A Conversation about EVs & Transport

[The Liturgist]

@AlexB23 I wish I’d noticed this conversation before since I am a massive railway and public transport nerd, as @Paidiske can attest (as i did once ask her a ton of questions about her experiences with public transport in Melbourne, which now has the largest tramway system in the world, due to cutbacks in the tramways of Moscow and St. Petersburg and growth that outpaced that of Vienna, Prague and certain other larger European systems. I’m also rather into long distance passenger rail and commercial air travel. One project of mine at the moment is to produce an airline simulator with gameplay similiar to the defunct Australian company Efzed’s AIRLINE series, which was always extremely buggy. I have AIRLINE 7 but I failed to download the last patch and can’t find it anywhere, but also knowing the bugs in the game, I fear if i used it to model my ideal airline it would crash and take my data with it, since now, rather than using individual save game files, all saved games in AIRLINE 7 are stored in an embedded DB which has to be backed up completely

 

[The Liturgist]

One thing I’m not a fan of are battery-electric buses. I think trolley buses with battery APUs or fuel cell APUs are the way to go, such as are running in Dayton.

Trolleybuses in Dayton - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The MBTA which serves greater Boston infuriatingly closed their trolleybus network in 2022 including their hybrid trolleybus Silver Line Bus Rapid Transit, in its case for unclear reasons, but the rest of the system was closed so they could convert the garage where the buses were kept for battery operation, but the problem is, in the short term this has resulted in a huge increase in the use of polluting buses, especially in the Harvard Square bus tunnel, where the trolleybus system terminated. The raison d’etre of the trolleybus network, which operated in the city of Cambridge where Harvard and MIT are located, was to serve that tunnel, and now the kids attending those universities are breathing in diesel particulates, and will be for at least another year while the garage to accommodate the battery powered buses is rebuilt. And in your youth is the worst time to be exposed to harmful substances on a daily basis since the increased risk of cancer is more likely to catch up with you, the younger you are, or if you are pregnant, which are all possibilities for many of the people using those buses.

People object to the wires with trolleybuses, but the solution is to use a hybrid system where the trolleybus wires are used to charge the bus and as the main source of power on busways and major arteries, and then when buses leave the busways and go through neighborhoods where the wires would be annoying, they can do so using a battery or fuel cell APU. Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver have very large trolleybus networks, and Mexico City has been rebuilding their network after a period of decline. In San Francisco, the trolleybuses are necessary to climb some of the steep hills, which otherwise would require a funicular or cable car, and trolleybuses have a huge advantage over both, in terms of being cheaper to set up, and faster. A typical trolleybus accelerates much faster than a diesel powered bus, its amazing to see them take off when traffic is light.

Wherever bus rapid transit exists, I think it should use trolleybuses. The ideal such system is in Quito, Ecuador, where it was realized that a light rail line would damage the historic buildings in the city center due to the vibrations:

Trolleybuses in Quito - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org