241–250 of 347 posts
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Trolleybusses are electric, they just get their electricity from overhead wires, similar to a railway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
Good luck rerouting them when you change their path thru the city.
Why don't we bring trolleybuses back? They rock! You don't need polluting batteries in order to run them, just some copper to put the wires up, and we've been master of this "technology" for almost a century now. Also, we should extend or re-introduce the tram network.
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When I picture a black cab I don’t picture it actually moving, their traditional role is surely to line the streets or sit in traffic with the engine running, decorating the air with particulates.
Also allow wealthy (usually white male) businessmen to beat the traffic by clogging bus lanes.
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Do the hybrid ones have any clever way to re-connect? All the busses I've seen have this system where the driver has to walk to the back and pull on some rubber bands to put the tentacles back on the wires. If this could be automated, then perhaps you could omit wires at big junctions where it's most messy, needs lots of points, etc. Building & maintaining wires with 90% coverage might cost half as much as 100% cover…
If you search YouTube for “trolleybus automatic” there are a couple of videos. Looks like there are special locations where the catenary has a little plastic guide on it. It also looks quite slow.
Chattanooga has operated electric buses since the 1990s. I would be surprised if this wasn't known by many municipalities in the US, but still it hasn't taken off. Numbers from late 90s indicate that fuel and maintenance costs would be about 1/4 the cost of diesel( https://afdc.energy.gov/files/pdfs/chatt_cs.pdf ). I guess range has been the problem stopping adoption.
Buses seemed to me to be a rare case where they are so big and heavy anyway, that low energy density from a cheap and old-fashioned lead acid battery could still work. But you're right, I started searching, and found a 2005 US DOT analysis that said otherwise: https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/Electric... > Consequently, powering a full-size bus would require a battery pack that is unacceptably larg…
Why don't we bring trolleybuses back? They rock! You don't need polluting batteries in order to run them, just some copper to put the wires up, and we've been master of this "technology" for almost a century now. Also, we should extend or re-introduce the tram network.
This is easy. Diesel buses were more cost effective than electric trolleys, which is why they replaced all the trolleys with diesel buses. Electric (battery) buses are expected to be more cost effective than the diesel buses they’re replacing. Thanks to the transitive property of inequality, we would expect electric buses to be more cost effective than electric trolleys.
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It works in china because CCP thinks, "if it's better for business/control/money/people, we'll do it, doesn't matter if some of us loses in this" Basically, if you are in goverment and you've stock holding in Gas cars, and they are lobbying, gas cars stay. But in China, CCP will simply acquire controlling interest in new winning EV firm if it's better from the perspective of power/money/control over an industry, so t…
They are exporting more petrol vehicles than ever before.
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It works in china because CCP thinks, "if it's better for business/control/money/people, we'll do it, doesn't matter if some of us loses in this" Basically, if you are in goverment and you've stock holding in Gas cars, and they are lobbying, gas cars stay. But in China, CCP will simply acquire controlling interest in new winning EV firm if it's better from the perspective of power/money/control over an industry, so t…
And yet, in a weird way it's working in a way that aligns to wider, long-term, individual interests. By making the government the controlling monopoly, China ends up with a form of capitalism where externalities apply to other countries rather than surrounding corporations and citizens. That's kinda interesting compared to how most other capitalist nations are handling their shit right now. You can do 'common good' s…
Not according to the devastated ecosystem, flooded archaeological ruins, and 1.3 million people once living around what is now the three gorges dam.