A simple solution at cost of minor aesthetic changes
A simple solution at cost of minor aesthetic changes
304 comments
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What the actual fuck⁈ “Batteries can catch on fire.” Sure, whatever could go wrong with a 1000l tank of FUCKING GASOLINE.
AAAaaaaHHhh I hate people!
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Going with the “batteries catch on fire argument” is stupid. “Batteries are heavy and expensive” is probably more compelling. But yeah, wires are better solution for things going in fixed routes.
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The ammount of water required to put out a normal car is infinitely less than the amount required to put out a battery fire.
Not to mention the extra weight, nor the retention loss per recharge meaning we need to change batteries every 2-4 years polluting a lot more, we ain't even talking about the energy loss when doing the conversion to electric and then again to mechanical.
The electric transport is the way to go in the future, but firts it needs to have a solid foundation, and nuclear is the way to go at least in this moment. Otherwise we are only making things worse.
Edit for those wondering about the battery degradation: https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
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Gasoline and diesel can be extinguished relatively easily. Extinguishing an EV means throwing it into a tub of water for a day or two
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Meanwhile in Australia:
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Bitch I’m a truss
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That looks pretty sick ngl
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It didn't suck as a solution when it was implemented. The buses function like small diesel trains; they don't have to deal with traffic, and can travel faster because they kinda lock in to the rails. It didn't need as much land as a freeway or cost as much as a dedicated train line because you could just retrofit old buses. Plus the advantage of being able to run a standard bus route at each end of the line, no need for connecting services.
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What am I looking at? A diesel bus on rails?
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Pretty much. This is the O-Bahn in Adelaide. More info (and the original picture I shamelessly ganked) here: Wikipedia link
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Yikes
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We have something similar in the UK, guided busses.
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Holy shit, I didn't know that. I always thought the O-Bahn was a unique piece of Adelaide weirdness. Adelaide has a lot of weirdness.
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Meanwhile on the Autobahn:
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Steel rails have even less friction
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This is a very nitche application. Tom Scott did a video on it.
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Not from nimbys
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WTF Germany how did I not know this was a thing and why aren't we doing it here in the US?
Question though. Obviously the wires can't cover every road and the truck sometimes has to drive off the wired road. Do they have small batteries to carry them between the wires?
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The wires aren’t for propulsion, but for recharging electric trucks.
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More about this from Tom Scott
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Battery fires are also less common than gasoline fires. But batteries are expensive, so overhead lines are still a good idea
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Shhh they've been fed their propaganda by Fox news and they want to clutch it as hard as they can.
God forbid they ever see what Europe or the rest of the world is doing while the US is being left behind. We might as well be pulled by horse and buggy still compared to how easy it is to get around Europe
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Europe or the rest of the world is doing Are you talking about public transit or Germany banning gas and diesel cars EU wide all while also getting rid of the best source of electricity, essentially making individual vehicle transportation for common folk a thing of the past?
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Switzerland runs a lot of these buses. Also trams, normal buses , trains. For those people in the U.S., it's a very effective and efficient system called public transport.
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Yeah literally, what is this post even saying
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Yes Switzerland is famous for its public transport
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Honestly, for growing places, or places with bad public transit, diesel busses are the way to go. They are the cheapest and require almost no new infrastructure so it can offset car emissions quicker than the other options. Established bus routes that are popular should be converted to tram lines or BRT.
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Diesel busses should be considered the last alternative though, out of all the mass transit options they are still the worst for the environment. Not unless a city has exhuasted all other options should they look into them, or truly have no money for alternatives.
Downtown areas can easily be canternaried for electrified busses, and battery busses are great for trips within cities.
If a city is growing then it's the perfect time to lay down rail and plan it out properly before road infrastructure gets in the way, and rail always pays off in the long run.For longer trips then fine, diesel, but only if 1) It's out of range for electrified busses and 2) there is not ridership enough for rail. (but even then, look at the UK's request stop numbers and I'd say that argument is pretty flimsy)
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I honestly disagree. If you can get 5 car users on a diesel bus, you are making a positive impact on the environment. And you can deploy way more diesel busses than electric ones. Once you build demand, you can skip busses altogether and replace with trams. The batteries in busses are a cool technology, but still exploit child labor and extended neocolonialism in the same way oil does. Also battery fires are much worse than normal fires.
I think we should electrify fleets as soon as possible but I think adding a few battery busses here and there won't do anything but pander to environmentalist
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People need to learn the difference between „Doesn’t catch fire“ and „Doesn’t burn AS EASY AS gasoline“.
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The problem with battery fires is that most batteries are made out of lithium which reacts with pretty much everything and is extremely difficult to put out.
In addition obtaining the rare earth metals for these batteries ecologically is a real challenge and it will only get worse the more we use.
I'm not saying we should abandon electric cars but we should know the benefits and drawbacks of each option before making a decision.
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Depends on battery tech. LFP batteries dont use cobalt and manganese, and have have much less chance of fire when punctured for example
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I didn’t mean batteries, I was talking about diesel. Should have made that clearer, my bad.
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Obviously diesel burns and batteries don't really explode, but the only way to put out an EV fire is to dunk the car for a few days in a tub of water. And how many of those will a fire department have? 1-5?
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"Electric buses aren't safe because the batteries can catch on fire"
London here running hybrids for over half a decade with no issue.
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We USians are so hooked on, and controlled by, car infrastructure that we’ll come up with any lame ass excuse to undermine public transit. “Busses (or trains or any other form of public transit) aren’t perfect because of X, so we should just keep destroying our health, our communities and our planet”
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We have some electric but lines in San Sebastian (Spain) too, no issues, the buses are lovely, they work fine. It has been about 4 years since they first got introduced, no major issues.
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Yeah, who the heck complains about either of those points? Hybrid buses have been a thing for a long time. And even if it was a plain diesel bus, it'd still be better than having dozens of gasoline cars.
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Trams.... Where isn't possible trams use trolleybus... That's it!!! But what is sad, Eastern Europe falls into buying electric buses because it's mainstream 😬
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trams!!!
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This. Trams are so much nicer, carry more people, way less maintenance cost and the tracks look so good if grass grows between it, also I don't get motion sickness on them. You don't even need any asphalt for them which is expensive to maintain, looks worse than pretty much anything except maybe a literal pile of garbage and heats up the surrounding area.
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We had trolley busses here in Wellington NZ for decades. The network needed an upgrade so our shortsighted council ripped it down while promising battery buses to replace the trolleys. We ended up with old, dirty, diesels chugging round our city for years, an I'm not sure we've gotten rid of them all yet. It was a disaster.
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I hate that they were taken out. I rode on the as a kid regularly, it was always a little adventure when the driver had to reset the runners
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Same in Dunedin!
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Let's face it: in most US cities there probably isn't much aesthetic for the power lines to spoil. Just like in the grey Soviet cities where they come from
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Greetings from Winterthur, a pretty nice, human-friendly, town in Switzerland which bunch of old buildings. Also called the bike-city of switzerland. It turns out that the trade off is worth it. I rather have power lines than cars or fuel powered busses.
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Yes! I used to live there for most of my childhood, and thus have always considered those power lines to be a normal part of any city as a kid. Growing older and starting to visit other cities (without either trams or trolleys) I was surprised to see them missing and thought it looked strange, like a crucial piece of infrastructure was missing.
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Those wires are only there if you are looking for them.
This is in my city. It looks this way because it is the biggest public transport intersection, with trolleybuses going all 4 directions meeting a tram line.
Seriously, after a while you just ignore those wires.
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We have these in Vancouver, a lot of them. And a few battery buses as well
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Ehhhhhh! A fellow Vancouverite! Greetings from Scotland!
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How are they?
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Works just as well as the diesel buses. Sometimes they hop off the guide wires and the driver has to get out with a fibreglass pole to reattach them but that usually only happens due to driver error
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The torque on these things...
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There's also an idea of doing this in highways.
Tom Scott video on it: https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg
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I always upvote Tom Scott
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The best thing trolleybuses have going for them is their relatively low dependence on rare earth elements in production in contrast with BEV buses with their large batteries. Trolleybuses environmental toll is way smaller and it makes producers and operators way less dependent on third world countries devastating the environment with slave labor.
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There's also the centralization advantage and long lifespan. Centralized power generation is nearly always most efficient, and EV batteries degrade relatively quickly, while there are real life examples of 30 year old trolleybuses still operating fine.
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Hurr duurr rareearth . Written from your phone with rare earth materials, tomorrow you're going to drive to work using rare earth to work on your laptop with rare earth materials.
Neither batteries nor drive train components of bevs HAVE to use rare earth. There's tons of cars without them (bmw electric cars for example).
If you even respond, please include a modern car which does not contain ANY rare earth material and does not use electricity for energy storage.
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Nothing is black and white you know. No decision is 100% good or 100% bad, we live in a sepectrum where some decisions may be less bad than others and that is the point.
Also current batteries will use cobalt or lithium, other options are either not efficient enough (like metal hydride or sulphuric acid batteries) or developed enough - solid state batteries, or LiFePo.
Also current BMW BEVs are still using lithium based batteries, whose mining pretty much is environmental disaster as a process.
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add some steel wheels then its perfect
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... on tracks. Steel wheels would destroy the wheels, blacktop, and concrete.
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And connect them together.
Choo choo
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They are still running in The Netherlands, although only in 1 city.
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Vancouver, Canada, still rocking these bad bois
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Really sad we should have more of them their just better then battery electric.
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I think trams are pretty good as well, which I know the Netherlands has a lot of
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Basically the same thing but with actual rails.
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When I was there I found those busses really cool. But to my knowledge, they're being phased out. They essentially combine the worst of bus and tram:
- relies on special infrastructure and thus cannot go anywhere, is more expensive than bus
- often shares the street with other cars being more vulnerable to traffic, uses tires (leading to fine particles)
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I see it the other way. Trolleybuses (with either battery or diesel backup) are the best of both worlds. Much cheaper to built (compared to a tram) and doesn't pollute in the city (compared to a full diesel bus)
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Best solution: trams (or streetcars, for Americans)
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The fact that "streetcar" means something unrelated to both a street and a car is above my IQ
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Trams are surely better, but the simple infrastructure and relative simplicity of the drive train make trolley often cheaper than a diesel bus. Trolley buses with a small battery can also deviate from standard lines or bridge small areas between trolley lines.
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Trolleybuses are the best compromise because they can (and in my country/city do) work as diesel/battery buses
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i actually like the aesthetic.
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My grandfather ran a printing press using old trolley bus motors, reliable and powerful shit.
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that rocks
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San Francisco has a fair number of overhead electric busses, too.
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I assumed they were pretty common in cities. I don't know how practical they would be in suburbs.
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Down here in NZ my city used to have these too! Apparently it was the last commercial trolleybus network in Oceania. But as a mostly suburban kind of city environment (not quite American suburbia but still low density), their utility definitely was quite limited by the predefined routes. Eventually more and more routes weren't even using them. But they were still servicing the old main road high frequency routes, so they were still very useful in those instances. Much better than the diesel buses, too, which were so loud you could hear them coming from several stops away! Eventually they phased the trolleys out in 2017, citing all the usual rubbish like maintenance costs and such. But we hadn't yet electrified our bus fleet, so for a while we had to borrow a bunch more diesel buses. Still on the road to having a fully electric fleet, and I imagine it will be a good while yet before that happens.
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I think someone else mentioned that San Francisco has these. I also wanted to throw in that Seattle has got them too. Maybe it's a West Coast thing in the USA? I'd be curious to know if other parts of the country have them too.
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Vancouver, Canada has them as well
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There's a few in Philadelphia I think
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Buses are lame. They combine the cons of public transit with the cons of driving a car in a city. I believe in tram surpremacy.
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Buses > trams. Something breaks down in bus lane? Bus go round. Breakdown on tram track? Tram stuck.
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Trolleybuses the best compromise. Uses electricity without having downtime to charge and weight of lot of batteries and doesn't need tracks (but can still have dedicated bus lanes)
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The tram supremacy doesn't lie in the inherent nature of the technology but in the way we treat it! Trams get:
- their own lane
- dedicated signals at intersections (often even priority)
- infrastructure money and thus planning effort
In short, they are (usually) treated like public transport. Busses on the other hand are too often treated like just another car that's thrown in with the rest but also has the obligations of public transport. If you treated trams like that (sharing the road, waiting behind cars) they would be even worse than busses.
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I love trams, light rail, and subway systems. I've had to think long and hard about why. Busses have notable advantages for flexibility and redundancy in the system, so why do I prefer to use a railed transit solution?
For light rail, grade separated trams, and subways it's easy: they're faster in the city. Like... WAY faster. They don't fight traffic so I wait a few minutes (at most) in any city with real transit solutions, ride for a short bit, hop off, and I'm there. Not having to deal with my car is freedom.
So... trams.... why trams over busses?
First of all they're bigger. There's more elbow room and it's easier to get on and off. It's easier for a group of people (see: me and the kids) to all climb on and make room. The doors are larger and it's easier to use multiple doors to load a large group so the people getting on and off a tram can go much faster. There is less shuffling along trying to wedge yourselves into the tram like you're forced to do on a bus.
Second, they're predictable and have a visible route. When I'm walking around, I can tell where the tram will be because I can follow the rails. I don't have to guess what the route will be or where I should go to meet it. Yes, busses have signs every so often, but it's not nearly the same as seeing the rails and knowing I'm on the route. This is especially true if they do move the bus route (which is what everyone who advocates for busses says is a good thing), and I don't know it. The bus is just gone.
Thirdly, the tram drives in a predictable path. I can be near it and know where it's going to go. In fact, whole big crowds of people do it all the time in plazas in Europe. You can walk near the rails and know that you're still safe. Check out the plaza in front of the main train station in Amsterdam. They chose to run the trams right through it, but not allow busses since they weren't safe and predictable enough.
Fourth, they're quiet. Trolley Busses get this too, but trams have had it a long time. They can co-exist with a people-oriented space without being too disruptive. When you sit in a cafe talking with your friends and the tram goes by it's no big deal. When a diesel bus goes by it's incredibly noisy.
Lastly, they're a community commitment. When a city installs a tram, the whole city knows that the route it travels will be supported for a long time. If you choose to live near a stop, you'll have transit. If you're choosing to start a business, you'll want to be close to the tram line so customers can easily get there. The same isn't nearly as true for a bus line. I haven't really pinned down why yet, but there's a very different feel to rolling along on a tram while looking at businesses to visit, and rolling along on a bus. You just don't have the same kind of connection to the street around you on a bus that you do on a tram.
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You. You get it.
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I totally agree with passenger space, predictability, speed and overall commitment towards development of the parts of the city that the tram goes through.
However I personally cannot agree on trams being quiet at least in my country. They have an incredibly loud squeal when cornering at higher speeds. Sometimes one can hear a tram squealing by half a kilometer away.
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I heard we tried that in some German Cities way back in the 80ies or even late 70ies, but the technology wasn't that far yet and the overhead cables would get damaged when the buses engaged them, sometimes leading to complete outages of the tram network, and as such it was scrapped again. Glad to see that other places took it on later, we could really need that right now.
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Trolley Buses are over 100 years old as a technology. They were super wide-spread in the entire eastern block and now cities in hungary, the czech republic and romania introduce a lot of newer (better) models: For example, Skoda has one that can easily integrate with exsisting tram infrastructure and has batteries to bridge smaller distances in places where there are no overhead lines.
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They're also fairly popular in China! When I was visiting family in Shanghai, a sizeable chunk of the bus service consisted of electric trolley busses.
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You can also find them in North America, in Vancouver!
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They are still in use in Stuttgart/Esslingen since 1944. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/TrolleyBusEsslingenVanHool_P1010048.JPG/624px-TrolleyBusEsslingenVanHool_P1010048.JPG
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberleitungsbus_Esslingen_am_Neckar
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They are pretty nice and if you are on your bike in traffic behind one, the feeling of not being dieselized is amazing ....
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here in Santiago we have more than 1000 Electric Buses In operation, they work great.
Trolleys can't divert trough an alternative route if the original route got blocked somehow (for example it got barricaded.) wich is a common occurrence here in Santiago.
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I'm Czech and my city has a trolleybus network. Every single trolleybus has either a) diesel engine or b) battery backup, depends on their age. Hell, there are even entire lines where 1/3rd they run on batteries. But, they can be smaller, so the vehicle is lighter.
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I would like to drive around in one of these please.. in the front or back, i dont mind!
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I've rode in the back of something similar. Don't be jealous. The cage really decreases the ability to appreciate getting to ride in one.
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We have a ton of regular electric busses in my city in Denmark
Big powerlines everywhere in narrow city streets? People would get mad.. it looks terrible. And we already have all our power cables below ground.
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But cables ugly/s
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And the same people who gripe about overhead cables apparently have no trouble staring at a street full of idling, polluting, and noisy cars. It's really impressive.
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Seattle used to have these as well. Sadly, the US (outside of a few cities that kept their 1930's infrastructure and updated it) can't find it's ass with both hands when it comes to public transportation.
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Seattle still does.
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Holy carp they're still there! You're right.
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...we don't anymore?
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You do! I had to look it up. I haven't seen them in a long time (I don't get to Seattle much anymore), but they're still in service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Seattle
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*and northern
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*and the rest of Europe
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tram :D
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Also people from Vancouver ( Canada ) where hydro power makes electricity super cheap.
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Because diesel catching on fire is totally unheard of.
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Because diesel catching on fire is totally unheard of.
On it's own? Pretty much unheard of. Usually is a leak and something else set it on fire.
Batteries on the other hand plenty of cases where the battery itself was the starting point. Is usually cause by a bad design or external factors? Yes, not saying otherwise.
And tbh Diesel is the worse example you could put as requires either high pressure or a continuous exposure to a flame as you could throw a lit match on it and it wouldn't set it on fire. Petrol/Gasoline on the other hand...
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Wait this isn't a thing in the west?
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They are being phased out in most places. I think in favor of train and electric buses.
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In my city in Spain I remember them from when I was a child. They were removed during the early 2000s. But ten years ago, last time I visited, they still had some in Seville.
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I like them because they are much quieter than buses and honestly it makes so much sense... buses rarely have to go out of their route
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We have them in at least one city in Austria (Linz), although it's only one or two bus lines out of a few dozen I think.
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A beauty
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This is just a tram without the tracks? Guessing it is just for charging otherwise why not just have a tram which is much safer, more space and can basically drive itself
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It has some benefits if they are worth or not I am not so sure.
It's easier to change the routes, either permanent or temporally. In the case of temporally if it has a second source of power like battery or non electrical engine it can like use a non electrified street if there is some emergency or construction or whatever.
You can change routes for special days easily without junctions or whatever is needed for trams without big issues.
And even if it needs to electrify a new zone it, it probably much faster than the work for adding new rails and junctions.
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Exactly, you don't need to build tram tracks, and you can easily build routes uphill/downhill. I'm no expert on trams but I think it's pretty complicated to have them go through versatile environments without having to build tunnel systems etc, so building a network that makes even more remote corners of a city accessible is much easier.
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How is a tram safer?
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Nah. Winterthur has them. Combines the worse aspects of trains and e-cars
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Minor cosmetic changes like running above ground power infrastructure where it doesn't exist anymore?
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Its much easier and cheaper to install above ground than in the ground. Bonus points you could open it to Electrical trucks for emission free cargo in the city.
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Im also waiting for hydrogen to take off!
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I use them every day for commute. Trolley buses are absolute pieces of shit. Slow, drivers understand mash the throttle like it's on and off button and in cold winters their electrical cables overhead freeze and you get delays.
Btw their electrical cables make the city look like garbage. The only ones who think trolleys are a good idea are those who don't use them.
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I hate to see misinformation being spread.
First off, Diesel Busses Are equally environmental friendly as electric trains. (On long distance trips) this is due to infrastructure emissions, which are far higher for train infrastructure.
Furthermore looking at batteries: Batteries are expensive and very sensible to temperatures. They are virtually unusable in some climate zones. Furthermore a battery burns much hotter than gasoline. Much much hotter. So hot in fact that the damage to roads is immense. In addition to that, battery driven cars and buses are extremely heavy and damaging asphalt infrastructure as well.
The best solution is to shift mobility towards Diesel driven Busses and facilitate car sharing. It’s flexible, mich more flexible than other solutions. This makes it adaptable to many environments and situations. And it does not force people to give up achievements of mobility.
The example in the meme is extra problematic, because steel cables and train infrastructure is heavily reliant on coal. And replacement of coal with hydrogen is not to be seen in the foreseeable future.
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What sort of “infrastructure emissions”? That doesn’t really make sense to me, once you build the infrastructure it already exists, so it doesn’t just emit on its own. Also rail infrastructure being worse than road infrastructure doesn’t makes sense. Electric trains have extremely negligible emissions (I dare say practically none in normal operation). Electric road vehicles (of any type) still have tyre emissions (and make them worse because they are heavier). Electric trains are over all the best way forward dice intercity transport.
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And those emissions that exist happen outside of the city
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What sort of “infrastructure emissions”? That doesn’t really make sense to me, once you build the infrastructure it already exists, so it doesn’t just emit on its own.
Let me rephrase it: infrastructure maintaining emissions. You have to think about all the people involved in organising train infrastructure each day. It’s immense. I can’t find the source anymore. But a german agency once published a calculation, that on a 100 km trip, the train was still emitting less, including every emissions connected to this one train ride. But the difference to a diesel Bus became basically unmentionable. Just a few kg CO2 more. But not much. And keep in mind that a bus is much more flexible than a train.
Also rail infrastructure being worse than road infrastructure doesn’t makes sense. Electric trains have extremely negligible emissions (I dare say practically none in normal operation). Electric road vehicles (of any type) still have tyre emissions (and make them worse because they are heavier). Electric trains are over all the best way forward dice intercity transport.
Not quite. As every city is dependant on road infrastructure. It starts with the building of houses and the transport of material. You cannot use rail infrastructure for every house. It does not bring the needed flexibility. Same goes for emergency services, police, firebricks, ambulance, craftsman,… asphalt based infrastructure is irreplaceable. Might as well use it for public transport instead of creating a second infrastructure to care for. One little new building project and a rail route in a city is blocked for 1-2 years. Car infrastructure is flexible and can evade this problem.
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The whole thing about trolleybuses is that they don't pollute inside of the city. Obviously that pollution still happens somewhere, but it isn't under your nose.
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And that’s the take of the people without any knowledge of what they are rankling about.
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