San Francisco and Boston: a tale of two trolleybuses

A couple of weeks ago, Miss E had a business trip to San Francisco, so I came along the weekend before. Her Airbnb was in the western part of town, an area called The Richmond (note: not Richmond, which is somewhere completely different). It’s a nice area, pretty quiet, mostly two and three-story residential, most with a garage taking up the first floor.

Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The old part of town is way east, so we took a bus to tour around down there. Actually it was a trolleybus, an electric bus powered by dual overhead wires. I gather that trolleybuses are favored in San Francisco over diesel because of their better ability to climb hills.

The trolleybus was comfortable, but stopped pretty much every block. Short distances between stops seems to be a common problem with municipal bus systems. I presume it’s because locals all demand that the stops be close to their house, and claim hardship if they are farther way. But that’s just a guess. All I know is that the quiet, quickly accelerating bus could never get up to speed because it was stopping again almost immediately. This made the trip way longer than it need to be.

The ride did make me miss trolleybuses, or trackless trolleys, as they were once known in the Boston area. Even when I moved here in the 80s, most people just called them electric buses. A year ago, all the ones in my area (Cambridge, Watertown, Belmont ) were eliminated.

Adam E. Moreira, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

The MBTA gave a lot of reasons why they had to go, and the reasons were familiar: the system was old and hard to maintain, and very few cities use them anymore. Some road work meant it would be expensive to replace the overhead wires, so why not just take them down since new battery-powered buses would be here soon? Using diesel buses would be a stopgap just until the new buses show up in 2024. Well, given the MBTA’s record of project rollout, we’ll have to see how long this stopgap is.

I got the impression the electric buses just seemed a bit dowdy. And I get the San Francisco keeps its system because of its hills. They are even converting diesel lines to trolleybuses.

I think battery-powered buses will have their problems, including the complex charging infrastructure, unanticipated maintenance problems (these are always unanticipated), and the disposal issues. People need to take a harder look at a working system before they decide it should be replaced by something sexier.

Like everyone else with an interest in public transportation, improving urban life, and mitigating climate change, I want the MBTA to make good decisions. I’m just not sure this was one of them.