this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
397 points (73.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
9817 readers
664 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Let's think then of electric VEHICLES. you know buses, trucks included.
Being against electric cars, at this moment, is being for combustion cars.
The cool thing about electric city busses: you wouldn't even need to have them on batteries. They could be attached to electric wires
My city has been stuck trying to expand its tram system for decades at this point, but whenever I mention that we could introduc trolley buses instead people look at me like I'm crazy!
They just make so much sense for our use case. We're a hilly city, so the rubber tyres are more suitable than steel on steel, the routes they want to build on don't really have the space for separated infrastructure, so having buses that can run on the roads will be less disruptive, and by not having to install rails they're a lot cheaper too.
The main reason I dislike buses compared to rail is that the very things the engineers and operators consider to be advantages -- the less need for permanently-installed infrastructure and therefore greater flexibility for changing routes -- I consider to be disadvantages because it means the routes can't be relied upon to stay put. With rail, once that line is in, it's in, and it's safe for the people along it to plan their lifestyles accordingly. Transit-oriented development, for example, isn't likely to happen along a bus route the way it is along a rail line. Residents are a lot more hesitant to go car-free when the risk exists that the bus route they rely on could be cancelled or changed one day. The visible infrastructure of a rail line signals long-term investment in the community (thus making it more attractive for development) in a way that mere bus stops do not.
I realize that you're talking about trolley-buses, not regular ones, so the existence of the catenary wires might help mitigate these issues. Still, I don't think it would be a strong enough signal to achieve the desired effect (especially since the wires are the ugly part of an electrified transit system, and the community getting only the ugly part is kind of a signal of its own, LOL).
keep organizing around it! Strong Towns could be a big ally in this fight. Get some people to join you and take turns using your speaking times in city council meetings to explain why electric trolleys would be better suited for the needs of the city
You see the mistake you made was saying it's cheaper we don't like cheap expenses here in America
That's a stupid idea. You'd need extremely long cables that would keep getting tangled up around the city. They would have to be disconnected and the bus would have to connect to closest socket to continue on the route. They would also need to have huge spools of cable, and soon the city would be drowning in cables. You'd have to keep rebuilding all the buildings on top of cables. Again and again. Then at some point, the city would be so high there wouldn't be enough air for people to breathe. Do this everywhere, and you may even considerably slow down Earth's rotation.
/j
trolleybus go brrrr
Seriously though, those poles come off weekly and the bus driver has to get out and fiddle with them to reattach. It wastes 5 minutes and slows down the bus behind it.
That's what no one mentions: with these poles one bus can't pass another bus.
Rails would be less prone to attack from psychopaths
This is more or less why I voted for Biden.
How'd that go?
Better than expected, TBH.
Quite well, thanks for asking.