10 thoughts on “Random Pic”

  2. Makes a neat photo composition but does bring some things to mind.

    Hardly anybody thinks of the horse poop problem in urban areas before internal combustion engines. The people who keep pushing mass urban transit similarly don’t think of the tracks and wires needed for trolleys, or big busses running up and down streets.

  3. New tech gets layered over old tech as often as it replaces it.

    We used to have an electric bus network here–the infrastructure for that system took a long time to disappear.

    The mention of manure brings up the thought of how bad horse-cities stank; and that’s even after mass modern sanitation and understanding of public health. Shakespeare’s London and Mozart’s Vienna must have been awful.

  4. Some municipalities operate buses whose bodies are configured to look like old-fashioned electric trolley cars. In my area there is no charge to the riders of these buses. It would probably be better if these cities weren’t in the bus business, but at least they aren’t running actual light-rail trolley systems as a few cities actually do.

  6. I had to look twice to see they aren’t trolley catenaries. Pretty sure they’re cable TV drops, so probably U.S. I’ve seen recent pictures of working trolley bus systems in Russia and Europe. Maintaining the catenary system is expensive and there’s the issue of having the open wires strung so close to the ground. usually 600 or 1300 volts and usually DC.

  7. They struck me immediately as catenaries. (A word I did not know, thanks.)

    We now have some electric trolleys as a feature of getting north and south along our Main Street, but they are modern tourist rides rather than serious mass transit.

  8. }}} Some municipalities operate buses whose bodies are configured to look like old-fashioned electric trolley cars. In my area there is no charge to the riders of these buses. It would probably be better if these cities weren’t in the bus business, but at least they aren’t running actual light-rail trolley systems as a few cities actually do.

    In my (smallish — about 250k metro area) city – a significant college town (>40k students, >20k staff and faculty), there was a real estate developer that did a LOT of development in the downtown area. One of the details of the deal was that they would get paid 60k a year to operate an electric trolley that ran from downtown to the campus, about half a mile away.

    For about 2y, they did, then they stopped. It was another 3y before anyone noticed/remembered the deal and commented on it.

    While I gather the payments stopped, I seriously doubt if there was any effort by the city to get back the 180k they paid out for a service that wasn’t provided by the contract.

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