A Street Car To Desire: Imagine Trolleys With Hypercapacitors And Overhead Fans?
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 11.29.08
Septa PCC Trolley 2325
Image credit: Flickr, CSX 4758's photostream, Septa streetcar rolls westbound along Girard Avenue in sunny Philadelphia on April 3, 2007.
When I was a kid (in the 1950's), electric trolley cars or "trams" like the still-operating Philadelphia model pictured here, were quite common in US cities. They were quiet, had no exhaust, and followed the same rules of the road as cars, trucks, and rubber-tired buses. One drawback I remember was that crossing the tracks at an acute angle while riding a bicycle was likely to toss the rider if a narrow-tired model was caught between the steel rail and the street edge: you had to be careful to slow down and cross at close to the perpendicular. Another issue was that the tracks tended to fill up with caked salt and sand in the northern winters.
Look at that web of wires overhead. What happens if street trams come back? Will cell phones be messed up? WiFi communications interfered with? HDTV become snowy?
As Atrios points out, some are opposed to overhead wires for what mainly seem to be aesthetic reasons:
I've frequently come in contact with people who consider overhead wires to be such an abomination that they think that any neighborhood which has them is worst than a third world shanty town. This particular aesthetic bugaboo has long puzzled me. Don't mind them at all.Some historic preservationists apparently regard the wires as an infringement.
Sure, trolley power can be put at ground level, in the street, as has been done with Tramway de Bordeaux (via:Wikipedia link). But, even that won't work well in cities with flood prone, or snowy, streets. So, for situations where you want to put trolleys back where they once were, and extend them to the suburbs, overhead wires will be the cheapest, most reliable approach.
Except: there may be new design and track layout opportunities offered by modern technology. On wide avenues and thoroughfares, trolley routes could be used to separate cars from curbside bike lanes (no car or truck passage or parking allowed, unlike in the photograph), for example.
Hybrid Trolley's could be designed with regenerative braking systems, and with ultra-capacitor power-storage banks that would enable route completion even with a temporary power interruption...or to periodically allow for the crossing of "no overhead wire" zones or street segments. Because capacitors can be recharged very quickly, this would be quite a useful way to short-step the overhead wire infrastructure limitations.
If any of you readers happen to be purchasers or designers of trolley vehicles, please pay close attention to this next idea.
You absolutely must put "whole trolley" ceiling fans in a roof-top bonnet capable of pulling a strong draft fresh air in through the side windows and exhausting it from along the side top edge, with exhaust flows used to divert rain away from the side windows below the exhaust ports, keeping window-seated passengers dry. Except in the most lilting heat, air conditioners won't be needed!
And this one too.
Route district WiFi connections through the power supply wires so that passengers may partake. There has to be a way.
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If cell phones were "messed up" from overhead wires I'm not sure that would be such a bad thing. We'd probably be a more civilized society.
trams, street cars, trolleys - they are all so 1950's
get with the future and get behind PRT - personal rapid transit
http://www.cprt.org/CPRT/Home.html - as just one example
very little street/parking space lost to infrastructure
personal - goes where you want to go
Imagine me in my Limo, passing your stupid, crowed, never on time, overpriced government run train and you wishing you had a Limo, so you wouldn't waste your day riding trains instead of getting home faster!
In Vancouver BC 25% of the public buses are electric trolleys, they don't have those pesky tracks you talk of either.
Our electricity is from 85% hydroelectric sources. hydroelectric generation definitely has drawbacks it's debatable whether it's sustainable in terms of the reservoirs and lifespan of dams, but there is some run by hydroelectric generation stations coming on line in BC.
The trolleys here have a battery reserve to get them clear of traffic in the event of power disruption, but it's limited to that.
The overhead wires have never been a bother, I think the wires are actually kind of iconic for Vancouver they've been there more than 50 years, people relate with them as part of our Vancouver street scene.
Why not have streetcars that are designed to soley run off of capacitors?
In Chicago, there are several routes where the bus travels less than 1/4 of a mile between stops:
1. Michigan Avenue
2. State Street
3. Dearborn Street
4. LaSalle Street
5. Chicago Avenue
6. Randolph Street
7. Washington Street
8. Adams Street
On these routes, buses could simply charge up by sliding under an over-head charger that draws off of the grid, perhaps with its own capacitor built in.
Capacitor to Capacitor charging can be very rapid. We're talking seconds for a full charge. Said full charge might be just enough to move the bus a mile or so.
Currently, buses average about 6mpg on diesel. So that's 1/6 of a gallon of diesel per mile. Diesel has 132,000btu/gallon so for one mile a bus needs 22,000btus. Consider that, at best, said diesel bus is 30% efficeint tank to wheels. An electric drivetrain will by 90% efficient. So we only need about 7,300btus. There is 3,412btu in a kW/h so we'd need a 2.5kW/h capacitor pack to power the bus.
GreenPlease is absolutely correct with the way to charge the trolley underneath, that is the way to make electric trolleys or trolley buses that everyone will accept. I have firm confidence this will be the result. the only issues is whether they'll be on tracks or tires or even hovering....
San Francisco, famed for cable cars, has lots of trolleys that, unlike the cable cars, handle a fair bit of the transportation needs of the city. On the Embarcadero they run historic trolleys like the one in the picture and others from all over the world in their original livery -- very picturesque. Elsewhere they run modern, faster, bigger trolleys. SF also has electric buses. What don't they have?
I've never heard of interference as a problem. Some people do complain of the noise the cables for the cable cars make.
I like your idea, GreanPlease. Perhaps they could simply have streetlights or powerline posts that are set up with these chargers that the buses could hook up to when stopping or in slow traffic with a connector that extends out.
Here in Seattle we have the overhead wires in all of downtown and quite a bit of the surrounding urban areas, stretching as far the the U-District. They really aren't an issue at all, personally I rarely even notice them, and people never think twice about them. I've never heard of any issues with cell phone service, or wi-fi interference.
Electrified street trolleys seems to be an effort for fixing the 20% problem of Pareto before working on the 80% part which is getting decent transit the attracts riders regardless of energy source.
Neil said;
"Imagine me in my Limo, passing your stupid, crowed, never on time, overpriced government run train and you wishing you had a Limo, so you wouldn't waste your day riding trains instead of getting home faster!"
So then I say;
Neil I'm imagining you now, in your Limo. Oh no! Neil that's a red light Neil ! Hit the brakes Neil! Hit the brakes! No Neil! NO! I'm now imagining a spectacular fire ball Neil. That Limo must have had a very big gas tank, eh Neil. I'm now imagining the rest of us driving around the burnt out husk of your limo in our electric bus and I'm imagining at the time, we're all thinking the same thing, can you imagine what we're thinking Neil, after the way you spoke to us earlier...Neil?
I remember the trolley cars very well, and I would like to see a more modern version like "trackless" trolleys put on the streets of the city again.
But, in Cleveland, where I rode them daily, I can tell you they are and were anything but silent. There was a constant whirring and grinding noise when they were running that could easly be heard a block or more a way. But the real 24/7 thing was the screeching of the metal wheels against the tracks at every curve and every stop. It went on endlessly and was a standard part of the night, before air conditioning.
They were also more dangerous and hazardous to board, as you always had to walk out into the street to get to them, and you were frequently dropped off in the middle of the road.
The trackless models were steerable and had rubber tires, more like an electric bus with a trolley, and they could run much more silently and would pull to the curb to pick and drop passangers. Much safer.
Lastly there were complex procedures involved in any change of direction, and the process blocked traffic often for as much as five minutes, while the trolley driver got out and manually transfered the trolley assembly from one set of wires to another to allow the change. Universally, drivers hated them, and were not much more appreciative of the diesel buses that replaced them.
As a retiree, I got rid of my car, and use public transportation almost exclusively. Even so, there are times when friends can get me somewhere in their cars that is not reachable by bus. Cars definitely have their place.
The advocates of private transport are really funny. Overcrowded trams? So what about totally congested highways with kilometers of completely blocked traffic?
Sometimes I think that you guys are simply scared of the other people.
Perhaps a compromise can be reached. Maybe the trolley can have a battery pack that can be intermittently charged (at end of the line and at stoplights) from magnetic induction coils embedded in the road activated when the trolley is overhead.
Here in Richmond, VA, arguably the birthplace of the electric streetcar (run on hydro-electric power, to boot), recent attempts to bring back mass transit have been hindered by the quaint use of the word 'trolley'. Instead of modern, ADA/bicycle-friendly streetcars that would serve all citizens and multiple neighborhoods, we have had small-minded attempts at 'historic trolley replica' buses that merely go from one white elephant downtown development to another in a vain attempt to draw tourists. Beware of 'trolleys'. Demand modern streetcars! Since a lot of federal grant money has been wasted, Richmond is not likely to see light rail any time soon, but 'bus rapid transit', which at least tries to serve more citizens and neighborhoods is possible.
I live in Boston, and the concern about overhead wires is the biggest pile of rubbish I've ever heard. You never notice them, and it's not like people haven't dealt with ubiquitous phone lines and other power lines for almost a hundred years. And disruption? What? Since when? I have HD TV in my apartment and use my cell phone as a primary phone and I've never, ever had anything resembling a problem as a result. Some people must just be grasping at straws to preserve the road-rage saturated SUV-driving world they've already paid for.
WiFi interference? Cell phone reception?
Has the author ever been to a city with mass transit via overhead electric lines? Here in Düsseldorf, Germany, the city is criss-crossed with a spider web of high voltage lines for powering the u-bahns, streetcars, and the inter-city trains. No cell phone issues. No WiFi issues.
The casual mention of a potential problem that does not exist merely gives the opponents of mass transit schemes more fear-mongering ammunition to work with.
Toronto has been using streetcars and they generally work well. the problems we have here relate to the execution. Unlike Amsterdam, Toronto makes its streetcars share road space with cars, except for short sections of the University and St. Clair lines. Also, the busiest tramlines are on streets with daytime street parking, which results in long lines of traffic behind streetcars. These problems could be eliminated by instituting alternate-side parking on the busy Queen and King lines, and by creating more dedicated tracks. The second problem relates to the age of our Swiss-made streetcars, which were put in service in the early 80s. It's ironic that a country whose transportation colossus Bombardier makes subway and streetcars for some of the world's most advanced cities can't boast of similar technology in it's biggest cities (Montreal's Bombardier subway cars were made in the early 70s).
Our streetcars rumble and screech (we have the tightest turn radii in the world) but it's a city of 6 million people and you get used to the noise. As for communications interference, no issues here.