Dayton OH and Seattle WA are the only metro areas that have installed or rebuilt there trolley buses lines. Dayton is rebuilding and buying new buses and seattle uses theres in a tunnel underground. Phili had taken there system down in the last 2 years and hamilton and toronto in the last 10. Trolleybuses however are common sights in european citys as adjucts to there extensive light rail system.
A number have been proposed in bus rapid transit sceams but planners have gone with hybrid buses instead. hybrid being Natrual gas or diesal electric power. The problem that I see with hybrids is that they still use carbon based fuel instead of hydro or nuke. Trolleybuses have a tendacy to last almost as long as trolley cars. Dayton Oh has had some buses that are 40 years old and running just fine.
Internal combustion engines have a limted shelf life and Iimagine we will discover that the complicated electronics in gas/electric hybrids will corrode over time in salt and other elements.
What I am proposing here is that trolley buses have these uses
1.Short loop runs in downtown areas or in a large university campus to reduce polution particaly Deisal Partical polution or DPP.
Long inner city runs that have a bus every 10- 15 min or crosstown runs that service is frequent enough to justify the cost of catanary.
3.Bus rapid transit-electrct buses reduce noise along right of way
4.Downtown portions of runs-Hybrid buses would have trolley poles that would go up in the city and go down in the suburbs. The layout of highrise office buildings in places like Pittsburgh and LA traps partical polution in the canyons that are created by high-rises
G’Day, Y’all, If Atlanta and Georgia’s bought and paid for by the road lobby politicians had their way, that is what the new Atlanta Beltline will have despite the fact that rail is already in place. If transit could afford to buy a few honest politicians we wouldn’t have to worry about rubber tires on cement. But our wonderful governor, Cement Sonny Purdue, is as beholden to the interests as any of our politicians.
One of the biggest problems is you are limited to fixed routes, as with rail. That means if ridership changes, you cannot adapt. Also they are limited in manueverability, so if there is something in the way (traffic accident or street repairs) they cannot get around it. There are many good reasons why there aren’t more.
Actulay after riding trolley buses in Dayton OH I had found them quite manuruvble…
Todays trolleybuses have battery packs that can power them short distances off the wire…
most major citys have bus routes that have been busy for years and have well establiseh patterns of travel----usaly such runs have low route numbers like 1-6
Right, if you read th elink to the SFmuni site, they talk about this. The busses can go off power for some distance. San Fran only uses them on major routes. There are some routes that just are never going to lose their ridership. San Fran and Seattle also both have a lot of steep roads where rail trolleys wouldn’t work. Cable cars would, but the infrastructure is ridiculous.
When I was 10 years old, my friends and I met at each other’s houses to operate model trains and talk about how rail was the only civilized mode and how anything involving rubber tires and concrete was the result of a vast automotive conspiracy. These days I ride whatever mode of transit – bus, trains – is available and try to ask questions about the advantages and disadvantages and proper application of each mode. Even the vaunted Amtrak California uses buses as connector service to the trains, and I have heard good things from train riders about how well buses are integrated into the service.
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz of the City of Madison is advocating streetcar rail for the downtown, and Hizzonner had to explain to me the distinctions between streetcar rail and light rail of which I wasn’t clear on.
Why streetcars? The modern generation of articulated streetcar (like the Skoda T-10 used in Portland and other places in the U.S.) has more revenue space than a non-articulated bus, and it has a center section with an ultra-low floor for easy boarding of everything from persons in wheel chairs to bikes to baby strollers and shopping carts. The electric propulsion gives a smoother ride with more acceleration without the noise and smoke of a Diesel bus. The fixed route of rail is seen as an advantage to developers building high-value high-density condos in the downtown area with a minimum of parking to add traffic congestion in proximity to the line. Bus lines are seen as things that get moved or taken away, and a bus line apparently doesn’t have the same cachet as streetcar to purchasers of those condos. Streetcars are observed empirically to boost ridership, perhaps because of the improved comfort and amenities of streetcars over buses, perhaps b
Ummm, what IS the distinction between streetcars and light rail? I just thought that streetcars were literal trolley (pole) cars, and light-rail uses the more modern pantograph, Western-Europe style. Pittsburgh, PA, has a light-rail system but it evolved out of a streetcar system.
Good question. Portland’s “streetcar” design is mentioned, but Portland’s Trimet is considered a Light Rail system. I does have street running in downtown Portland and in Hillsboro.
Light rail goes longer distances at higher speeds, turns corners at larger radius, and may cover part of its route on a separate right-of-way. What makes light rail “light” is that it is not FRA-compliant and has to run separately from freight trains. Heavy rail is supposed to be subway trains and the like, often electric powered, differentiated from commuter rail – gallery cars and the like. Some subway operations (Boston) use light-rail cars, and the CTA cars have a streetcar heritage.
Streetcar is much lower speed, mixing with auto and pedestrian (and even bike traffic according to Portland) and of more limited range or serving as a circulator. The streetcar/light rail could be like the old streetcar/interurban distinction, but interurbans seemed like heavier vehicles, and streetcar lines back in the day went considerable distances, so I guess the streetcar/light rail distinction is whatever people pushing these systems call for.
As to having apoplexy about guided rubber-tire trams, are we to have cardiac arrest over the Paris or Montreal rubber-tire subway? Yes, I admit that those wheezy Diesel buses that look like an old trolley car are a poor excuse for real antique trolleys like in Memphis along the river front, but beyond that are we going to get all huffy about the Disneyland Alweg Monorail or some of the airport trams because they are rubber-tired?
Here’s another little wrinkle. Part of the Trimet was built on the old Oregon elecric. Portland & Western/Wilamette & Pacific run frieght on a very short portion of the line which means they per definition are violating FRA rules. granted, the frieght doesn’t run during the day. Further, The New Line from Escondido California to Oceanside in San Diego county use DMU cars which are not considered heavy freight. Yet that line still supports a couple freight trains a week.
Per the Wikipedia article on Light Rail, it’s just a modern word meaning street car or Trolley.
What I don’t understand is how subways and Chicago’s elevated rate as heavy.
I heard a news blurb recently that explained that Minneapolis/St. Paul was looking into building a street car system. The former system was ripped up in the 1950’s by a corrupt local politician in kahoots with the bus company.
Heavy rail (metro, subway, rapid transit, or rapid rail) is an electric railway with the capacity for a heavy volume of traffic. It is characterized by high speed and rapid acceleration passenger rail cars operating singly or in multi-car trains on fixed rails; separate rights-of-way from which all other vehicular and foot traffic are excluded; sophisticated signaling, and high platform loading. If the service were converted to full automation with no onboard personnel, the service would be considered an automated guideway.
Light rail (streetcar, tramway, or trolley) is lightweight passenger rail cars operating singly (or in short, usually two-car, trains) on fixed rails in right-of-way that is not separated from other traffic for much of the way. Light rail vehicles are typically driven electrically with power being drawn from an overhead electric line via a trolley or a pantograph.
During WWII on Young Street in Toronto and St. Catherine’s St. in Montreal, ordinary streetcar lines carried loads that would be thought impossible today. Neither city had subways. Big, two-man Peter Witt streetcars seating 50 and standing 150 hauled center-door trailersm doubling the capacity, with about a one-minute headway on YOung Streeet. 400 people every minute works out to 24000 people past a given point during an hour. On St. Catheran’s Street in Montreal there was an better show. Six or seven large two-man heavyweight singles crossing the interesections with each light cycle, almost like coupled in trains but just running singly with each “Gard du Moteur” knowing just that in front of him and behind him, the others were notching up the same way. Each of these cars could handle about 250 people, rear entrance with triple-wide doors for fast loading and conductor seated between the back platform and the interior for rear entrance. So 1500 people every two minutes works out to 45,000 per hour. Yet the theoretical maxium for an on-street streetcar line is usually given at 12,000 per hour. Buses are about 8,000, even articulateds and there is no difference between trolleybuses and diesel in capacity. Dedicated rights of way can improve both streetcars and buses, of course.
The newest trolleybus lines in North America, as far as I know, are the Ballard extension in Seattle, compensated by the use of hybrids without trolley pickup in the tunnel, battery acceleration isntead, and the South Station portion of the Boston’s Silver Line, with dual-service buses running on wire in subway and diesel on the surface and through the Sumner Tunnel to Logan Airport. The small system in Cambridge, MA, based on the bus tunnel at the Harvard Square Red Line station, still carries on (3 or 4 routes, depending on how you count them), so in addition to Seattle and Dayto