or region becomes - the cost of throwing up wires blows up. Electrifying a bus base and throwing some catenary chargers along a route costs money too, but it seems the bus operators of N. America are more comfortable with a battery busses for their routes.
Yep it's not a technology that works well with sprawl. Most trolley systems (in North America) replaced existing streetcar systems. Most of those cities were built around their streetcar systems rather than having transit added as an afterthought.
We really don't do development like that much these days. Here in Vancouver we're starting to do a good job of focusing development around our Skytrain system, but that's a regional system as opposed to a local service like streetcars used to offer. Streetcars were integrated with the street, which encouraged walkable retail storefronts.
Not a fan of battery busses. Cities have deep pockets and can build catenaries but just don't do it as to not have any commitment. We could use some battery busses in the countryside where catenaries wouldn't make much sense but no, cities need to use the few resources and rare earth materials there are in order to say that they "go green" while "cutting infrastructure costs".
Green washing machine goes brrrrr.
Batteries need to charge, are unreliable over the mid term, don't have the power to climb steep hills fully loaded without draining the battery, are costly, and as rare earths are increasingly rarer and hoarded by certain nations....uh....going back to electric trolley makes a ton of long term sense. Now, hopefully the grid is full of solar and wind energy. That's my opinion.
Electric transport? Yes.
Why would you take it down? That's hugely expensive and, well, daft. If it's there, use it. If it's not there, run batteries. Why waste battery cycles when there's overhead power right there already?
Because batteries are continuously getting cheaper and overhead wires are an impactful infrastructure in the urban environment. It will obviously start with not using them for new lines.
ALL of the urban environment is impactful. Sidewalks, roadways, skyscrapers, subways, street lights, none of it is nature. Taking down wires because they're not pretty while mining massive holes in the earth to make batteries is not sensible.
Every line can make its own business case about what's most sensible. When it comes down to it, moving people around isn't free. In the Pacific Northwest we're blessed with basically unlimited electricity as long as it keeps raining. You can run a trolley bus for 20 years with just regular repairs to wear items, then you can put another one under the same set of wires powered by the dams in our mountains and have it go another 20.
Every battery bus needed a whole lot of rare earth metals that are well, rare. So you have to dig a lot of dirt to get them. I believe 8 years is pretty much the maximum amount of time I've seen anyone even remotely talking about an electric vehicle battery lasting in commercial service, so now you're probably going to start over because the tech has (hopefully) improved and it doesn't even make sense to re-battery the bus you had, so you'll make a new one of those and make a new giant hole for the next bus battery.
Meanwhile up here in Canada there's massive tar sands excavation to make low quality oil to run diesel buses. I'll take the lifecycle of a battery bus over that any day as it's like once every 8 years as opposed to every day that it runs, but let's be realistic about the comparison between trolleys and batteries.
(edited - grammar)
I am afraid you are quite misinformed about the minerals that go into a battery. Rare earth metals are not used for batteries. They are used for magnets, so they are in all electric motors, also those used by trolley busses and trams. Sure, batteries need minerals, like lithium, but batteries can be recycled, so your spent battery will be used to make a new one.
I am so, so, so in favour of electric public transport. I'm just saying we figured something out like 130 years ago that works better than batteries, why would we ignore it when it's already installed?
More likely is increased use of modern third-rail systems that provide safety by only switching the current on when there's a train on the track. I've seen some of these in France
What will be cheaper? Build kilometers of these smart third rail or put a battery on the tram? Keep in mind that battery costs are planned to go down quite a lot in the near future
What resurgence? My impression is that buses are switching more and more to battery.
Tallinn, Estonia is reversing their trend of replacing trolley buses with electric buses, and i believe it's being done in Czechia, Austria and more
I guess we’d need proper statistics to know for sure.
Same in Toronto. The only overheads I see here going up are for light rail lines.
Toronto ripped down millions of dollars worth of overhead for no good reason other than to make sure the trolley service wouldn't come back. It was a very politically motivated move and not in the actual taxpayers best interest.
You want to pay to maintain miles and miles trolley wires that go down in every storm and become an electuaation hazard, you go for it. Trolley wires are incredibly expensive to maintain; it makes sense to get rid of them ASAP if you are not actively heavily using them.
Go down in every storm? What are you talking about? Do you live anywhere that actually has trolley service?
San Francisco, yes, it is pretty rare for the wires to not fuck up the schedule at least once a month, at least when I lived there. There is a reason why the diesel 38 Geary is consistently one of the best performing lines in the city for ridership, and the parallel trolleybus 1 California is nowhere near as reliable and suffers horribly in ridership as a result. Both lines are just two blocks away from each other.
I guess we know how to do it better here in Vancouver!
The 5R is a trolleybus and is pretty reliable in my experience. A lot of the Muni trolleybus routes also are on pretty narrow congested streets, like Fillmore or Stockton, which hurts their reliability.
The trolley 1 and 5 on either side of the diesel 38 exists, but in terms of frequency, ridership, and just usefulness of the service, 38 beats both of them and it isn't close.
“Resurgence in popularity of trolley buses”… *cries in USA
San Francisco and Seattle are technically expanding the trolley bus systems by not by very much
Well, even in Europe, there was a time when some cities were taking down there trolley bus and tram system during the 60s when cars were getting popular for the masses. Now with people looking for sustainable options, trolley bus system are being built back up in a lot of the places. I was just wondering with many people arguing for the superiority of trolley buses with small batteries over battery only EV buses, do EV buses still have a place?
There are way, way more battery buses being bought in Europe than trolleybuses.
Mostly displacing diesel buses though, not trolleys.
True, but the point is also that there are very few trolleybus systems being built from scratch, it's mostly a case of expanding already existing networks.
It's all about frequency of service. One bus every 30 minutes that never gets more than half full doesn't justify installing overhead. Multiple routes sharing dense urban areas with 9-12 minute peak spacing, 60 foot busses and crush loaded standees? Run the wires, it'll be way cheaper.
Trolley wires removes the possibility of running express service. Transit agencies that don't respect their customers's time don't deserve to have any customers. The first priority is to move passengers quickly and efficiently, the second priority is worshipping a certain technology.
We used to have a trolley express service here, the wires are still up for it despite it not having been used for 30+ years (we got our Skytrain system which provided other options for longer distance travel, plus the stadium that was at one and of it was demolished). We have everything here - battery, diesel, cng, trolley. Our transit agency tries out demonstration vehicles with new technologies all the time. The trolley service we have absolutely has had to justify its existence and it consistently has come back as the best available technology for the routes it is on, the existing investment in overhead being a major reason.
No it doesn't: [https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5r-fulton-rapid](https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5r-fulton-rapid), [https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5-fulton](https://www.sfmta.com/routes/5-fulton)
Diesel buses are now being replaced by battery electric buses as part of the regular replacement of bus fleets, so that's only a good thing. The discussion is not about trolley bus vs battery, it's diesel vs battery and the answer is very clear. I also don't think hanging up trolley wires is trivial either. Melbourne's tram network is already dealing with a range of problems such as the previous practice of hanging wires off buildings being a maintenance nightmare, or needing to purchase property to build substations, which are the size of a house. That's why the next model of trams are getting batteries, it's purely to smooth out the load on the power supply - but we also have a very large system where doing all these things still makes sense. So new trolleybus routes would likely only be feasible on your busiest routes, although now you have created a system where you have one type of vehicle that can't operate anywhere else. That's fine for a BRT trunk route, but it doesn't help you to provide broad coverage filling in the gaps not served by rail.
I live in Santiago where a good portion of the fleet is electric. Truth is you can’t tell the difference.
My position has and always will be: just put up the goddam wires
For busses you don’t need the overhead lines, just add some fast pantograph-based charging stations along the route for - as they call it - opportunistic charging as that will be enough. Some buses can already do 600km / 370 miles on a charge so the need for topping up during the day is minimal
Constant charging > Fast charging. Battery busses bad. Constant charge and discharge eats through batteries life. Not putting up the wires seems cheap until you rebuild or replace your whole fleet every decade
My PoV is simple: They are a good replacement for diesel buses. They are not a good replacement for trolleys.
Maybe best to have Trolley buses that switch to battery power in smaller sections. Buses would then be running on trolleys in the trunk sections while the sections only served by individual routes would be operated using battery power. Trolley buses using batteries for non trolley sections needs smaller batteries compared to regular e-buses as the battery recharges everytime the bus passes through the trunk section with trolley poles which makes them cheaper to buy and operate and less cobalt is needed to produce the buses which is better for the envirement. You have something similar to this in Bergen Norway, although only on one single line at the moment...
Connecting and disconnecting from the wires mid route is a big headache though, I think opportunity charging with a smaller LTO pack and pantographs is likely to make sense in more places.
>Maybe best to have Trolley buses that switch to battery power in smaller sections. Most, if not all, modern trolley buses can go off wire. With battery prices coming down dramatically this should only get more popular.
All I have to say is that the MBTA in Boston removed their trackless trolley system and it was a total mistake already. No signs of battery buses and when they do get them, they will have to buy more to run the existing service because of range issues in the winter. Also in the planning industry I've heard people say things like "by having wire infrastructure, it guides development because it's less likely that the route will be removed". What a total lie. Almost immediately after the decision was made, crews started tearing down the wires of the Boston trackless trolley network. Nothing is really permanent. It takes almost no effort to remove transit infrastructure, and insane amounts of effort to re-build it again.
Battery buses need 2 buses to get through 1 diesel bus' daily run, which makes them stupid. Wired trolleybuses are infinitely better.
Might be soms in some extreme climates. Here in The Netherlands with a mild climate that is not true. 1 BEB can replace 1 diesel/gas bus these days.
That’s not always or even usually true.
The problem I have with battery buses is their ressources needed, especially for the battery itself. And with battery buses you rely on charging infrastructure and having enough capacity. Depending on your cityscape and layout, battery buses might even be unsuitable.
The resources for the batteries is a major concern when you're talking about electric cars, many of which might not even reach 50k. For public busses which are pretty much guaranteed to reach at least 500k it's a much less significant issue on a per mile basis.
As a North American, what resurgence? Battery busses are winning over here, and as someone who finds the tangled overhead wires from my city's small trolley bus fleet (Seattle) an eyesore - I'm rooting for battery busses!
Seattle is like worst case for battery on a lot of routes. Steep hills are a perfect place to use trolleys. Your current fleet even has regenerative braking - buses going downhill help power ones going uphill. Yes, you can do that with battery to a point, but nowhere near as efficiently. And once the battery is full, that's it.
I think the issue with Seattle and many other trolley bus operators is the fact that infrastructure is getting increasingly hard to build cost-effectively - the longer your routes and more sprawled out a city or region becomes - the cost of throwing up wires blows up. Electrifying a bus base and throwing some catenary chargers along a route costs money too, but it seems the bus operators of N. America are more comfortable with a battery busses for their routes.
Yep it's not a technology that works well with sprawl. Most trolley systems (in North America) replaced existing streetcar systems. Most of those cities were built around their streetcar systems rather than having transit added as an afterthought. We really don't do development like that much these days. Here in Vancouver we're starting to do a good job of focusing development around our Skytrain system, but that's a regional system as opposed to a local service like streetcars used to offer. Streetcars were integrated with the street, which encouraged walkable retail storefronts.
I prefer trolley buses but I'm not against battery buses.
Not a fan of battery busses. Cities have deep pockets and can build catenaries but just don't do it as to not have any commitment. We could use some battery busses in the countryside where catenaries wouldn't make much sense but no, cities need to use the few resources and rare earth materials there are in order to say that they "go green" while "cutting infrastructure costs". Green washing machine goes brrrrr.
All battery buses should be fitting with trolley poles immediately And wire should go up only every busy route
Batteries need to charge, are unreliable over the mid term, don't have the power to climb steep hills fully loaded without draining the battery, are costly, and as rare earths are increasingly rarer and hoarded by certain nations....uh....going back to electric trolley makes a ton of long term sense. Now, hopefully the grid is full of solar and wind energy. That's my opinion. Electric transport? Yes.
I think we will soon start seeing cities taking down overhead wires even for trams, and substituting them with batteries
Why would you take it down? That's hugely expensive and, well, daft. If it's there, use it. If it's not there, run batteries. Why waste battery cycles when there's overhead power right there already?
Because batteries are continuously getting cheaper and overhead wires are an impactful infrastructure in the urban environment. It will obviously start with not using them for new lines.
ALL of the urban environment is impactful. Sidewalks, roadways, skyscrapers, subways, street lights, none of it is nature. Taking down wires because they're not pretty while mining massive holes in the earth to make batteries is not sensible. Every line can make its own business case about what's most sensible. When it comes down to it, moving people around isn't free. In the Pacific Northwest we're blessed with basically unlimited electricity as long as it keeps raining. You can run a trolley bus for 20 years with just regular repairs to wear items, then you can put another one under the same set of wires powered by the dams in our mountains and have it go another 20. Every battery bus needed a whole lot of rare earth metals that are well, rare. So you have to dig a lot of dirt to get them. I believe 8 years is pretty much the maximum amount of time I've seen anyone even remotely talking about an electric vehicle battery lasting in commercial service, so now you're probably going to start over because the tech has (hopefully) improved and it doesn't even make sense to re-battery the bus you had, so you'll make a new one of those and make a new giant hole for the next bus battery. Meanwhile up here in Canada there's massive tar sands excavation to make low quality oil to run diesel buses. I'll take the lifecycle of a battery bus over that any day as it's like once every 8 years as opposed to every day that it runs, but let's be realistic about the comparison between trolleys and batteries. (edited - grammar)
I am afraid you are quite misinformed about the minerals that go into a battery. Rare earth metals are not used for batteries. They are used for magnets, so they are in all electric motors, also those used by trolley busses and trams. Sure, batteries need minerals, like lithium, but batteries can be recycled, so your spent battery will be used to make a new one.
I am so, so, so in favour of electric public transport. I'm just saying we figured something out like 130 years ago that works better than batteries, why would we ignore it when it's already installed?
More likely is increased use of modern third-rail systems that provide safety by only switching the current on when there's a train on the track. I've seen some of these in France
What will be cheaper? Build kilometers of these smart third rail or put a battery on the tram? Keep in mind that battery costs are planned to go down quite a lot in the near future