Why TrolleyBuses are vastly Superior to Battery Electric Buses!
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- čas přidán 31. 07. 2020
- I dream for a good bus network of sparky bois 🚎
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The weird pauses in Audio are because CZcams forced me to remove music from the title cards.... ugh.
I just wanted to boogie woogie woogie
What a bunch of tree hugger manure!
8:00 This argument is more than a little ridiculous considering lithium Iron battery's weren't commercially available until 1991.
It's funny because fair use DOES protect small amounts of use (even for profit) since this content falls under "reporting". Too bad courts don't care about laws!
@@RandyRandersonthefamous Fair use would protect musical snippets included for the purpose of discussing the music in question. I don't think this video was intended to be a commentary on Madonna's song.
You forgot to mention that trolleybuses can ALSO have batteries for running off-wire, either as a planned part of a route or just in the case of an emergency when the connection to the wire is lost or when power to the wire itself fails! AND there can be in-motion charging, where the on-board battery charges while the bus is running ON wire! So cool!
That's how the newer Dayton Trolleybuses run. It's allowed the RTA to expand one of the lines to include significant off-wire running.
@@TimothyCizadlo How significant? There's a ten minute frequency a few minutes from me which further up the road traverses a four mile or so section of rural dual carriageway...when an accident blocks this (as sadly it fairly frequently does) the diverted wire free section (literally the only alternative) would be at least six miles, maybe more, with an immediate turnround at the destination and a similar length return across the diversion...I don't see this as trouble-free...
@@cogidubnus1953 In theory, the off-wire range of the Dayton trolley buses is 15 miles at fifty miles an hour. Right now, I think they've added a three mile one-way extension to a line that is 11 miles long. The 15 mile spec is actually designed for a different route that is already under wire for a bit over half of the length, but has a large section (similar in length to the one you stated) that isn't.
@@TimothyCizadlo Hmm, it's pushing the limits...are they double deck (say 65-75 seat + standees) capacity?
@@cogidubnus1953 No. Gilling 40' BRTs. That said, the technology is there for them to work.
Moscow trolleybus 1933-2020, rest in peace old friend.
and now moscow is going to stop buying diesel buses, so what was the point? They've torn down all that infrastructure just to shackle themselves with buses made unavailable by charging times and with expensive batteries that last five years at most. Such a waste. I think the old trolleybus system deserves a proper send off czcams.com/video/B6kcXuhWclo/video.html
@@doorhanger9317 Wrong. 80% former trolleybuses routs was replaced diesel buses. And Moscow municipality continues to actively purchase diesel buses. For example, now in Moscow more than 8000 ground transport units, and only 220 units are electobuses. ~800 units is a trams. The others 80% ground transport is a diesel buses. More than ever relative to electric transport.
@@Stelsclient That's even worse, but I guess it's no wonder the promises to stop buying diesel buses by 2021 were bunk. So the tearing down of the trolleybus wires wasn't merely public officials wowed by the jangling keys of flashy new technology, but an outright cynical plot to destroy public infrastructure and shulk the costs onto people's lungs and the environment.
@@doorhanger9317 if those buses works biodiesel (produced with recycled materials and waste) there's no problem, but the problem is that they take away history and nostalgia, trolleybuses must be alive.
@@playgt326 biodiesel isn't produced from recycled anything. In theory you could make it with waste cooking oils but generally using waste cooking oils for anything ends up being impractical due to contamination. Typically what's used is ethanol and mass-farmed plant oil, that tends to be the most economical way to make an already expensive fuel, and the whole cycle of farming and processing and transporting means it's hardly carbon neutral even if all the carbon in the end product was technically taken from the air by a plant, I think the overall emssions reduction is around 60% on a good day - and that's from B100, which is rare and tricky - usually it's blended with regular diesel.
Not to mention all the massive advantages trolley buses have over diesel buses anyway - the *only* reason to have diesel buses in a city is being terrified of public infrastructure, which most cities are. As this video points out, trolley buses are by far the best kind of bus in areas with a high enough route-density to justify a wire network - they're lighter, cheaper, vastly more efficient, have zero emissions (good for lungs, not just the climate - an area with lots of diesel buses in a city can be hard to breathe in, I can attest myself), use like, 70% less energy on a bad day, don't need expensive fuels, need less maintenance, have more power, can regen brake way more efficiently than even an battery bus for even less energy use, modern battery technology means that a small battery pack can give tens of miles of off wire capability with no charging downtime due passive charging under the wires, the list goes on.
That old soviet trolley bus in the intro, pure nostalgia :) Also, those trolley buses dropped their poles constantly, stopping in the middle of the road. The driver would need to get out, put on heavy rubber gloves, and hook the pole back to the overhead wire with a stick, all in the middle of rush hour traffic, while passengers keep swearing at him. Good times.
Tatra were also producing pretty solid trams, the T3 model was even written in Guinness book in 1988 as the most widely produced tram in the world.
@@ristekostadinov2820 bombardier to
@@ristekostadinov2820 i think the most produced tram in the world was not Tatra T-3. Maybe it was Soviet KTM-5M3 (71-605M3).
You failed to mention the pole ballet when buses need to pass each other. And, when a rod springs off and crosses both wires with a boom. Good times.🤦
I live in a city where trolley buses are still in use, and I hate that one random guy that shouts at the driver because of the slightest experience
Effectively infinite range, fewer components that need maintenance, a lower cost of production. The only major downsides of trolley style buses are the limited route selection and the fact that you have to build and maintain the overhead wires.
response moved -- you're just repeating op's points.
Now they have a small battery that can drive a few miles if they have to derail
but overhead wires are ugly af.
@@michaelz.7140 So are wide roads full of gridlocked traffic, might as well go with the solution that costs society less.
@@michaelz.7140 Tram
trolleybuses are really common here in eastern europe although in recent years they've been getting replaced by diesel busses from mercedes-benz (prolly some lucrative deals with city officials)
where does that happen?
Mmmmmmmmmmm, cash before nature!
*Haha Conecto and Citaro go brrrrr*
uh no. not happening everywhere in eastern europe.
you should be thankful for mercedes buses. in bucharest somehow some turkish firm that makes armored cars won the bid (i'll let you take a guess how) and now we have those shitty buses
The google algorithm knows that I want trolleybus content, and it feeds me it
Nice
@@torchedegg come here you overexpensive graphics card
Nice
@@theworld9533 NO PLEASE DONT INSERT ME IN YOUR PC
We still have trolleybuses
Overhead wires are simply more efficient - wow, that's such an important point.
Battery powered vehicles are the tech industry making things more complicated then they need to be.
It's not that the tech industry is intentionally making things more complicated, per se. It's arguably more that a complete and total failure of governments at all levels has allowed poor, inefficient, generally worse solutions to appear optimal. With actual leadership and regulation, the same tech industry could easily be solving real problems. There is ofc the problem of regulatory capture and capital corroding and manipulating the skeleton that remains, but that is once again largely the fault of weak and ineffectual governance.
The tech industry has nothing to do with this. Busses are purchased by local agencies and governments. They are the ones chasing trendy and “futuristic” technologies to please you, the voter.
What this means is that either the voters think that battery busses are somehow superior or that the local elected mistakenly think that the voters want this.
This ironically signals that someone, the voters or the electeds, are trying to buy something “modern and good for the environment”. Which isn’t a bad thing per se.
I would argue that this is a cultural problem. Battery busses are viewed as the superior alternative. They are not, but they are also cheaper than catenary in the short term. It’s up to all of us to change that perception and make trolley busses and rail more “futuristic” and desirable than battery busses!
Alan is doing his part. Let’s all do the same! Catenary needs to become perceived as the default choice for “modern”, “futuristic”, green, fast, whatever - the only choice that pops into the electeds’ heads when they even begin to think about modernizing a bus fleet!
I think that “hybrid” battery+catenary charging busses are the easiest to make the default choice today. They’re the entry point. In the future we just ditch the batteries or minimize them.
@@TohaBgood2 it’s definitely the voters. Your average middling politician making these decisions barely understands a lot of this, but they know if they put “rechargeable battery bus with a panda painted on the side” that every yuppy and college girls gunna flip out because “muh environment”. “The best argument against democracy is a 15 minute conversation with the average voter”
@@TohaBgood2 What you said... I always hear people say but electricity cables are uglyy, ewww. It'll ruin the scenery, make the city ugly..
Yeah! Let's build a whole network of overhead wires and permanent busways and electrical distribution switch gear and overhead safety barriers and monitoring systems, and we'll need to alter the height of a bunch of bridges, alter every major intersection, re-do the traffic flow planning for the entire inner urban area, resume land for dozens of new substations and thousands of new poles, creating thousands of new crash hazards on street level that will need to be protected by new street furniture... so SIMPLE! Yeah! Wouldn't want to be needlessly making things so 'complicated', would we?
Overhead transmission lines were always a janky compromise that had to be made because battery technology couldn't provide enough portable power. Now that such batteries are starting to exist, here we go with all the crying and moaning that 'the old ways were better'. This is weird, cultish rejection of a new technology for no good reason; a classic case of refusing a good idea to petulantly demand a perfect one, for no reason other than being a smug obstructionist and getting a kick out of feeling smarter than everyone else.
I did my bachelor's thesis on the trolleybuses of my hometown, and it amazed me how durable trolleybuses can be. My city bought second hand Marmon Herringtons from Chicago, that were built in 1955 and kept them running up to the 1980's, when they replaced them with Mexican-made vehicles, that somehow they managed to keep running until the 2010's. Compared to combustion engine buses, which have to be changed in a decade or less, these bad boys still cruise after 30 or more years.
A friend of the family used to work at the state vehicle deposit and he told me that the bosses sent him to Mexico City to buy spare parts that their transit agency couldn't use anymore, to put more of those old trolleys back in service. This was a common practice for decades here, I imagine those mechanics taking parts from dead trolleybuses to revive other vehicles, then yelling "IT'S ALIVE!" when they start working again.
Moving parts and chemical reactions have drastically higher degradation over time compared to electrical circuits. No engine, no battery = much longer lasting vehicle
@@GeekProdigyGuy then the issue comes when comes time to do work on the battery and costs $15-20k+ which makes it make more sense to just buy a new car which goes back to being insanely wasteful
Combustion engine buses can run for decades as well.
bro, in Hungary, we use 30 years old diesel buses.
Most of the 110 trolleybuses in the former Los Angeles system (closed 1963) were sold to Mexico City.
My city recently decommissioned all trolleybuses claiming they were outdated technology and states that every trolley on every route will be replaced by a new green environmentally friendly electronic bus.
Guess what I'm taking to work ten months later? Yep, good ol' diesel fart-machine
Even the new ones, with digital screens, blinking buttons and that sanitized soulless corporate cyberpunk aesthetic all around? Yep, all diesel
Same in my city Kathmandu.. it was decomissioned nearly a decade ago.. but sadly instead of new elctric bus they got replaced by diesel bus.😢
At least we have hybrid diesels. But yup brand new buses with big ol diesels under the hood.
Diesels are loud and unpleasant sounding engines, the fuel is expensive and they cant be the most economical.
Running LPG fueled plug in hybrids would make sense. Many countries use gas buses instead of diesels. Gas is like half the price of diesel or petrol.
Man this is sad, the only problem with trolleys is that they are costly to implement
I want to understand this. Your city, to be ecologically sustainable, replaced all their electric buses with diesel buses and a promise of new electric buses?
@@JustClaude13 Politicians and media. You know how you can tell if they're lying? Their mouths will be moving.
If you want to crush your soul, go to some minority event or protest and watch what is happening there. ("Save the park!", "Don't demolish the monument!", "Get us drinking water after 30 years!") Then go look at how the media covers it. You'll see polar opposites - they'll literally just make shit up and write whatever they want to convey their slant and make people feel informed. (With lies.) It's a real gut kick when you do the leg work and realize that politicians lie and the media is bought and paid for. (AKA propaganda.) It'll have you questioning everything. You'll see 5000 people protesting in person, then read an article a day later stating "a couple protesters held signs outside the government building", etc.
I live in Canada, and it was a real downer realizing that our media is as controlled as China's.
I was about to throw a joke how in the Eastern Europe, you can see those in almost every city/town. Well you were already way ahead of me :D
It's only recently that Moscow got rid of its last trolleybuses.
Sarajevo has a lot of trolleybusses, along with a tram network. It's old but it gets the job done ^-^
In Slovakia they're replacing the trolleybuses with... More new trolleybuses
Yep, SPB still has them
in romania they are replacing the current trollybusses with electric busses....
Vancouver has been using its trolley bus system since the late 40s and still going strong. Just recently they been using electric buses for small routes that are close to the Vancouver area.
Do you think Vancouver can get new trolley buses? Like are they even making them?
Vancouver’s trolly busses seem to work well for downtown and powering up the steep hills that would kill batteries
But I think some of them covert to natural gas in the further neighbourhoods
I'm from the city in Britain who used Trolley Buses for the longest time in the UK, also the first place in the UK to use them. The Blue and Cream double decker trolley buses of Bradford are a rich part of its heritage. It's a shame they're all gone now.
That is just sad.
Yeah. I wonder why double-decker trolleybuses aren't a thing anymore.
They had them in London once I believe, but I definitely remember them being in Reading.
@@aj6954 They got rid of them in the 50s as part of a wider strategy to scale back public transport and make space for cars. One of the biggest public policy failures of the post-war era.
Use them or lose them. It's really that simple.
We used to have trolley buses in Stockholm, Sweden, between 1941 and 1964. We also used to have a tram system. But in '64 we decided to tear down the trolley bus network and pave over the tram system, because we wanted to be "modern" just like in America and besides, we had a subway too. Fast forward to today when the subway system is way over capacity and can't really be expanded (the city is built on islands, problematic for subways) and nobody can figure out how to fix the traffic situation except to have tolls for cars to keep traffic down.
So, getting rid of the trolley buses, not the brightest idea we had in the 60's.
Adding trolleys or trams wouldn't fix the current congesiton issues as we have today
The real issue with Stockholm is the shortsighted politicans refusal to dig a tunnel from Nacka onto the existing Värtahamnen-Mariehamn tunnel, finishing the ring road the city very desperately needs.
Doing that would reduce congestion the west side of the city, and make a trolley or just normal BRT line make sense, which would further decongest traffic.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
@@MetroidChild Building more roads for cars doesn't solve anything. No more car roads.
@@bertrandbolin7097 It wouldn't be building out existing roads, it would be making better use of of existing ones.
I think to it might been naïve of those day's politicians to tear down the tram and trolly-lines and thing the underground (T-bana) would futureproof problem with capacity. But it was a easy (and probably cheaper) option in regards to converting/buying new rollingstock for the switchover to right-hand traffic. Add that climate change was new in and easy to ignore and diesel was cheap.
Today it is a question about cost. E.g. the tram system is going to be extended in Stockholm to merge Citybanan and Lidingöban and a new bridge. Why is that? I might be wrong, but I think it might be because Lidingö opted out from having the subway drawn there, then and now (compare Kensington in London).
So my opinion on trolleybuses:
I think they are better then regular busses in city traffic where trams is overkill (e.g. capacity and turn radius) not to mention underground. For the rural bus traffic the investment in infrastructure is hard to justify in maintenance costs. There I think in the future, hydrogen fuel cell busses is going to be a better option. With tat said this makes trolleybuses look like a stopgap measure.
But in the long run: Is it sane to form/build a city where people need to travel so long that we need to use a vehicle in the daily commute?
One thing you forgot to mention is, if you perform regular maintenance, both LRVs and trolleybuses can stick around for a long long time. Milan is still using old streetcars from the 20s and 30s while up until at least mids 00s, Athens was using old Soviet built trolleybuses. In same cases cities can use the motors and such in newer bus bodies. I believe Seattle did this with their trolleybuses. You can't say that for ICE buses. The systems maybe initially expensive to build but they will be useful for many years.
Great point! I actually covered this topic in my LRT vs BRT video, mainly pointing out how it's not uncommon to find older LRT vehicles from 30+ years ago running but extremely rare to find 30yr old busses running
More than half of Prague's trams (the Prague tram network is probably the fucking gold standard of trams, and one of the largest and most used tram networks on the planet) are a model that was first produced in the 1960s, based on the US PCC concept. They stopped building them in 1997, so the latest models are at best 23 years old, while the oldest are from the late 70s and early 80s, and the entire design is based on a model built in the 1930s. They are regularly modernized so they're pretty comfortable, they have wireless card payment systems on board, and there's a billion of them everywhere. The only downside is that the standard models dont have a low floor entrance, so they're really unfriendly to the disabled and elderly.
@@ChaplainDMK yes, there are a lot of them in Moscow too. After them came soviet models that were more crude and noisy (as always, USSR doesn`t care about customer goods). They are the cutest trams here and only few years ago new models that are really more comfortable have appeared on the streets.
Moscow government is "donating" soviet trams to smaller cities and towns, but Tatras aren`t going anywhere.
@@alanthefisher The bus company in my city actually brags about how new their busses are!
@@ChaplainDMK Here in Antwerp we also have still a lot of those PCC trams left, more than 50 years old and still in service. Although they are now gradually fased out, as they are not accessible for wheelchairs and increasingly difficult to maintain.
One disadvantage of trolley buses is their overhead wires are sometimes torn down for “looking ugly”
It's a bit laughable to talk about in the context of a city where the entire landscape is ugly and artificial. The wires are just like everything else - once you get used to them you stop noticing them, otherwise people in the cities would've gone insane by always seeing every detail of a concrete crap jungle they live in.
And btw, that's also why cities you aren't used to can look really ugly. Like, if you're from Europe New York would likely look like a hellhole
@@NJ-wb1cz I agree
Because they damned well ARE ugly. And they get torn down in accidents (a high load on a truck is all it takes). And they stop all other use of airspace in inner cities. And they make routes totally inflexible (what happens when there are temporary roadworks on the street they run in?).
I've always thought the best way is those buses now common in Chinese cities with small batteries that recharge a little at every stop while people are boarding. Max range need only be a few kms (you could even use supercapacitors rather than lithium batteries). No fast charging. No range anxiety. Lower capital investment, quicker to install, far more flexibility in operation, much safer, ultra quiet (no sparking). And infinitely better aesthetics. It's the best of both worlds.
@@kenoliver8913that's very interesting thanks
The last trolley bus I was on many years ago got disconnected from the wires.
The driver seemed less than pleased to have to reconnect it
Destroying an actually good form of public transport and replacing it with dogshit exploding battery buses for "looking ugly" is extremely retarded
7:25 There's also the country of Switzerland that uses trolleybuses a lot. They're present in almost every city (if not all of them), mid-sized and large alike. The clips in this video with the red trolleybuses were recorded in Switzerland by the way (in the canton of Bern I believe)
I live in Bern and there are 2 newer Bus lines that use Battery Busses. It's so stupid to see the big CO2 Neutral Sticker on these Busses when you see way more, resource friendly trolley Busses that are even better for the environment and even a lot of trams that are even better.
Yes it's in the City of Bern. In more rural Areas, diesel Busses are used more, because the expense of installing and maintaining power lines over the streets is too much to justify them for a connection that comes every 30 min. And Oil Lobbyists like the Idea that the superior Public Transportation Sector gives them Money to fund their Planet destroying activities.
@@gonzocrunch8356 The problem isn't just that routes for trolleybuses aren't cheap to build, they also come at a speed limit. They're usually limited to 60 km/h because of the system used with the trolley poles and wires. At higher speeds this becomes unstable and the poles would simply jump away from the wires. I've read about trolleybuses reaching speeds of up to 80 km/h but they're the exception really.
As for trolleybuses in Switzerland, they're in use in Zürich, Bern, Luzern, Lausanne, Genève, St. Gallen, Biel/Bienne, Neuchâtel, Winterthur and Schaffhausen. The latter only has one line though that replaced a tram line in 1966 (a rather common occurance in Switzerland). Most other lines have been converted from diesel to battery electric buses over the last couple of years. There is also a trolleybus line that runs from Vevey via Montreux to Villeneuve, which is the longest trolleybus line in Switzerland at over 12 km in lenght. It recently got a new fleet of double-articulated buses which also have batteries for the extention to Rennaz. There used to be other such lines, but they were all taken down.
Note that Basel isn't on this list, as they got rid of their three lines in 2008, as did La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2014, which was due to 'construction work', except that they never reopened once that was done in 2016, but it is scheduled to run new trolleybuses there starting in 2024.
Also, trolleybuses are more lightweight!
Higher capacity to.
Less room required for a large diesel engines and fuel tanks.
I thought that’s what the video was going to be about. Lighter weight = less energy used getting up to speed, which is really important for buses since they’re stopping all the time in city traffic. And then of course you use less of your tires and brakes
"Trolley buses are more light weight"
Most people would use this to improve their efficiency and capacity. I would just make the motor bigger so the bus can YEET itself across the landscape at like 400 mph.
@@petersmythe6462 good luck with the limited amounts of wires.
Lighter vehicles deteriorate roads less too
Trolleybus
-cool overhead wire like a streetcar
-interesting history
-some were made by Pullman
-does not run out of fuel
Battery Bus
-is a bus
-no interesting history
-can run out of fuel
-ugly
Overhead wires are not cool, they are ugly.
@@dlwatib well they remind me of streetcars (which are cool)
@@WesternOhioInterurbanHistory single wire is fine, but in larger intersections they are ugly.
Yes, but we don’t need to build overhead wires for E buses.
Battery bus is made in China also. Yeah BYD
What's insane is that we really had all these problems solved until after the second world war when they were torn up. I disagree that it's an issue with lack of planning - it's planning explicitly for the single-use suburb, subsidising the car and phasing out things that worked.
To be fair, a lot of it was driven by post war optimism. People assumed our energy problems would have been solved by the 80s. Society had only recently started switching to much cleaner oil over coal, and the scientific consensus was that fusion power was only 20 years away. Ford even designed a nuclear car, the Ford Nucleon, in the 1950's assuming that advancing technology would allow a fission reactor to be scaled down to a car.
It's called Capitalism mate, High Value Property, Cars and Petrol puts the biggest buck in the Pockets of Oligarchs
Another great thing about them is that their dedicated lanes can be shared by cyclists which is something I really like about the lines we have here in Mexico City
You nailed our whole issue. We seek to rationalize our inefficient city structure via irrational, expensive technical solutions, but all our problems are social. Social meaning how we organize ourselves--- planning is the solution. Like you said, everything we need to build cities for human beings-- not cars-- was invented nearly 100 years ago, but we abandoned that whole way of organizing life for the sake of property and capital. If we hope to exist in any semblance of 'balance' with nature or if we wish to organize ourselves in a rational way, we need planning of some kind.
But muh profits! Yeah corporate greed is getting old.
"Next thing you know, the US is now a Command Economy instead of a Market one..."
But the idea isn't bad, though.
Not just "property and capital", this was pushed by progressives of the day as "progress" and it was facilitated by laws that cut against property rights. Without eminent domain you won't seize/buy up quarter of the city to bulldoze and put the highways in. Those old cities had holes punched through (especially in USA, but some European cities followed it including Russia and later Soviets) to make way for progress. Entire elite was in on it with cars: both the profit seeking leeches and the far-seeing messiahs. Very much the same as early laws protecting factories from liability from pollution - originally in England a progressive measure to hasten industrialization so as to quickly limit hunger and poverty.
American suburbs ban grocery stores in the neighborhoods, where people are. Instead, they create huge malls with supermarkets that are half an hour's drive away if you're unlucky and don't live in a development close to a mall. Old towns from before the suburban sprawl in the '50s aren't like that. Commercial grocery stores and restaurants were right in the residential neighborhoods, next to the people they serve. 3 minutes walk. In Communist China, back in the '60s, during the cultural revolution, the Chinese people had no rights - the most fundamental one being deprived of rights to food - they were forbidden to open grocery stores in the local neighborhoods where the people are. Doing so was called capitalistic counterrevolutionary opportunism. Instead, people were forced to travel half an hour away to a huge supermarket in the middle of nowhere ran by some faceless company (in this case government owned, but it doesn't make much difference either way). This is a way to control people, shape their behavior/consumption to something less natural, less human, force them to buy bicycles and mopads, herd them from one place to another like cattle, sever local ties between people by preventing them from loitering in front of grocery stores, forming local connections. It's evil, it's manipulation, it's control, it's tyranny. Thankfully, things are better in China today. No where where you live, you're within 3 minutes walking distance to a grocery store or restaurant - food, and the right to food, the most fundamental of all human rights, is available where you live. Cultural Revolution era zoning laws preventing businesses in residential neighborhoods were abolished - they tyrannical, anti-people. Good for the Chinese. They have freedom now, they have human rights. Pity for those of us who still live without human right to food. Can't drive? Walk for 3 hours on roads without sidewalk to the nearest source of food, or starve. Don't get run over on the way. The Chinese would have revolted at this perverse social control scheme.
lmfao sure, cars are mutually exclusive with humans. tell me you're an enviromentalist lunatic without telling me
You got me intrigued. I have never even heard about these as a energy enthusiast in Finland, this just never has come upi and no one talks about it, and I bet 99,5% of people neither.
Finally found an energy enthusiastic person like me
I believe the future is a hybrid between battery and trolley buses, considering the idea of 'In Motion Charging' technology and having a system where you can effectively plug in and charge buses as they go along their route going between trolley and battery mode. Battery buses don't need wires for less frequent and shorter trips, trolleybuses seem pretty economically for fixed, high frequency and numerous trips. The middle ground will be both, for the flexibility and the convenience.
Look at supercapacitor buses. They charge at the stop, can drive a while without stopping, don't need batteries and don't have the overhead wires. I think a perfect solution
@@spinningjenny1629 I think the unstated "problem" is overhead wires. This is implied everywhere BEV is promoted. If wasting resources on heavier, more expensive, and less efficient buses is only needed to de-clutter bus routes of wiring, we are just kicking the can down the road.
You just treat road networks like electrified rail main lines.
Trolleybuses handle the main lines. Trolly battery buses handle the offshoots.
The problem is that whiny car owner's are never happy with road closures for any reason.
For city transit , a small battery with range of 10 km is enough
That's going to make them easy to get across intersections
Some notes regarding the economy of the trolleybus system: a trolleybus has a quite long lifespan (20 years and more), much longer than a diesel bus (10-12 years) and probably longer than a battery in a battery bus. Trolleybuses are (still) more simple machines and cheaper to produce than battery buses and diesel buses and thus offseting higher cost of catenary. But the most important and interresting fact is this one: the more frequent service you have on a particular route (bus line), the more are trolleybuses cheaper to operate than the diesel buses. In my city (Brno, CZ), the frequency of service on trolleybus lines were (before covid) 10, 12 or 15 minutes. In such circumstances operating diesel buses would be more expensive even if you count in the cost of instalation and maintenance of the catenary.
jo máme super trolejáky jako
Well in the UK, we got rid of the cumbersome outdated trolley buses that are restricted going by the overhead wires and we have both Diesel and Battery electric Buses, and in the West Midlands some routes have a 5 minute frequency, London definitely has high frequency bus routes using Diesel Buses.
@@peterwilliamallen1063 and loads of diesel fumes - you watch when a diesel bus pulls away from a stop there is a huge cloud of smoke and fumes that had built up in the exhaust system while stationary.
@@alejandrayalanbowman367 Not in the UK our Buses have very high quality low emission engines, so no we do not loads of smoke and fumes from our modern buses, our buses only tend to stay in a fleet for 10 to 12 years before they are replaced by new buses and in the UK only top quality Diesel is used. May be in your country diesel buses are old and nackered and use crap diesel, thats why you get smoke and fumes from them.
@@peterwilliamallen1063 I happen to be referring to the UK and to London in particular. With traffic control measures, all traffic including buses gets held up by traffic lights, etc. and while idling the exhaust fumes build up in the system until the vehicles move and then they belch out clouds of exhaust.
My uncle used to drive one of these back in Philadelphia and would take me for a ride around his loop when I visited. That was 65 years ago. Philly buses were famous for black smoke and stink, but not the "trackless trolleys" as they were called.
They are still running on the 59 route!
@@joelressner9651 on the 66 route too. Trackless trolleys are what Philadelphians have always called them
In Germany we had also the term trackless trolleys, but it was later replaced by a word, that is literally translated "Upper wire bus'
I have a question when it comes to this. How do the poles stay on the wires? Is it just down to the driver having to make sure to drive in a certain way or does the driver have some help staying on the wire
@@Egerit100 they must have been pushed up by springs from the bus. I remember my uncle had to get out once and pull on the cord attached to the top to reattach it.
As a young child in the 1960s
I went to the "celebration" of the last trolleybus
in my hometown,
a Northern English Industrial town.
My childhood memories were that the trolleybus service
was partial
we lived on a hill and the trolleybuses were only on the flatter roads
i.e. the valley floors
I suspect they had replaced an earlier tram service
which was long gone before I was born.
Seeing the trolley bus conductor
(yes, we had a two person bus service)
with a long pole reconnecting or swapping the connectors
to the power lines is also something I remember vividly.
You missed the best part about trolley buses: they spend their off time as bumper cars.
Let me explain. When I first moved to SF, I lived down the street from a trolley-bus yard. I will swear forever that late at night when I was riding my bike home from a bar or whatever, I'd see the buses in the yard crashing around on their own. Really. I swear.
I don't believe you.
My man had too many drinks XD
Yuo shouldn't ride your bike while drunk pal.
When holidaying in Switzerland I was surprised to see even the small town of Schaffhauen had trolleybuses; though their higher infrastructure costs made them cost effective only in cities
Living in Schaffhausen myself, we have recently approved a resolution to replace them with battery powered buses - the batteries are just the right size to still be viable here. Interestingly, as small as this town is, we actually used to have even a tram line here - then it was replaced by the trolleybus line you saw.
@@mattherhorn290 Ihr dödel, weningstes het winti denn no Trolleybüs
The way you spelled Schaffhausen "Schaffhauen" Means bearing up a sheep xD
@@mattherhorn290 they should keep some of the overhead wires in place as chargers for on route charging eliminating range issues.
@@bjorn1583 there are no range issues. The batteries are the perfect size to be viable here! Electric battery powered buses aren’t necessarily always bad, in our case they work excellently.
omg thank you for mentioning we're a throw-away society, I hate it and wish we were taught more about the supply chain!!!
Here in Belgrade (Serbia) there are also some old Soviet trolleybuses being used. One thing I love about them is the torque they have. I remember the first time I felt it when I first moved here, there was some traffic jam and some dork parked in a bus lane, so the driver had to go around him and he was pissed off, so he floored the pedal and the acceleration was so strong that it pushed me into the seat. It felt like sitting in an accelerating sports car.
I am from Chișinău, Moldova and we have a very fast and active network of trolley buses which is constantly expanding. We even have a couple of trolley buses with batteries so they can go where the electric lines aren't laid specifically we have one that goes to the airport and then it once it comes back from the airport it hooks up back to the line and keeps going normally while charging its battery back they're pretty cool
We also just got ones here in Yerevan, Armenia. And yes, indeed, they are very very cool. And they could expand the network vefy easily
Очень забавно. This is the ZIU-5 trolleybus. The good old Soviet bus. Kopec, our old man was in a foreign video. Thank you for a rather funny and interesting video) (I apologize, about mistakes in words, this is for the Google translator)
ЛИС
in Poland (Tychy) we called them "ziutek" ;).
I will say this is something San Francisco did right. Say what you want about the city (as a resident I probably agree), but the city does have a great trolleybus system that goes pretty much everywhere
There's a reason for this: Our hills are too steep for a diesel bus to handle; _only_ electric motors can do the job.
But even here, they're replacing the aged-out trolley buses with hybrid trolley/battery powered buses. I was curious when I noticed the 24 Divisadero - the trolley bus route that runs through my neighborhood of Noe Valley - running with its poles down.
Here's what I found on the MUNI website:
The Plan
Between 2016 and 2020 the SFMTA will procure 278 New Flyer trolley coaches to replace and expand our all-electric trolley coach fleet. To date, our trolley coaches are the only coaches that can successfully navigate San Francisco’s difficult topography. For example, these remarkable vehicles can climb a 23% grade with a fully-loaded bus. The SFMTA’s next-generation trolley coaches contain state-of-the-art technology and support technological advances.
The coaches slated for replacement have reached the end of their scheduled useful life. Replacing these vehicles will save time and money spent on maintenance and allow the SFMTA to dedicate more resources to serving our passengers. Expanding the trolley coach fleet will increase our trolley coach service and help us meet growing current and future ridership demand. The bigger and better trolley coach fleet will not only be more reliable, but also safer, and more comfortable for our operators and passengers.
Technological Upgrades
1. Service improvement features
Preventative and predictive maintenance system
Incline Mode to prevent vehicle damage when traversing uneven terrain
2. Safety improvement features
State-of-the-art braking system
Better performance on high-grades
Off-wire capabilities that allow the coaches to run solely on battery power for an extended period
Brighter, more reliable interior lighting.
3. Ridership experience improvement features
Perimeter seat layout with more standing room
Low floor chassis, instead of door steps, for easier boarding and alighting
Environmental Benefits
For almost 85 years Muni has continuously operated a network of vehicles, including trolley coaches, that run on 100% greenhouse gas-free Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric power. Our legacy, or pre-replacement, all-electric trolley coach fleet helped the City meet its 2017 San Francisco Climate Action Strategy goals. Upgrading and expanding this fleet will help the City meet future environmental goals by increasing trolley coach service and growing ridership on the greenest transportation system in North America.
Additionally, upgrading and expanding the trolley coach fleet is in line with the City’s voter-approved Transit-First Policy established in 1973. The policy prioritizes public transit, bicycling, and walking on SF Streets as an economically and environmentally preferable alternative to transportation by individual automobiles. By providing safe, reliable, rapid, and environmentally sustainable transit service, this project will support our city’s economic and population growth while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption.
@@dwc1964 limited battery range really just makes sense, and covers the main flaw of trolley busses of having a fixed route.
I remember once that Jeremy Clarkson on old top gear made a job about how we should just have wires above all the roads like dodgem cars. Little did people realise at the time that this man genuinely had the right idea.
I feel like i am falling into some youtube rabbit hole with urbanism and public transport content
What about weight? Don't the trolley buses also have higher efficiency than BEV buses? Since the BEV needs to carry around its heavy battery, it will use more energy to move itself around. So... unless I'm missing something you will get more bang for the kWh in the trolley than in the BEV, right?
The advantage of battery driven busses is that you can change routes overnight, for example if a street is broken up, or there is some special event. The ideal solution is probably a hybrid version with batteries and an overhead connection. In this case you could have a dense overhead grid in the inner city where many buses ride, and the buses switch to battery mode when driving outside this area.
Tesla is already üsing cobalt free batteries in it's Chinese version. These ferro-lithium batteries have a slightly lowe capacity, but are much cheaper to produce.
@@harenterberge2632 a night charge won't be enough to supply routes for the entire day, and imagine the pressure on the grid when 100s of those will be charging at the same time
@@deathblade2639 That is why with a battery only Bussystem you need charging points along the route, and busroutes are charging locations can be designed for the charging of different busses not to coincide. Nightly simultaneous charging is not a problem because the electricity demand is low at night anyhow. But you seem to miss my main point that a trolley bus with a battery is probably the best solution.
@@harenterberge2632 bruh, I know that, I know that battery trolleybuses are the best option
This type of content is why I pay for internet.
You forgot to mention another (obvious) advantage for the trolleybus: since they don't need large batteries, trolleys don't have to transport the weight of batteries, which may be huge for an electric bus!
Trolley Busses are making their entry into India recently. Trials have been rolled out in 3 cities and if they work out well, they will spread throughout the country quite quick
That's trans lohr ...not trolley buses
Recently in my city (Ukraine) appeared hybrid trolleybuses. It has trolleys for charging and able to move around 20 km without wire coverage. Neat.
I hope your doing okey
Disappeared as fast haha
I hope you are doing well
@@somedudedelespagne bruhhhhh💀
He got Tochka-U'ed
Here's the only argument I need:
Chad trolleybus: no charging, infinite range
Virgin battery electric bus: sad
mic drop, nothing else to add
You still have to charge your electric bus.
@@PersonManManManMan you need charging stations and batteries are very expensive!
"infinite range" yeah for where you build expensive infrastructure, you can't fill a country with such a grid
@@jankkman5546 It's not supposed to fill a country. Trolleys are for local traffic only.
One big problem with trolley buses tend to lead to a route network that is nearly impossible to expand or adapt to a growing city. This is because, unlike a battery routes which is easy to change, every tweak to a trolley route requires installing new overhead wire at a cost of several million dollars per mile. It also leads to bus routes being decided by NIMBY neighbors not wanting trolley wire on their street, rather than actual transit needs. In practice, this results in a trolley network that is largely frozen to match what the city was back in 1950, which leads to bus routes that abruptly end in awkward areas.
Trolley buses also struggle to go around any kind of obstruction in the road, whether an accident or construction. They shut down completely during power outages, leaving passengers stranded. This means that in order to run trolley buses, agencies also need to have a fleet of diesel or battery buses on standby, just in case they're needed as backup.
The video also ignores potential for future technology improvements to reduce the environmental cost of battery buses, of which there is active research going on.
Ultimately, the solution is not installing trolley wire on every street with a bus route, but improved battery technology.
I do agree with your point that the video doesn’t acknowledge the potential for battery technology and manufacturing and mining methods to improve. Battery technology has progressed at an incredible pace and I don’t imagine it will be long before many current problems are solved.
New Flyer trolley buses in San Francisco no longer require the driver to get out most of the time. With a press of a button, they can lower the poles, or when they get to “unbrellas” they can raise the poles from a push of a button and the unbrella will guide the poles to the wires. It’s pretty cool and they also can go a few miles off wire and can still go up to 40-45miles per hour.
When I visited Budapest, my friends couldn't understand my excitement when I saw a trolleybus. "It's a trolleybus! Have you ever been on a trolleybus before?" They are very rare in Spain.
You should visit Lublin, Poland definitely! There are a lot of trolleybuses. 😊
Maybe in terms of energy use, but they are less practical when there are detours, or on longer distances.
But probably best would be to combine the two into one bus. Trollying and charging in the cities, running on batteries in outer areas.
Actually this is already done in Beijing and many Chinese cities, and it's been done for years
@@georgH In China, those city buses have capacitors, though. But those aren't sufficient to serve rural area's around cities. So probably a (limited) battery pack is needed there.
@@Skoda130 I wasn't aware of their use of capacitors on the mixed trolley-autonomous vehicles. Those account for the vast majority of buses within the city centers, like Beijing.
No idea about rural areas. Thanks for letting me know.
Where did you get this info, though?
@@georgH Just google/youtube "Shanghai electric buses". :-)
Different places require different solutions. There's really no need for a trolly in smaller towns, but a bus to take you from one town to another works perfectly fine
Funny enough, you can co-utilize trolley bus network for EV charging, for those who scream "nO iNfrAsTruCtUrE"
One of the main arguments for ripping out trams and trolleybuses from my home town (London, England) was that diesel motorbuses gave better operational flexibility because, if there were roadworks, they could divert much more easily. But we could make hybrid trolleybuses / battery electric buses that can move under their own power over short distances. No need for high-capacity lithium batteries - much lower performance and capacity batteries would do, just to allow them to move under their own power when required.
The best choice - trolleybus with a battery. It charges battery in motion under wires and runs on battery where there are no wires. It has all the advantages of the battery bus (it can run through areas where there are no overhead wires (battery capacity of 30 km in St. Petersburg), can operate if there is an incident with the wires, can overtake other trolleybuses) and the trolleybus (no need to wait in the depot/stop for charging, batteries take less space in the cabin so there is more space for passengers)
Indeed, why choose when you can easily have (most of) the best of both worlds(!)
Slightly heavier than a "pure" trolleybus but I would think that it's not by as much (especially when some have diesel engines for a similar purpose) and the reduction in battery demand (as well as them not needing to be fast charged a lot of the time) is only a good thing.
@@fetchstixRHD Point is that with the hybrid solution you do not need a battery that stores charge for hundreds of miles, but only for a few or a dozen. Makes a huge difference. But there are also some disadvantages. You cannot charge as fast through poles when the trolleybus doesn't move, and you have to have double insulation (since electricity can be outside the vehicle, eg. the wire can come down and fall onto the roof) which is more expensive.
"in USSR, where resources are very limited..." *looks at the infinite mountain of gas and oil
Yeah they didn't use them out of necessity but just saw them as efficient. I don't think many people realise that Russia still got more gas reserves than OPEC combined
@@Smexy_af They needed save the oil for exports, because oil was practically only source of income of USSR.
@@edfx HA "only icome source", are you sure about that... have you any consideration how large the USSR was and how many different types of resources it gathered... hell, they'd even have Alaska if the stupid Tsar didn't sell it to the US for a handful of gold (what moronic idiots those Tsars were...).
@@edfx what about weapons exports?
Electronics, electrical and medical equipment to Anti American 3rd world countries
Titanium, Zinc. They are pretty mineral rich, just so you know.
@@xgamerbih I think they meant that oil and gas were the major, key sources of foreign currency, more important than others, so they would be saved for trading
One other thing that needs to be considered about batteries are that they’re simply less effective in the cold. Anyone driving an electric car in places like Minnesota will tell you that their effective range gets cut in half in the winter.
No it doesn't. I live further up north, in a colder place, and it sure as hell doesn't get cut in half. Not even the anti-EV people claim such utter nonsense.
Trolley buses combine some of the worst parts of trams and regular buses. Not a fan of BEV cars, either. Electric bicycles are the way to go, unless you need to travel for long distances.
Chevy bolt batteries can lose up to 20% in really cold weather (made by LG, i think), but Tesla batteries only lose 2%, less than having the AC on in a ICE car.
Tesla has the best batteries in the market right now. Give it 5 years, and everyone will have batteries like Tesla.
Sodium battery’s would be nice to see as an battery type in these trolly busses. From what I’ve seen they are better for the environment but have a lower energy density, which for trolly busses wouldn’t matter as much.
Cardiff, Wales, had an extensive trolleybus system with single and double deck trolleybuses. They were also fitted with (lead acid) batteries which allowed short distance movement in depots and for short diversions.
Alas, they were all replaced by diesel buses- very short sighted!
not really. Buses are cheaper to operate than trolleybuses with a wired system that's why they were replaced
@@MiroBG359 That was the reason given at the time, but it led to an increase in local particulate and Nox emissions. I don't know if you are a UK resident, but the sale of diesel cars (for a start) will be banned in the UK from 2030 because of this, even though diesel engines are so efficient compared with other prime movers. The resale value of diesel cars has plummeted as a result.
A wired trolleybus emits no local exhaust pollution and does not have to carry the extra weight of battery electric buses.
Even london used to have them till ww2 where people were too lazy to replace some cantanery that could easily be mass produced.
Even better: Trolleybuses with dedicated lanes
And their logical continuation - trams 🚊
@@kagenekoUA Definitely! Trolleybuses are unable to leave their lane anyway, so why not put a railway beneath and make it even more efficient?
@@kagenekoUA Road neutrality has worked wonders!
@@eselain7601 Honestly, the only argument I have against this is that the sound of a tram taking a turn is one of the worst things I've ever had to hear.
@@balazsnagy5781 That's a good point, indeed. X-)
You didn't mention the weight of batteries, which with the amount of battery weight a bus would be carrying would be significant, and the effect of weight on wear and tear on the bus's tires and suspension components, but also the roads
In the GDR they used Trollytrucks - just in big factories. There was Industry park with a Trolly bus line through it and between the buses in the schedule time (each hour or so) there was trolly truck with a gyromotor transporting stuff from one fabric building to the others.
We need more trolley buses in new York
Especially in the upper manhattan and harlem area, because trolley buses excel in hilly places.
There are NO trolleybuses in New York. They ran in Brooklyn until 26 July 1960.
@@MarceloBenoit-trenes they know that
I agree but you need to put them on to battery mode too because some route do involve highways example is the Q70 using I-278 & combined Grand Central and Northern State Parkway from Woodside to LGA Airport or M60sbs Upper West Side to LGA via I-278 Triboro Bridge Quill Depot. Although the M60sbs gets XE60
they should take inspiration from cities like Zurich
Well, looks like a have something new to bug my Mayor about.
Trolleybus wires are a beautiful work of art 😀
Capacitor electric buses are a great middle way.
It removes overhead wires and establishes the charging infrastructure to the bus stops
I agree that TBs are great. However, it is more like the love child of a tram and a normal bus. So, if neither meets the local demands, it might be a good solution. Battery buses can be good if you cannot use wires in the streets.
We need more trolley busses and trams/light rail systems around the world, yeah trams are more popular than the trolleybuses. Even the regular bus is more popular by politicians, sadly
trams and trolley are expensive to build and have expensive infrastructure to support the lines, compared to buses
@@MiroBG359 but they are clean and have cheaper operating costs than buses
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa no, they don't have cheaper operating costs than buses. How would they be cheaper than busses when a wired network has to be built and maintaned?
@@MiroBG359 1.they don't need to change the oil once a month or change the battery every 5 years like a regular bus. electric motors can last for 10-20 years to be replaced 2. doesn't need a lot of charging places. 3. Trams can carry more passengers than buses. and steel tires are more resistant than rubber tires. 4. electricity from a direct cable saves at least 20% of the battery. and there is no risk of the battery exploding. 5. trams and trolleys. can run 24 hours a day instead of electric buses that have to be charged. both systems are only expensive when built but then the operational costs are cheap, yes cheap because there are no parts that need to be replaced for 20 years of operation
@@MiroBG359 most importantly they are cleaner and more environmentally friendly than buses.
And more recently electric lorry designers have been toying with a revolutionary idea... Stick wires over highway/motorway/autobahns run a positive current down one and make the other neutral... Have a battery onboard to allow for first and last legs when you aren't on the most major of roads... Hey presto you don't need tons of batteries in order to go as far as a tank of fuel while not dramatically increasing your vehicle's weight (cutting into your maximum load)... Crazy, I wonder where they got the idea for those wires from...
I live in latvia and it's strange to think that other places dont have trams/trolleybuses/busses and trains
I lived in a city with trolley buses in the 90's: the trolley would come off the wires _all the time._ And the bus had to stop for the driver to fix the problem. I hope tech got better.
it did, there's been a bunch of advances in Pantograph design mostly as a result of growing electrification of railways. besides having to get the trolly bus back on wires is nowhere near the inconveniences imposed by battery busses especially when you include the more hidden ones
You can always have a hybrid one with a battery for off wire use
@@xcalium9346 you still have to stop and manually put the trolley back on the wire.
I've seen it happen before but where I live there's a lot of trolley buses and it's super rare for them to disconnect from the wires.
@@ChilapaOfTheAmazons No it is done from inside of cabin on new trolleybusses
czcams.com/video/0oj9IO7Xq1E/video.html
My reactions at 1:13
"MBTA, neat!"
"Wait, I know exactly where that is"
"I’ve driven a truck through there"
Ah, Cambridge Commons. As you come out of the tunnel, you will see the former Radcliffe on your left and Harvard Divinity on your right. It may only be another twenty blocks before you find parking... you know, around the Cameron Ave yards.
Great video. Just subscribed to your channel. I am reading alot on transit systems and their history in preparation for a book ( in french i am from Montréal Québec. ) and in the older books they called trolley buses "Trackless trolleys". I like this term because it makes the distinction between the two types of electric buses.
Looking forward to watching the rest of your videos.
Im so glad to have been recommended this channel all of a sudden
The only disadvantages of trolleybuses is that they need the wire, wich means difficult to re-route and unable overtake other trolleybuses
Nope, most trolleybus in China have battery to run wirelessly. The most disadvantage is they are slow, especially entering wire crossing. Also, wire is considered "ugly" here. All of our city's wires have been put underground.
@@fhs7838 there are wire crossings that don't make trolleybuses slow down
That is already solved with trolleybuses with small batteries that is enough to enable them to travel for few miles without power. They are used in Brno and even Prague which is slowly reviving trolleybuses and long time gone tram lines.
@@warmike Well, that need a complete upgrade of all trolleybus' polls and all crossings. Too expensive if the system is already huge.
@@MrToradragon In Beijing, we have been using this solution since 2002. But the power battery is still weak that not allows quick accelerate and do not support AC power. Though now we get a BEV downgrade trolleybus model, with 100km+ battery operate range, it's just a BEV with polls. But still, that's detour from the trolley bus keys: reducing battery cost.
Many (many) years ago the suburb of Boston where I lived replaced their old trolley cars with trolley buses. We appreciated that they could pick us up at the curb instead of in the middle of the street. But our area was hilly, and during snowstorms only vehicles with tire chains could handle the hills. The model of trolleybus that we had could not use tire chains because of a grounding problem, and consequently, during a bad storm they would all pile up at the bottom of a hill and block traffic. They were beyond their reach to the overhead wires and required tow trucks to get them back into service. Sadly, they were eventually replaced by diesel buses.
The chief complaint about trolley buses is the appearance of the overhead wires. I know there are hybrid systems that can operate both from overhead and from batteries, but those vehicles would be more expensive. Frankly, the appearance of wires doesn't bother me.
Eventually there will be batteries with a larger capacity that are made from less exotic materials and we can do away with the ugly overheads, but until then trolleybuses are a good solution. Anything would be better than diesel!
sadly I read an article about Boston planning to replace the trolleybuses by electric (battery) buses in 2022. Which is sad news. In my opinion they should replace diesel buses first!
Trolleybuses are a good solution for reloading the batteries on very tight timetable lines: they go under the wire until the battery will be charged
We got those where I live in Brazil. They connect São Paulo, Diadema, São Bernardo and Santo André. They have their own lane in the street, so they are never stuck in the traffic (even though they break quite often and make us arrive late at work anyway).
Já faz alguns anos que estão substituindo por ônibus elétricos
Just about all future trolleybus models will have batteries built in.
The only differences wil be how much battery capacity each one comes with. And going back as far as the 1960s some trolleybus models had on board battery (though very small) for crossing thru non-powered zones, or abrupt
route changes, or emergencies, etc...
What I love about your channel the most is that you’ve combined my love for transit and Vulfpeck
haha thanks, you should check out this video too, where I made some Vulf vaporwave edits;
czcams.com/video/pwWr_ManIzg/video.html
Soviet ZIU 5 what a pity that my city did not leave them for the Museum (google translation im sorry i dont know english)
А какой город не оставил такое чудо для музея?
@@KalitaFox Донецк
@@yarem4uk.r мда, это печально...
@@KalitaFox это, это печально.
Seeing buslines from my home town feels strange... But also great. Though usually youtubers seem to avoid Switzerland, everything's too costly:D
I like a lot the efficiency, however I completely dislike the hanging cables above the streets.
If you dislike hanging cables above the streets, then you also dislike trams as well.
Do you also dislike hanging cables above the railways?
@@automation7295 Yes, I also dislike tram as well, but not railways. The reason is that we spend most of our life in the city, not outside of it. And the architecture around us has a great impact on our culture and individual characters even if we aren't conscious about it. I mostly prefer old cities with classical architecture. And while there are ways to combine it with modern efficiency, I think that this type of transport is not one of them.
Hmm... now that I think twice about it, there are cities that get it right, but I grew up in communist cities where it just created a depressing atmosphere, so I am a bit biased.
@@automation7295 there are wireless trams.
@@ci-cy3ww Wireless trams requires changed, just like electric buses.
@@florentinalexandruiftimie8214 You also dislike cable cars (not ones in San Francisco) and ski lifts? They need cables, most things need cables to work or get power from.
Some elevators need cables, suspension bridge have think cables. So you dislike hanging cables above the streets, would you also dislike hanging cables above the streets in you lived in 1960's?
You did your research, I appreciate that. Also, you showed an RTA light rail unit from Cleveland. Guess where I happen to live near? Cleveland. Good to know someone has taken interest in our system.
Yoow! Happy to see that much footage of my beautiful hometown, Bern in this vid! ;)
This Saturday Boston is retiring their last trolleybuses to make way for battery electric buses in the next 2 years. Searched for this video because I’d seen it in my recommended before and was curious how they compare.
not to mention the huge environmental cost involved in making those batteries. Trollybusses would be greener in every reguard. The only real detrement is the visual impact of the overhead whires.
Also in the materials department: Vancouver's electricity source is largely hydro-electric power. While it is renewable, there is still damage to ecosystems - see the site C dam situation.
We can get electricity from less destructive methods. In Ontario, most of our power is nuclear which is pretty clean. Therefore Toronto's streetcars are actually nuclear powered.
Dams do have an impact but it's very localized to the surrounding land and the river. Any CO2 produced while generating power affects the whole planet.
Thank you for showing Bern, Switzerland so many times!
I was listening carefully, then I heard the USSR national anthem and started to listen epically.
It's even better when you know all the words.
Very nice video. The city where i born (Esslingen, Germany) also use trolley busses.
They were not sure of they want to keep it, but luckily they decided to buy new trolley busses. That's mean the future of trolley busses is safe for another 20 years.
The old busses were from Van-Hool and the new are from Solaris.
TrolleyBuses suck, they require a connection to work, in certain places they can't make an emergency detour or even change lanes due to the connection they have. Several times the connection is lost, and the driver has to go out and connect it to the network again. His electrical network is sensitive to any simple tree branch that falls on the wires, generating a short circuit that will shut down an entire session (and stop the buses that run on it). The network uses high voltage, which is definitely not safe, the bus connection system requires maintenance due to wear and tear, the electrical network generates visual pollution in the city, and high maintenance costs.
Electric buses to be perfect just need a new type of more efficient battery, which is about to be released.
Why not put battery in a trolley bus?
This is something which I should have mentioned somewhere but forgot. Most modern trolley buses have a small battery to allow running off of the wires, so in a way they are hybrids.
@@alanthefisher yeah, i always thinking of that. so we dont need cable in intersection.
@@zzzz5695 whats wrong with cabels at intersections? i mean you do not wanna run on and off the wire as you have to re attach to the wire everytime
@@zzzz5695 trolley buses don't have any problem at intersections they smoothly transition, watch other video of trolley buses to get how they work.
@@alanthefisher Or, they can have a CNG engine or something to power the motor which is even more environment friendly, but I don't think it's as efficient
0:48
Goliath:
Boss, I will now pick up your stranded passenger
0:57
Nurpo:
No, Noo, NOOO!!
The resource point is the most important one indeed. Bussin' video!
pfff this is lovely. my city has incredibly strong public transport network, and the trollybuses are a part of them! unfortunately, over the years, the amount of trollies has been decreased and now there's only 3 left out of the previous 9 trolly lines. and they're gonna be phased out by ~2023 too. :(
Simply outrageous
Which city?
Great footage of the red trolleybuses of the city of Bern. Numerous cities in Switzerland have trolleybuses and trams. They are both definitely more cost effective on a long run as a mass transport system in cities.
I’ve always loved trolleybuses, or better yet, trams. I think if it’s gonna be locked to a specific route then trams are superior but if it’s gonna be a bit more flexible than trolly buses are a great solution, especially since they can be given batteries to let them run on small sections away from the wires, letting them make use of the flexibility their rubber wheels give them.
Seeing a trolleybus just makes a person happy.
Perhaps there are scenarios where the two could be combined. E.g. dual purpose the trolly bus infrastructure as charging infrastructure and then when busses are charged have them disconnect and run peripheral routes on battery.
To make things more complicated: modern trolleybuses (like the ones in Bern, which you used in this video) are actually battery electric buses. The power source for the motor is always the battery, which gets constantly charged via the overhead wires (Swiss manufacturer HESS even doesn't call trolleybuses trolleybuses anymore on their website, they're now all electric buses with different charging systems). This allowes the trolleybus to run small sections without overhead wires, e. g. in case of a diversion because of construction works. Also in Zürich, the overhead wires on complex intersections were removed to save on maintenance cost and the trolleybuses now run without wires between the adjacent stations. In Bern, the battery in the trolleybuses is actually about the same size as the one in the battery electric buses which charge at the terminus (ca. 40 km of range).
If trolleybuses or battery electric buses are better really depends on the use case. In cities with an existing trolley network, trolleys are normally better because they don't need additional charging infrastructure. Also for long lines, the charging time at the terminus might not be long enough. In the case of Bern, there are now trolleybuses on the already existing trolley lines (plus extensions) and battery electric buses on other lines (currently one, more will be introduced in the next years) with no existing overhead wires.
I've seen these in Riga, Latvia and always thought they were a great idea for inner cities. Simple and efficient.
I lived in Moscow and worked as a trolleybus operator for some time of my life. The newer machines have a large Li-Ion battery that is charged in motion. This lets the vehicle operate off-wire, in cases out outages and also draw current from the battery for increased acceleration, especially up hills. There's is a special mirror for the driver to keep an eye on the wires (now a camera) but overall modern vehicles are much less hassle to drive in terms of protocols, noise ans the general. It's also quieter and basically better for everyone. Did I also say Russian transit vehicles have 3/4 (articulated) doors with boarding from any door.
Fun fact:
There's some trolley buses running around in the city of Mexico right now. Though, they are not very common and due to their poor maintenance (thanks gov,) they often break down.
Most of the public transport from there is fossil fuel based actually, so It might be a great idea to revive that's left of the Trolley system soon.
Yeah, that's the point! Sadly our mayor doesn't want to understand that.
Would like to have seen more discussion about overhead cable installation for trolley busses. Seems like a major oversight
USSR limited resources? In a country of that size nothing was limited.
Also on topic of efficiency - trolleys don't have to carry the battery.
That trolley sound in the beginning sure brought up memories.
Soviet and Russia don't have lithium.