<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Fred Schneider <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fwschneider@comcast.net" target="_blank">fwschneider@comcast.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
It happened when the Canadian federal government was telling the provinces they should keep them. I forget the whole deal but the politicians in Ottawa were trying to lock Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver and Hamilton into long term operation of electric vehicles. Edmonton and Hamilton apparently didn't want it shoved down their throats.<br>
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I have no idea what their costs were or even if they looked at them. I do remember some advertising fluff from the late 1940s that General Electric passed out in their attempts to sell electric equipment. They were telling transit companies that if you could fill your vehicles every five minutes, then a trolley would make money for you. In the 5-6-7 minute range, trolley buses could be profitable. When you got beyond around 8 minutes, the diesel bus would earn money. And if you could not keep the vehicle running all day, then you might as well buy a gasoline bus.<br>
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Well, those were only generalities. If you were San Francisco and owned your own hydro-electric plants and only had to pay PG&E a modest transmission charge, then the trolley bus might just be cheaper than the diesel where it would be more expensive in other environments.<br>
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But in general, a lot of cities that converted to trolley coaches after the war discovered that riding plummeted and what had been cars on a 5 minute headway soon became a tragedy where they couldn't even fill a bus every 20 minutes. Think Wilkes-Barre, Sioux City, Dallas, Milwaukee, Peoria, Baltimore, Birmingham, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Portland, Cleveland (can they fill anything today?), Youngstown, Johnstown (they lost two thirds of the population). The problem with the trolleys was identical to the rail cars
you could not go beyond the wires.<br>
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San Francisco has another advantage
it is hemmed in by water on three sides and the population keeps growing. The land doesn't get any bigger
about 7 x 7 miles (46.7 square miles) but the population is the highest it has ever been at 805,000 people. That's over 17,000 per square mile and growing
it's one of the most densely settled cities outside of New York. Probably our second most packed city. So the trolleys work there.<br>
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Edmonton
density is 3,000 per square mile. Their light rail is, like many of them, a low-cost commuter railroad. Not a city trolley system. The trolley buses were a local city service. Downtown Edmonton, the last time I looked was a disaster. That monster mall out to the west side had killed most of the downtown stores.<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Well, you've filled in a detail and killed part of your story. Yes, Pittsburgh metro has people 40 miles out instead of 75% in the core, but our downtown is ... a mixed bag, not an unmitigated disaster. <br>
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