2009-07-17
post/143401625
Cue the trolleybus: a wonderful merging of technologies to solve a curious, quirk of a problem. In the UK, the trolleybus is obsolete (partly because Britons think that receiving a combustion engine for their seventeenth birthday is a rite of passage), but they’re still going strong in parts of Europe, Russia and China.
As the article mentions in passing, trolleybuses are also used in San Francisco, where they seem to work out OK most of the time (although the drivers do have to be taught how to hook the power cables back up when they jump off the lines). It does put power cables into lots of tourist photos, but I think that’s probably worth it.
Mind you, this is also a city that still has cable cars, and trams (or as they’re known in the US, streetcars). I’m sure people who actually live in SF can expand on how the trolleybuses came to supplant the streetcars when the rails were pulled up.
(This is a great photo, by the way.)
