To address the trolley bus comments - yes, they are better than battery buses, but my city already has a tram network and the bus network covers too much territory to justify putting trolley cables.
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
449 points (99.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
13776 readers
744 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
The best electric busses have electric lines overhead, so you don't need big batteries.
It’s never enough for you people.
People love to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They oppose incremental progress and preserve the status quo as a result.
Everything converges into either crabs or trains.
A lot less versatile and a lot more disruptive to the community.
Not entirely against them but I dont have them a the gold standard.
Kinda hard to do that in the suburbs.
Strong disagree. If you have telephone poles by the road, the power is already there
No telephone poles anywhere near my house. Only along main roads at least 30 mins walk away.
All the household electrical wiring, internet, cable TV, telephone, natural gas, and water services are underground.
Trolley busses are also much better for steep inclines!
But.. But think about the battery megacorps!
Boston had newish hybrid deisel trolleys until 2023, when they replaced with battery electric buses.
They claimed the catenary was too expensive to maintain, especially with roadwork. Meanwhile the battery electric buses are completely self-contained, independent, and there are multiple manufacturers.
I’m sure it didn’t help that they were over complicated. This was a new transit line where everyone wanted a subway, but it was too complicated. They needed more capacity than a bus, able to maneuver tight corners, electric to go through tunnels, and unconstrained in traffic. They created Frankenstein monster and called it “bus rapid transit”. Partly dedicated roadway, partly in traffic. Partly above ground, partly below ground. Partly deisel, partly trolley. Bigger than buses but articulated to fit through narrow streets
My city is also playing with electric buses buying different brand and models. One Chinese brand they have drives me crazy because it rings a bell as it moves. It's louder and more annoying than the gas buses.
I wish my city was running the electric buses at night. Without the noise of other traffic to help mask it, the gas ones sound like explosions as they drive by at 3a. Unfortunately the bus company said it's cheaper to charge them at night when electricity costs the least.
I am for electrification but I just can't get behind electric buses.
My city made some study last year and the best way forward in terms of public transport is expansion of trolley bus network. With batteries and constant use it just doesn't make much economic sense. If you can build the wiring it is much better in long run. You don't have to have 100% coverage, 70+% is enough for partial battery powered trolley bus, then it starts to be economically feasible in the operating cost sense.
Also they will need to build some kind of metro system - probably as an extension of commuter trains.
Isn't a trolley bus just an electric bus with a "antenna" on top to charge its battery from an overhead cable?
BEV busses need much larger batteries, while trolley busses can get away with a very small battery
Yes, and they're much cheaper and last longer, since they don't need big batteries
Keeping that in mind: would a good solution not be to have electric busses with batteries, which also have the umbilicle on a spring loaded or electronically actuated system to raise it to connect to the wires? This would allow said wires which would normally connect a trolley system to be placed along main strips while still allowed busses to travel along lesser used streets. The mobility of busses with the power system of trolleys to ensure they don't have to stop to recharge or refuel, they can just connect on the main strip and keep their battery banks full.
I'd even say with something like this a supercapacitor bank to quickly charge those to 100% on connection then allow those to charge the batteries. This would help to reduce charge cycles on the battery and help to keep the batteries in a constant charge or constant discharge state instead of having every bump in the road disconnect the batteries from the grid.
would a good solution not be to have electric busses with batteries, which also have the umbilicle on a spring loaded or electronically actuated system to raise it to connect to the wires?
Trains. Believe it or not. Boston still uses deisel commuter trains, including one “deisel under the wire” on the electrified Amtrak line. Everyone has been pushing to electrify but it’s expensive. Their solution is battery trains. They can run them on battery now, while tAking power from catenary as it’s built. Seems like a huge waste of money, but I guess you have to transition somehow
So you're saying the better alternative to electric busses is...electric busses
I was excited when we started getting electric buses here, then I learnt we used to have trolley buses until the mid 70s. At least we got a tram line in 2021 so that's great
Yeah..... We kinda solved this problem in the late 1800's. Overhead electric or powered third rail (depending on need) is really peak public transportation when it comes to cost and efficiency over time.
People always harp on the infrastructure cost when it comes to rail, but turn a complete blind eye on extreme cost of things like road maintenance and need for lane widening caused by everyone driving huge ass half filled busses everywhere.
Road maintenance is one of the largest expenses for most states in the US, and it's largely so much worse than other countries because our dependency on the trucking industry. We're all basically constantly subsidizing the trucking industry at great cost instead of funding adequate public rail.
Toronto has overhead electric trolleys. They got rid of the buses, but only because GM refused to make them. The fleet of overhead electric buses were 50 years old, they never broke.
But I get the appeal of the ebus it just sounds cheaper. One city I won't name started to build trolley bus network again after they got rid of it in 70's (because of metro construction and expansion of trams), but they just doing it bit idiotically by wanting to have like 30% of it on wires and rest run on batteries.
Why? Because the infrastructure is just more expensive upfront.
Will it work? Nobody knows, people that are building it lobby to get it up to at least 50/50 then it is maybe just feasible.
I think that roads and buses have place in the transportation but you just need more options not just that.
Edinburgh rolled them out somewhere in 2017 i think? Most of the buses are still diesel powered
jelly... nothing like biking on the wall lane next to the the highway and getting smogged by a gas bus' top exhaust right in your face, right after overexerting to get up there in the first place
My city also has been rolling out electric buses the last few years and they ride so much like their gas counterpart that I wouldn't be able to tell which is which without the design/colour scheme they chose to tell you which is which.
We have nearly all electric buses here in Oslo now, and whenever I wind up on a diesel bus I think I'm going to get hearing damage
Electric buses are far from silent, but WOW the amount of noise and stink we've just been tolerating with fossil fuels is insane. Even absent climate change, that'd be worth switching to electric vehicles.
I almost fucking asphixiated on a diesel bus yesterday because for some reason we had to stop for 5 minutes in the centre of the city and since it was quite cold the exhaust stayed low and just crept into the bus. Fucking traffic.
Poznań, Poland has 25 hydrogen buses, and plans to have 9 more by May 2026
What is the source of energy to produce the hydrogen? The carbon footprint of hydrogen is pretty bad unless you have abundent renewable energy.
If it's in Poland, it's most likely coal unfortunately
Well Germany has to sell their shitty lignite coal to somebody..... It's not like their environmental laws will allow them to burn it in Germany. But Poland is fine.....no one cares about the polish greenhouse gasses. That's Poland's problem....right?
or from plastic burning. Poland is where most EU "recycled plastics" end up being incinerated.
So has mine! Although the buses in my city are hybrid, not fully electric.
which city?
Zagreb, Croatia.
Nice, i really love electric bus, it doesn't stink and it's quiet. My city rolled out some half decade ago, but it doesn't last as the company that made it(Chinese) doesn't support it anymore. Then we got another batch like last year i think. Hopefully this one last.
Bravo but can we not put big-ass stickers on the windows please
They always put a promo sticker when introducing new buses into the fleet.