[PRCo] a different sort of Library streetcar

[Fred Schneider]

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.   

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.  

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.

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.   

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.   

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.



On Apr 10, 2013, at 1:52 PM, Derrick Brashear wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Fred Schneider
> <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>> Thanks for the mobile library film, Derrick.
>> 
>> What I find astonishing is how those Canadian prairie cities have grown while ours remain marginal at best.   Much of it is their oil boom.   A lot of it was simply Canadians hunting cheaper homes than they could have in metro Toronto … they were escaping.   The Canadians also seem to accept living in smaller homes close together and riding transit more willingly than we do.   As a result, even though they live farther north than we do, and there are a lot more degree days that require oil or gas to heat their homes, their per capita oil consumption is only 12.8 oz higher per day than us … and it is all for heating, not driving.   Our car ownership, per capita, is 36% higher than the Canadians.  I was astonished on on my my trips there a few years ago to see crowds waiting for city buses in the rush hour in Victoria, BC, a city of then of about 75,000.   In a city of that size in the USA, the buses might have three or four people on them at five o'clock, not six or seven people boarding at every street corner.
>> 
>> The library trolley film that Derrick sent tells us Edmonton, the capital city of Alberta, had 92,000 people when the flick was produced in 1942.   Wikipedia tells us that the current population is 812,000.   A little farther to the south is Calgary, which had around 100,000 in the war years and now has a city population of 1.1 million and is the center of a metro area of 1.215 million.  Amazing isn't that last number … the city is 90% of the metro area, not 25% of the metro area like a lot of our big cities.   The people of Calgary live in Calgary, not 40 miles away in the suburbs.
>> 
>> And because of living in the city, they have amazing transit utilization up in the middle of no where.
> 
> Tho Edmonton got rid of their trolleybuses. Not sure what that generalizes to.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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