What about streetcars interfering with the normal flow of traffic. In Boston part of the Arborway line was abandoned due to the fact that the right of way was a 2 lane city street…where streetcars had there own Right of way they survived.
In most places those trolley buses have also been replaced by buses with internal combustion engines. Toronto may have some. I can’t think of a US city that does but maybe someone knows about such cities.
Dayton OH Seattle,Boston, San Fran.
Thank you, Bonas.
I should have known about Boston because I go there now and again. The other cities I’m not familiar with.
John
Dayton has the oldest system in place and have voted to expand, Seattle has a bus tunnel and so does boston for short way at harvard sq tha require the use of trolley buses and San Fran is part of there Muni system. Toronto abandoned theres in the late 1990s,
Seattle’s bus tunnel does not use trolleybuses at the present time. The consultants insisted that the new light rail system that shares the tunnel be 1500 volts, and so the current buses are hybrid battery-diesels, that use the diesel very sparingly in the tunnel and rely on battery power for acceleration. But the rest of the torlleybus system has expanded, with the Ballard line the most recent conversion. Boston has really two isolated systems, one from Watertown and Waverly to Harvard Square, Cambrdge (full service) and then to North Cambridge on Massachusettes Avenue (sometime service). The other is the line from Logan Airport to South Station which had dual-mode electric and diesel articulated buses and uses the electric mode in the tunnel on the Boston side, but not in the regular vehicular tunnel under the harbor shared with regular traffic.
Dayton seems to have trolley buses.
Stilll does. So: Dayton, San Francisco, Cambridge and Boston, and Seattle
Question: Why is that in-street streetcar routes in Europe don’t seem to present a traffic-interference problem (beyond what buses cause) than we seem to think they would here? Auto traffic there is quite heavy.
One of our European friends could probably answer this better than I can, but I suppose the easiest answer is that unlike here in the US the streetcar lines never went away, so, auto and bus traffic in Europe has had to adapt itself to the existing city streetcar lines. Here in the US we’d be reinventing the wheel, for lack of a better term, and streetcars would have to adapt themselves to car and bus traffic. A sticky situation with no easy answers.
The automobile is not KING in Europe, in general. Transit passengers are just or even more important. Ditto in Toronto and now in San Francisco.
For those who do not believe that utility relocation is a problem. ---- Atlanta reports that tey have to deal with 13 different utility companies some which are not readioly accessible.