I forgot to mention Roz actually talked about one of the routes in particular before if you want more info on what Philly has lost. ruclips.net/video/zcxezjtw1Ak/видео.html
I love trolley but damn septa is frustrating example the westmoreland loop is open after a trillion years seriously why did a small loop take so long and thank you I've been saying for years E-buses(trolleybuses) in the 23,29,47,53,56 and 79 just to name a few
The way to solve "cars in the way of trolleys" is to tow them away and make people pay fines to get them back. After people understand that's what happens when you block them they'll get the message pretty fast.
i like the idea of fining the offender, but what if they cut away and remove just the section of car blocking the tracks, like a tree that’s fallen across a trail 😘
@Adora Tsang Why do you think so? EDIT: I asked before you added "Because car owners pay more tax than trolley riders" after just "It makes more sense to just get rid of trolleys." My response to you is: Car owners and trolley riders are all taxpayers. Some car owners pay more taxes but so do some trolley riders, similarly, some car owners and trolley riders pay very little or nothing in taxes. Everybody pays, so we might as well pay for nice cities and neighborhoods rather than ones that are simply fast and easy to drive through at the expense of everything else, if the trolley bothers you so much just take a different route, it can't after all. Slow down, enjoy your life, perhaps take a break and ride a trolley.
@Adora Tsang The amount of infrastructure necessary to allow everyone to drive will always cost more than the revenue we could capture from those drivers. This only appears feasible because cities have spent the last 50 or so years bankrupting themselves in an attempt to accommodate cars. Most people are unaware of how insanely expensive all the car infrastructure we take for granted is. Though a trolley fare is comparatively less than whatever taxes drivers are paying in PA, the trolley can transport a lot more people at a much more reasonable cost per person.
I remember when SEPTA trolleys cost 5 cents to ride on. Favorite SEPTA story from those days: A man got on the trolley and gave the driver a $20 bill, saying “I’m sorry, I don’t have a nickel.” The driver answered; “That’s fine; in a minute you’re going to have 399 of them!”
Nickel fares were back in pre-SEPTA days when it was called PTC. If there was an open window I'd hop on the side, put my feet on that sideboard and hold on to the window bars - save myself 5 cents for a candy bar. School shoes were hard, sneakers were best. The 13 was my trolley line, it's still runnin.
George - d'ya know the story about crowded trolleys and open fire plugs on a hot summer day? - with the best time for that stunt being late afternoon rush hour.
alan as a south philly resident and someone who rides the trolleys everyday, you really hit the nail on the head with this video. its incredibly frustrating to see other cities swoon over light rail and streetcars and race to build them, while septa just lets our unused tracks rot away, ESPECIALLY when the tracks are grade separated (like the 56). what i wish septa would look into and that no one talks about is converting more west philly bus lines to trolley...the tunnel definitely has the capacity because they did this in the past and this would legitimately speed people's rides to center city vs all surface streets
For the 23, 29, and 79, one would need Southern Depot (and possibly Midvale-the 23 is too long to be just out of Southern) to be able to equipped with that infrastructure.
I used to ride the 56 trolley years ago. I do not recall a grade separation from Cottman Ave to Broad Street. I do remember delays due to double parked cars.
Trolleybusses are so great! They are environmentally friendly as they don't require batteries or a combustion engine. recently I was filming at the largest trolleybus network of west europe which is in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Great video Alan!
You know some asshole out there is trying to create a battery-electric trolley just to get the worst case of battery powered busses and inflexibility of trolley rails.
Pretty much everywhere in the UK used to have them till the 1960's then they were replaced with a variety of busses from old AEC RT's & routemasters to complete different and newer leyland, bristol, volvo and dennis busses that ran under council liveries till privatisation.
As someone who uses the trolley in west philly everyday to get to work, I’m so excited for the renovations soon! The trolley cars are not great and we need so much more space. I don’t want to deal with 3 trolleys passing by my stop because they were too full 😭
I take the 34 into work, I'm a bit sad to know they'll be consolidating stops, but I know it's for the better to stay on time and to have the larger vehicles work
I take the 102 and 101 trolleys to work out in Media, and understaffing has apparently been a problem. I wish SEPTA was appropriately staffed & funded!
@@gabrieleortiz5041 - Everyone is dealing with staffing shortages. Agencies are competing with trucking companies for a decreasing pool of commercial drivers (these trolleys are still considered Class 8 commercial vehicles).
They're planning on buying a whole new fleet of articulated trolleys, but as always in Philly and PA someone has to come up with $$$ planning.septa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SEPTA-TrolleyMod_ProgramGoals.pdf
In before Europeans saying "Why don't you call them TRAMS?!?" 😆 To reactivate a disused trolley line in the US, they'd probably have to do a 30-year long EIS and economic-impact study after which NIMBYs would scuttle it anyway after they found out they'd lose a few parking spaces here or there.
Okay fair but what's that got to do with the name? Trollry Bus is an automotive bus with trollry wiring attached to it...this here is a rail based system thus making it a... Tram Trolley I guess? But basically all Trams run on overhead lines so why not just call it a Tram?
@@hurricanemeridian8712 I was just making light of how many people criticize US-Americans for calling them trolleys. Which would be like me telling a Brit he's using the wrong word for a spanner... that's a wrench, dude!
It would be interesting to see SEPTA run the old K-car trolleys up in Chestnut Hill once they complete (if they complete) the modernization project. My dad thinks that those are the original trolley tracks, would probably throw and old man fit if he found out they were renovated and never used.
Everyone I've talked to at SEPTA has been extremely firm about the 23 not coming back until at least after trolley modernization is complete, which they say will be 2030 at the earliest, and they don't seem amicable to bringing the 23 back ever.
@@tealmer3528 I can't see it ever being a priority since most of it runs parallel to the Broad Street Line and the rest runs parallel to both of the Chestnut Hill lines which terminate exactly where the trolley did.
@@nathaniellindner313 The lower levels of SEPTA Planning have actually got a lot of really cool people that aren't morons, and people like Lex Powers are doing a lot of good work there. The issue is the higher-ups, as well as the structural issues both plaguing funding and giving the city basically no vote (SEPTA's board is 2 votes for the city, 2 votes for each of the 4 suburban counties for a total of 8 votes for the suburbs, a vote for the state house, a vote for the state Senate, and a vote for the governor)
In Romania, if you park on any tram tracks, you get a ticket from the police and a lot of meat in your fridge from the travelers. And if the police gets to lift your car, depending on how important that line is, you can also make it to the local news in a negative way. The worst problem we have in Bucharest are drivers that go on the tram line (something which is also forbidden at a national level, but largely ignored) which is why we started separating the tram tracks with fences to the rest of the road. This is really useful on large boulevards as it turns the tram lines into an effective emergency lane for ambulances to go through as well. They even added some bus lanes through, though this feels weird and is quite problematic when two buses going opposite direction meet in a fenced area. Unfortunately, tram systems in Romania have been quite neglected in the last 30 years, with 2 cities (Brașov and Constanța) getting rid of them completely, and another one (Botoșani) having it in tatters. There are cities, however, such as Cluj or Ploiești which have rebuilt their system from scratch, with Reșița doing the same at the time I post this comment. In Bucharest the system is both old, massive and complex, and attracts a lot of riders, despite the bad press caused by the old rolling stock (long story-short: the most widely used tram model is the V3A series, which was designed as a cheap communist copycat of a west-german tram and improved upon until today; the tram does not have an inch of low floor, except the models produced after 2000s, they are noisy, swing sideways a lot and do not offer too much to the travelers). Many important lines were completely rebuilt in the last 2 decades, but there are still 1/3 of the lines that need urgent replacement. Despite that, however, and the pressure from some politicians to do away with it, one cannot imagine Bucharest without the tram system. The bus&trolleys do not have dedicated lanes, and although we have a metro system, it does not reach every point of the city, is expensive to build and takes a lot of time and nerves of the residents, as they are usually built underground (see the M5 line which took 9 years to build a chunk of it, although they promised to build it in 3 years). So there is definitely a use-case for the tram here, even in the most "American" country in Europe (sorry, no offense).
Alot of people in Philadelphia work in the Suburbs, going against cars, reduces quality of life for most of us, many of us need cars for various reasons
most of the overhead wires don't exist any more; very few parts of the city still have them. The wires are a bit maintenance headache; and dangerous for large vehicles to cross.
@@billjohnson9472 Yes, but even where they do exist, you don't necessarily get streetcars. There were overhead wires in Seattle for the trolley buses that were relatively common until hybrid buses came along. There were even hybrid buses that could operate on either diesel or electricity for routes that needed to be electric to go through the tunnel, but they couldn't or wouldn't run those power lines for. Even with those lines in place, there wasn't much interest in streetcars and we didn't get them until some developers managed to convince the voters that it was a good idea. Newsflash, it was a horrible idea that just made the roads even less safe for bicyclists and added a ton of expense for something that serves no practical function.
True, I think it would be cool (and important) to talk about futur and curent transit projets in the rust belt. Don't change the fact it's a good video
I could be wrong but when I moved to Philly in 1975 there were trolleys running up and down many of the north-south numbered streets all throughout Center City. I recall at the time being told that Philly had the distinction of having the most still-operating trolley routes of any city in America. Then I saw as, one by one, they were either paved over, tracks ripped up, or left partially in place not used anymore. At some point there was talk of removing the asphalt to expose the tracks again, or rehab existing rail, or lay new ones, which I believe did happen in places. I left in 2011 and, as you mentioned, cities all over are building trolleys where none existed. What a missed opportunity.
I remember when I visited Philadelphia in the summer of 2015 and saw streetcar tracks by the Reading Terminal Market in Center City. Given that I'm from Toronto, Canada where just like Philadelphia we retained our streetcar system, I was kind of looking forward to seeing a streetcar pass by, turns out it wasn't the case. This video makes sense now as to why I didn't see any trolleys in Center City, thanks Alan!
We rebuilt the Pyongyang streetcar system as the original system got significant destruction during the war, with the first line opening in 1991 as the result of overcrowding on trolleybuses. There are currently four lines, operating on both sides of the Taedong but only one actually crosses it, Line 3. Line 1 uses to cross it but it was shortened to Pyongyang railway station with points east replaced with a trolleybus. Three of the lines uses trams either made in the former Czechslovakia by Tatra or in-house, while the Kumsusan shuttle line which goes to the Kumsusan mausoleum of my father and grandpa from Samhung on the Pyongyang Metro (this service has replaced the Kwangmyong metro station that's been closed since 1995 due to the site being home to the mausoleum), uses a VBZ Be 4/4 from Zurich.
I'm 67 but I'm gonna say this like a teenager, it would be truly cool if they make the trolly trains, like the ones in Europe. I saw one of those proposed pics in your video with the middle of the street barrier and waiting stand, thats cool. Plus it upgrades all those decaying, delapidated, potholled streets, left that way because they can't repave them over the existing tracks.
Trams in Berlin or Prague are awesome, fast, cheap and everywhere, non of my friends even has a car anymore .... it just has to be maintained like everything ...
To the Point of parked cars, if a tram is blocked, the support tow truck is there in 10 min and it cost 300Euro fine and you have to travel forever to get back your car, so no one does dare park on the tracks ^^
the trams in berlin are not very reliable many times you have to wait 8-9 minutes for a tram supposed to come every 5 minutes only for 2 of them to arrive at the same time
I will argue that the 56 trolley should come back. Very low priority project but the 56 trolley in Philadelphia does have some space for a dedicated ROW for more than half the route
I completely agree with this, and think that there are a few routes in Northeast Philadelphia that would be better off as trolleys, especially since the bus revolution is straightening a few out (though that would mean the laying down of new track). I think the 54 would also be a good idea for a trolley, since most of its route is spent on Lehigh Avenue, a very wide road.
If the Feds had any sense we'd have something akin to a PCC-2 developed for the 21st century. There's many expanding light rail systems in the US, and it'd make a ridiculous amount of sense to standardize and mass-produce them.
Great video! Trolleybuses are great but like you mentioned Philly streets are small and double parking would still be an enormous problem. A way to fix it would be to eliminate parking on one side, but that’s a story for another time. This too is a sore spot for me as I was a child when the 6, 23, 50, 53, 56, and 60 were still trolleys. What I’ve always hoped could happen was that some west Philly bus routes were converted back to trolleys and rerouted through the subway surface tunnel. A bigger idea would be connecting some north and south Philly routes through unused tunnels like under Arch street and Pennsylvania Avenue. I think the schuylkill valley metro was to use the latter.
Torontonian here! Philly needs to improve and invest in their trams! If it got some TLC, it would EASILY rival Toronto and Melbourne. It’s honestly a real shame especially since everything seems to still exist. It’s truly a shame how many cities have removed their tram systems. It would be a really really big shame to see Philly become one of these other cities… Edit: Trolleybuses are also awesome! Much better than these fancy shmancy battery electric buses, and I wish Toronto kept its Trolleybus network. We can only hope there’s a future for the trams and trolleys of Philly!
the problem with that is SEPTA is a state agency not a city agency and the rest of the state already doesn't like how much of the state budget Philly consumes, even though we also generate most of the revenue
Two of the trackless trolley routes 59 and 66 are actually owned by the city. Ridge Avenue was a former trackless route I used to schedule for SEPTA Bob Campbell
Usually I'm all for trams/trollies, but in this case I agree with you. If the city is not going to completely redesign the city center streets to be more trolley accommodating; then trolley-buses would work better in this case.
In other words (and if it makes sense to do), the city centre streets should be drastically improved. Why are we letter some things push transit around?
@@SomePotato that's not practical. Is already existing underground structure. And the expense is just off the charts. Nor is ridership particularly growing.
Appreciate the history on why there aren’t any trolleys outside of west Philly. I’m really hopeful about the 15 being the first sign of movement back toward trolleys/trolley buses on this side of the river. Additionally, I know there is near 0 information outside of the like 90 page document for the regional rail “lifestyle” transformation but if you were to try and do a comprehensive review of Philadelphia’s transit that would be an interesting discussion of “what’s next”. Pair that with a discussion of the bus revitalization project and you’d have a better story about what SEPTA is doing than they can write.
I’m sitting at Richmond and Westmoreland as I right this comment and they just spent millions of dollars and it took 3 years to redo the bus and trolley station but they aren’t going to run the 15 down to this remodeled station , it will go to Delaware and Frankford and turn to go back to West Philadelphia. I don’t know why they spent all of that money putting the trolley tracks back on Richmond street to not run the trolley . They also just replaced the tracks at this new station and they didn’t remove them from Richmond street yet but what’s the point of having trolley tracks with no trolleys?
@@mrbig4532 the trolley itself isn’t and they’re not planning on running trolley buses either? I’m familiar with the stop but from what I’ve seen running all the way into port Richmond they have wires and tracks. It’s a damn shame if they’re not running it out here but I haven’t looked at the plan to be sure one way or another.
@@gekquad116 it just seems like such a waste of money to relay those tracks and they just designed Richmond street making it a lot different then it previously was , they must have some type of plan to bring a trolley or tram up to the end of the line at Richmond and Westmoreland because they raised the curbs to a high height from the street at all of the stops from Allegheny Ave down to Ann street. It would really make me question whoever makes the decisions at septa if they didn’t put the trolley back onto Richmond street , the tracks were removed in the early 1990’s and then at great expense layed back down in the early 2000’s and now they don’t want to run the trolley that everyone loved by the way. I haven’t been on the south side of Allegheny Ave for a while until the other day I just avoid it because of the congestion and road work but I live in the area and I didn’t even recognize it when I saw all of the new buildings and the remodels it’ really nice down there with bars and coffe shops , restaurants are coming, and all of the old closed stores that have been sitting there for decades have all been reopened as other businesses but it looks great .
@@mrbig4532 I live in the area as well and I’m down that side regularly. It is great, I’d be really surprised if they didn’t run the trolley. I did some research last night about the plans to being the trolleys back and it certainly seems like they intend to with the time scale having shifted to fall 2023 for the full line. There was a Philly Inquirer article from earlier this year on it. Part of the delays, as I understand, is the construction not being completed in Brewery town (that’s scheduled to be worked on until the end of this month) along with i95 construction (which seems to have been cleared up on Richmond) as well as waiting for the old trolleys to be renovated. We’ll see but I do believe the plans for the trolley to return are there.
Think that's depressing? In central Indiana we have about 6 old main lines, some with existing over and underpasses that have been abandoned since the 80s. Some were lucky enough to be turned into bike paths though
As someone from Pittsburgh, I know what it's like to lose a robust Trolley system. The city used to have an extensive system that spread out from the heart of the city. Today we have busses that are fine but, less extensive and a lite rail system that only supports the neighborhoods and suburbs south of the city.
Just be glad Phily has transportation. Used to live in Indianapolis and all we had was bus lines. Do you know i lived there 2 weeks before i even saw a bus? Yeah i never even considered it a reliable form of transportation even with a bus stop across the street from my house.
This just reminded me of the fact that when I lived in Jersey City, there's this North Hudson Health Center right across from the Supremo supermarket and I always hated going in there because it was always packed and had a long wait eating out of my day. Later on, I learned that the building where the doctor's office is now was once a trolley house as part of the North Hudson County Railway/Public Service streetcar system, and streetcars went from Palisade Ave to either go down an elevated trestle or take a funicular wagon lift to get to Hoboken. And that made me hate it more for using the space for a doctor's office instead of trolleys. Sure, Hudson County learned from getting rid of its trolleys by building the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, but it's not the same.
As somebody living in a city with absolutely great public transport, I can tell you: Busses are absolutely not better than trams. Trams are great. And if people park on the street, they are in for a very expensive surprise. I have 8 tram lines in a 5 min walking distance, the whole public transit network in the city is HUGE, and it transports us everywhere. Trams go every 5 to 15 min (depends on the day, there are fewer on saturdays and sundays). The trams are efficient, reliable and much faster than going by car (for most routes in the city) and since the city acknowledges the importance of public transport for the wellbeing of the city, it pays part of the fees, so people only pay 365 Euro (388 US-Dollar) per person for one year of transportation all around in the city of Vienna. It is just great. I can recommend that. Maybe you could have a look and implement something like that in America too.
I wish, Americans are really territorial when it comes to their cars, in South Philly they couldn't even get a slight decrease in road width in order to make room for bikes & pedestrians, let alone public transportation. People here in general have a huge blind spot for how much space parking takes, and generally have no sense of how much time and effort they actually spend storing 2 ton appliances on public streets. It's a huge waste and an eye sore.
Trolleybuses require different infrastructure than streetcar. The former requires two catenary wires to complete a circuit, while latter uses a single wire, as the track itself is the return. So, while it's possible to convert trolley line to a trackless trolley one (streetcar line to trolleybus), it would require completely new electrical infrastructure.
the REAL solution is to build dedicated sites for major tramways lines (this means no car can drive on trolley tracks and no cars can park near the site except if there are specific parking spots) and for less frequented lines they remove tracks for trolleybuses. And for major trolleybuses lines they make exclusive bus roads.
No, trolley bus is worst version of tram, period. Tire wear and tire is usually the main source of PM2.5 pollution causing the most health damage. As a European (from Prague), the nobrainer stuff do are: 1) fixing the tracks so that it doesn't look like something from former soviet union (think of Volgograd or Cherson level of awful) 2) get modern tram vehicles with pantographs 3) give trams a priority in the roadways rules (basically, on a intersection, tram has always the priority over cars and pedestrians because it's bigger, heavier and carries more people) 4) get to frequency of 10-12mins at worst on any line so that the network is remotely useful (half hour to hour frequency at night) 5) restore the old tracks and build new paralel/redundant routes so in case of dumbo parking on the tracks, the trams can go around skipping couple stops and having delay in 10mins at worst instead of 45mins
Contract out to tow companies so that cars in the way of trolly lines will be towed in under 10 minutes. Institute a hefty fine to pay for this service.
Meanwhile Prague is reintroducing trolleybuses. They are cheaper and more flexible than trams. Trolleybuses are great If ridership is not enough to justify a tram.
@@ganz3995 Except trolleybuses are either temp fix for incompetence of other gov. agencies or just electrification of current bus lines in steep hills or elsewhere where it doesn't make sense to build full fledged tram tracks just yet (and if they want to, they have half of the shit ready and just have to laid down the track and move couple overhead wires)
One of the most charming quirks of this channel is how *aggressively* Philadelphian it is, and what makes it a *great* channel is how it leverages this extremely narrow context to make excellent points about transit in general.
As someone who lives near Toronto and uses streetcars every now and again, seeing potential reopened routes in Philly end up decaying and get built over is so frustrating! Philadelphia deserves way better than this.
I'm old enough to remember riding the Yellow Cars in LA. They were killed off in 1963 because; 1) the original LAMTA was more interested in promoting buses and freeways connecting the suburbs with downtown; 2) the money from the city and county wasn't there to fix the aging fleet and overhead wires; and 3) the 5 lines that remained by 1963 all went through Black and Latino communities in South Central LA and East LA; communities the cities considered "irrelevant". The only reason the Blue/A Line got built and opened as quickly as it did in 1990 was because most of the old Pacific Electric Red Car tracks between downtown LA and Long Beach were still being used for freight trains,and could easily be converted to light rail. Like its predecessor,the Blue Line is a heavily used route. The E/Expo Line to Santa Monica also follows an old PE route and is heavily used. Ironically,the new K Line along Crenshaw follows part of an old Yellow Car route. I also grew up riding Muni during both the PCC and current LRV era. The streetcar lines were saved from being replaced by buses because they utilized tunnels(K,L,M,N) or had ROW that was too narrow or hilly for bus(J). They've added the F,T and Central Subway in the last 25 years. Plus the trolley buses are heavily used. As for SEPTA? It needs better funding. And more representation from Philadelphia in addition to Delaware and Montgomery Counties. That's why the 23 and 56 were killed off as trolleys. The K Cars are 43 years old,long past their expiration date. The Modernization Project will certainly involve construction and disruption of trolley routes. But you NEED trolleys and stops that are ADA compliant along those routes: the 11 and 36 immediately come to mind. That's my one peeve about Muni: the LRV's aren't all accessible at every stop once they leave the tunnels. Hoping SEPTA doesn't go in that same direction.
6:00 If the only reason to prefer trolley busses over trams is ''to get around illegally parked cars'', there's a serious priority problem. This is a failure of policy and policing, not of trams. How about fining those drivers instead of allowing this kind of behaviour?? In my city in europe, if a driver is parked in the way of trams, they have about two minutes to run out and move their car. If not, the police is notified who proceed to the spot immediately with a tow truck. 10-15 minutes later the car is towed, with no argument possible. The driver receives a hefty fine of over 100 Euro, plus an extra fine the public transport company itself is allowed to issue legally on top of the police fine. And if the car was towed, to get their car back the driver has to get it at the impound lot and pay another impound fee. So you bet parking or even standing still on tram tracks is a VERY rare occurrence here. If parking in the way of a tram is so commonplace in the USA designers need to design around it, this just another sign of drivers and cars having been given WAY too much leeway, and of car-centric design and policy that's gotten out of hand. You don't park blocking a tram or public transit. If you do, you should suffer the consequences. Simple as that. Public transit serves the many, your car doesn't.
One thing that SEPTA's current fleet of trolley buses have an advantage over the older fleet is that the buses also have a diesel engine that can be used if the route the trolley buses take is closed due to a major incident, but have not been substituted with regular buses. At the same time, much like the Subway-Surface Trolley routes, SEPTA's current Trackless Trolley routes are now just down to one, the Route 66, that operates between Frankford Transportation Center and the Frankford-Knights Circle at the Philadelphia-Bucks County Line. At one time, the system was widespread, but like the Route 23 and other surface trolley routes, were replaced regular buses. One route, Route 79 (in South Philadelphia), uses battery electric buses, but due to potential issues, is now back to hybrid buses. EDIT: I forgot that SEPTA operates two other trackless trolley routes out of the Arrott Transportation Center (the old Margaret-Orthodox station on the Market-Frankford Line), being the Route 59 to Rhawnhurst and the Route 79 to Wayne Junction and Nicetown.
Yes, it is sad that Septa have not followed through on the old promises. Trolley buses are a better option than diesel buses, but anything which uses rubber tires is also polluting.
@@RestrictedProceed The manufacturing of steel is, of course, polluting. However, steel wheels on steel rails do not wear anywhere nearly as much as tires which exude huge amounts of tiny plastic and rubber particulates into the atmosphere. These, in turn, accumulate onto the road surfaces which eventually pollute water courses and drain into rivers and seas.
SEPTA is (in)famous for failed planning. They proposed a long exurban metro line that went near all sorts of important locations but not TO any of them. Every single trip would require a transfer to a shuttle for the last-mile part. They came up with another commuter rail system that would have cost 2-3 times as much per km as anything else planned in the country. On top of that a citizens' group looked at the plans and found that SEPTA could only run a single train back and forth because they hadn't considered scheduling conflicts.
Trams are better than trolleybuses in terms of energy usage. Trolleybus is still a bus - rubber tire on a concrete road, while tram is steel rolling on steel. That's up to 10x less friction. However, trams are heavier, so you end up with 4-5x efficiency. Of course trams are more expensive. So, when there is no money, probably it's better to start with trolleybuses and later replace them with trams on the busiest lines.
Even Berlin had trolleybuses...but the last lines got taken out of service in east-Berlin as they tey tended to de-wire at railroad crossings. But yeah they're an awesome type of transportation that's very underused here in Europe...aside from the former soviet states and Poland.
Berlin is considering reintroducing trolleybuses with 15 lines in the Spandau district. Trolleybuses are common in Switzerland, Italy and all over Central and Eastern Europe so not exactly underused.
@@ganz3995 Berlin is thinking about reintroducing Trams in Spandau. And i don't know any system in the BeNeLux region, France, or Scandinavia. I know Salzburg in Austria has them, in Germany it's Eberswalde and Solingen...but that's it lol
@@BruscoTheBoar munich had a Trolleybus system for exactly 10 years as a temporary replacement for some tram lines because the tram lines were destroyed during the 2nd world war. They removed the Trolleybuses again when the tram lines were usable again.
Mass transit (especially in populated areas), makes sense not only for carbon emissions but for just ease of getting around. The current model is 1 car one person (roughly) in the US. This means that highways and roads need to be larger as population grows and when they can't get larger then this means congestion. Mass transit can resolve that issue (as long as they have dedicated lanes - nothing gets solved if they use the same traffic lanes), but you have to have a convenient and reliable mass transit system. However, even if it takes the same amount of time to get to the location you want on mass transit then people may chose that option instead of the stress of driving in a congested area. Convenient and reliable transit is also a must. If I have to wait 1 hour for a bus/trolly/light rail to get to a place where it takes me 30 minutes to drive to then no one is going to take the mass transit. Additionally, if I have to walk 3 miles to get to the mass transit and another 3 miles to get where I am going, then again people will opt for them more convenient option which will lead them door to door or close enough.
Maybe the 15 is a harbinger of things to come? The rolling stock is almost done and the tracks are now running along Richmond St. as of this week. We need the one going up down Delaware avenue, at the least.
They did move the stops over to Richmond but I don’t believe the tracks are completed over in Brewerytown based on the notifications I’ve gotten. They’re still running buses sadly but I hope that when the trolleys are done, we’ll see them rolling!
Oh, and on the Delaware Avenue line, it frustrates me to no end that I see it sitting there whenever I’m on that side of the city. I cry inside every time I see it.
@@gekquad116 It's awful. It would take no enormous amount of effort and would be hugely beneficial for every neighborhood along the Delaware. There's so much development in that corridor!
@@Charles-yq8vv there really is. Between the connection to the various bike trails, attractions up and down the coast line, and relative ease of access from center city (allowing connections via regional rail and Amtrak) it’s a damn shame we don’t make it easy for people to go up and down. It’s not like people aren’t traveling that way! The number of tourists and clueless people I’ve seen walking in the bike lane would benefit tremendously from the trolley service. Plus, it’d be a great excuse for the redevelopment of the abandoned buildings further south in Delaware.
Great video. Worst part of unused trolly tracks for me is how dangerous they are for bicyclist. It's why I switched to a mountain bike with wider tires.
I laughed pretty hard at 1:34 , hits close to home lol. MARTA’s street car line isn’t exactly very useful at getting people anywhere, its literally just a 1-2 mile loop around tourist spots downtown. At least they’re planning to expand it up to Ponce City Market if it can get past this NIMBY protest phase its in rn.
As a Melbournian living in Santiago, Chile, I've gone from a city with one of the largest tram networks in the world to a city with absolutely zero trams. The worst part is there are still tracks on many streets, but trams haven't run here since the 1950s or thereabouts. There is a pretty decent metro system here though, so that's nice. Although it gets crazy crowded so that's not so fun.
I grew up in Philly, and its been wild watching the whoel city decay in real time...but that's American cities in a nutshell. For every 'modernization' project they put through, they demolish 5 historical sites or cut five important programs.
Trolly-buses are so freaking smart, especially combined with a smallish battery bank/supecapacitor bank giving them the possibility to reroute around problems on the line and the overhead cables doesn't need to go round corners. Here they have battery busses on the short flat routes they can manage, and diesels on all other routes. Well into the city the routes merge and runs along a few streets that easily could be electrifyed
In Montevideo, Uruguay you randomly see tracks peeking out of the asphalt all the time, at least we have a bunch of bus lines but sometimes I wish we had more alternatives
Big problem with trolley trains: doesn’t solve road maintenance. Heavy weight is why trains trolleys and trams work- gliding on girders doesn’t take much maintenance. Asphalt has to be upkept replaced/recycled constantly. It’s expensive
I remember reading a report on the minimum turning radii for Toronto and Philadelphia trams. Toronto had the second sharpest of existing systems in North America and Philly had the sharpest, by about 3 feet. Toronto could not use an off the shelf low floor vehicle and had to have on adapted to our curves. Philly would be even harder. Also Toronto had to have the centre truck powered to be able to push a disabled car up some of our hills.
That`s not a big issue now. Most of european tram networks have their specialities about curves, incline ets, and cars are being ordered with taking these specialities into account. When you`re ready to pay - tram producers will make anything. Even low-floor.
In Helsinki they have trams now with articulated bogies so each bogie bends in the middle as well as the entire tram and this seems to handle tight turns very well.
Pittsburgh can join the club. Aside from a few lines in the South Hills our trolley network was ran into the ground by Port Authority. 2 of the remaining lines might be cut as the result of a “best use study”…
If you think it’s bad in Philly, you should come to Tampa or basically anywhere in Florida with the exception of Miami. All we have is a few lousy buses here in the Tampa area where the population is exploding. We have a 2 mile historic street car line but in 20 years they haven’t been able to expand it, we even had a ballot measure to add a transit system and it passed unanimously but the state government overruled it and canceled it. Best part is they haven’t figured out how to refund the half cent sales tax we paid for two years to cover the ballot measure.
You know what else needs to be fixed? The friggin trolley diversion to 40th St. That entire are of West Philly becomes a traffic nightmare, the transit slows to a crawl, and the trolley’s bunch up as they vainly attempt a 3 mph left turn across traffic. I realize this is supposed to be the little-used backup route, but my goodness it is terrible.
the worst thing about the trolleys is that they share their space with cars. I live near media and it's a nightmare to drive down state st when the trolley is running, the roads are too narrow to pull over, especially because there is street parking on both sides of the road. Things would run way smoother if the tracks took up one side of the road rather than going down the middle.
This comes only from people who thinks streets are only for them and their cars. No, streets are for all citizens, and when people want to travel in trolleys you have to respect and share space, even when it makes your journey slower.
@@T0MT0Mmmmy I totally agree! I think I worded my comment a little bit weirdly. I'm not bothered that I need to pull over for the trolley, I'm bothered that there is no space to pull over to let it pass. it clogs up the roads when the trolley is trying to move and drivers have nowhere to go. In hindsight, I think a better solution is wider roads or no street parking in spaces with trolleys.
It should be noted under said Modernization Plan there would be the following addition of track: -15 Extension to 69th Street Transportation Ctr. -34 Extension to East Lansdowne (Terminal tbd) -36 Extension to Eastwick Station -102 Extension to Darby Transportation Ctr via Street-Running on Chester Pike. -New Depot off the 36 at Greys and 41st St for all new LRVs -Rebuilt Darby Terminal with 3 tracks for the 11, 13 and 102. Personally, I'm looking forward to the 15 and 102 extensions as it would finally physically connect the City Trolley Lines to the Suburban and it would make it easier to move around cars. All of the new "bendy" trolleys who are coming in will be double-ended so they can be used universally. Also Darby, East Lansdowne and Eastwick Terminals are slanted to be regular end sidings, no Loops.
There are also proposals (not necessarily on any list yet) to extend the 10 to the Overbrook station on the RRD, and do something similar with the 101 to meet the Media RRD station.
Philadelphia has the same attitude that NYC had when it decided along with the Philadelphia mayors, and city council in not bothering to have their representatives in the state legislature and in Congress to fund the trolley lines and improve them. The last trolley line in NYC was also the last trolley line in New York State ended in April 1957, the Queensborough Bridge Railway.
Cost for NYC is likely one of the reasons the city moved away from trolley lines. The subway system is second to none and probably contributed to the city not looking back. Places like Staten Island, Queens, Part of Brooklyn, and northern parts of the Bronx could use trolley lines. Philly might have had the same attitude as NYC but lacked the funding to expand its subway system to cover some of the losses of the trolley lines.
taxing cigs, sugary beverages are more important. how else is Filthadelphia supposed to fund council members destination vacations, buy their McMansions etc
Philadelphia politicians have to deal with representatives of the rest of the state who tend to hate cities. Philadelphia just won a court case to try to get equal funding for our schools. 😕
As a kid in the 1960s, we'd be in Philly almost every weekend. Our grandmother often take us to many places in Philly, the old PTC trolleys, loved getting on those trolleys, usually the 13, 11, 34 routes. Going into the tunnels extra exciting. In the suburbs, just a few months ago, SEPTA been closing the 102, 101 routes every weekend for upgrades. That has been going on over 2 years!! How long does it take? Especially to get to various events. What is done on weekends is shuttle busses. Trolleys have a more comfortable ride, get around faster, due to sections of tracks free of street traffic. However, after 2 yrs you'd think the work be finished on those 2 routes.
bah, Filthadelphia could just find more stuff to tax. cigs,booze,sugary beverages arent enough, well tax every dirt bike,four wheeler in the city. auction off the confiscated ones, confiscate them again. it's win win win all the way around
Love the philly videos keep them coming. Fully agree about trolleybuses, and frustrating to see Septa doubling down on battery electric when we already have the infrastructure there. We've got a crappy subway system compared to Boston, NYC, Chicago, and DC, and that's not gonna change anytime soon (my kingdom for ambitious city leadership), but we have the bones for a better transit system overall. And I def credit SEPTA for the trolley/bus/RR modernization plans - for an underfunded agency they are doing smart stuff with the money they have and (mostly) not doing vaporware nonsense I live right by the Girard station trolley stop you have pictured at 5:25. I am so excited for that street to be completely redesigned. A bonus - see the low, single story bank building behind the light rail car? That's going to be converted to an apartment block. Good things are happening in Philadelphia!
As a German it is funny to see the trolley almost stopping at every junction. In Germany trolleys have almost everywhere, every time the right of way and traffic lights give them the right of way when they approach.
But the 5 lines they have in West and Southwest Philadelphia have that exact same problem the route 23 had. Double parked vehicles when they’re not in the subway.
This video really hit home with me - at the 6:22 mark, it shows the stop at Levick St. where I got off the #66 trackless trolley as the last leg of my trip home from the Philly airport yesterday morning - Airport Regional Rail to Jefferson Station, MFL to FTC , Rt. #66 to home. What outrages me is that the Airport Regional Rail has only hourly service on the weekends. That is unacceptable for a major airport. Weekday service is every half-hour, but every 15 minutes would be better. Any thoughts on ways to pressure SEPTA to provide better weekend service to the airport? I keep thinking that the airport would be better served by more frequent Light Rail service as in Portland, or more frequent heavy rail as provided in Atlanta and San Francisco. It should be possible to provide a type of fully or partially automated service that is dedicated for the airport line, using the same tracks and number of stops that exist now. I wasn't aware of the plan to modernize the present trolley system. Where can I find information on that? Thanks.
I am a 76 year old who was born and raised in Philadelphia but no longer lives in the area. I loved the trolley rides and rode the 15 and the 47 quite often. I even rode the 8 before it became a bus route. Too bad they are not all still in use.
All the rolling stock in the video looks like it could be replaced by a single bus. That's probably part of why that is happening (chicken vs. egg...). One point with trams is that connecting multiple cars increases capacity without having to hire a second driver.
of course, another is that trams are just flat out cheaper to run (certainly per passenger) due to lower fuel and maintenance costs. This is pretty much always true of electric vehicles (especiall those that draw their power from overhead wires), the bit that keeps getting it put of is that it's more expensive to set up.
@@laurencefraser Exactly. When a city is strapped for cash, buying buses at 1/2 or 1/3 of the cost of a tram is a tough sell. It's easier for the system to come back in 10 years and ask for more money to replace them, versus the higher up-front costs of trams even though they might keep running for 30-40 years.
Trolleybuses might not be the best replacement. Compare two cities; Phily and Prague, Czech Republic (my hometown) citizens: 1,6 mil : 1,3 mil area: 370 km2 : 496 km2 metro lines: 2 ; 3 and building 4th now tram lines: 8; 35 (including ca 8 night lines with 30min interval and 2-3 special lines). rolling stock: 977 vehicles on 79 lines: 2019 vehicles (802 trams + 1216 buses + 1 trolleybus) on 179 lines (35 + 143 +1) Our trams go on surface in road in city center (due to space), on separate rails from vehicles outside the city center wherever possible and they have few short tunnels for themselves in the outskirts. They are usually double-articulated or go in couples (except 1-2 shorter lines and night lines). And there is a need for the capacity. In peak times just one line (22) that goes through the whole city and a city center goes EVERY FOUR MINUTES and from 9am to 2pm "only" every 5 minutes. Trolleybuses won´t have the capacity if needed and there is no way to make them longer. What I saw in the video was a really bad infrastructure. You need to maintain rails properly so trolley can go fast and comfortably for passengers. Levelled platforms and vehicles without steps is a leap forward and necessity for a modern city. Philly has a 1/4 smaller area than Prague, CZ while having 1/4 more of citizens. Trolleys are a perfect solution for public transport if they can get you to a destination you want comfortably enough and without too much waiting for another trolley on a stop you need to change lines (and without too much detours, of course, cause time). If you all want to see some videos of trams from my city, visit channel Honest Guide for entertainment and information at the same time. You can start on Crashes caught on camera, cars/pedestrians vs. trams where you will see most of infrastructure and vehicle types we have here :)
Trackless trolleys (we call them that in king county metro as well) are amazing! They are all electric and can get around obstacles! They are so fun to ride too
The trolleys actually only run in West and Southwest, and Center City Philly. The Route 15 on Girard Avenue, they are talking about bringing the cars back at some point. Swpta was fixing the rails in a recent project but no set date fir the return.
Same here from Kolkata,West Bengal, India 🥲our most beautiful trolly line(Maidan Line) got ditched during COVID,and it has been 3 years since then,with no response from the government. The issue here is lobbying by BUS and TAXI union😔
Bruh at least you still have trolleys there. Pittsburgh's light rail has been downsized to basically 2 crappy lines that have the utility of a minecart on a thousand acre farm.
I'd be interested to hear your analysis of the MBTA Green Line, the light rail of Boston's system. The E branch shares roadway with cars for one terrifying stretch of road, and its the last place in the system where this still occurs. But the MBTA just opened its first expansion in over 30 years, the extension of the Green Line to Medford/Tufts University. The tunnel that the green line is funneled into under downtown is the first subway tunnel in the western hemisphere!
@@luislaplume8261 it was a trolley tunnel, our other three lines are heavy rail “New York style” subway tunnels. The green line tunnel was a way of funneling street trolleys under the downtown streets when NYC tried elevated lines instead
@@cityonahilltours And what's more, the orange and blue lines started out like the green line and had trolleys instead of full-sized trains (that's also the reason both use narrower trains compared to the red line which is build closer to the standards of NYC Subway).
I was in Naples, Italy in the 1970s and there were unused streetcar tracks everywhere. The tracks ran along the curbs and that's where people parked their cars. There still were several active streetcar lines and I wonder if it has change at all. Here in Toronto we have several streetcar lines that are having major track work done. There hasn't been a streetcar on my street in two years (Roncesvalles Avenue) and the work might be finished by this spring. I'm not so sure that making a streetcar into a light rail line is the answer. Ottawa has an LRT and it stops at every stop where a streetcar only stops on request. But an LRT is sure better than a bus or abandoned tracks. We had trolleybuses on several streets until about 1993 but a guy from the TTC told me that they can only support so many kinds of technology and the buses were pretty well worn out having been in use since the late 1940s. The overhead wires were in place until about 1998 but were finally taken down. There has been talk of a new car line east of downtown along the lake shore but I probably won't live to see it. It's supposed to serve a new residential area that is going to be built near the harbour in an old industrial area. The money won't come from the province as our provincial premier hates mass transit except for subways.
I find it amazing that parked cars blocking streetcars are taken for granted. Why? Why should a transit system be planned around badly parked cars? Portland and San Francisco often have painted clearance lines, parking anywhere inside is clear, anything over or outside can get you a good fine or a tow and as a result, while there are times where a blocked streetcar has to blow its horn in a quiet neighborhood to bring out the planet gang rapist to take his effin car off the clearance zone, most of the time folks know where to park, even when the “clearance line” in SF is merely a crack between the concrete underneath the asphalt and the rest of the lane. And, it would seem MOST frustrating that you have what you have when once, long before 1990, a transit system that had streetcars on 90% of its N/S streets and 50% of its E/W streets. THAT was a system! But really, STOP treating the entitlement of cars and their drivers as a given. It’s time to start demanding laws that knock some sense into drivers, and remind them that driving is a privilege not a right and they have no entitlement, tthey do not own the road and moreover, should start losing their licenses for infractions that endanger other motorists, and especially pedestrians and cyclists. Stripping motorists of their entitlement has to start somewhere and videos like this should stop treating the bad habits of drivers as some sort of law of nature.
Philly used to do that years ago. I went to school at Temple and took the 23 on 11th and 12th streets. If a car was blocking the tracks the PPA would send out a special truck with a big "pusher" on the front. If they damaged the car, tough shit. Then the yuppie types started complaining so the practice was abandoned.
You shouldn't be surprised the streetcars/trams are gone as this is after all SEPTA - Slowly Eliminating Passenger Transit Altogether As you mentioned the only reason the west Philadelphia lines still run is because of the center city tunnel to city hall. The only route that doesn't go into center city is route 15 which is currently run with buses. Rumors are it will never come back as a streetcar/tram line. Elsewhere SEPTA simply doesn't want to deal with streetcars, the tracks they run on and the wires that power them. SEPTA is really a bus company that also happens reluctantly to run trains. Next up on the chopping block are the trackless trolleys that mostly serve south Philadelphia. Look for those to vanish soon as SEPTA doesn't want to upgrade the overhead wires.
It actually predates SCHLEPTA. Back in the 1950s the PTC was taken over by National City Lines, which turned out to be a front for GM, some oil companies, and tire makers. Within 3 years they'd gotten rid of more than 2 dozen trolley lines. SEPTA inherited a lot of NCL people and their anti-rail mindset has infected the system ever since, through multiple managements.
You are so right. And SEPTA management doesn't even try to hide the fact that they hate trolleys and trackless trolleys. They only run what they are forced to run, not what the public wants.
Reminds me of when I was living in Boston... there's B, C, D, & E trolley lines, and it was super interesting to find older maps with an A line & an extended E line. Most of the trolleys run underground or in a separate area in the middle of the road, but a portion of the E line used to run in the streets. The E line originally ran like 2x as far & connected out to the main elevated/underground line, and it was really funny, they "temporarily" suspended the E line service, but then they renovated / built a whole new station for the end terminal of the E line, Arborway, that sat unused for over a decade before they started using it for buses instead. I think they finally just demolished it & are going to build a commuter parking garage. While I was there, a bunch of local businesses got really fed up with the conditions of some of the roads with the trolley lines, and just paved over the trolley lines & roads themselves, lol. The MBTA got really upset but ultimately didn't do anything. Sadder was the A line, which I researched a little bit. There's this big curve in the B line where it sharply turns, and that's where the old A line kept running straight. Turns out, they shut down the A line service, but still had to keep all of the lines & infrastructure up & running for like 20 years, because the trolley repair depot was at the end of the A line, so they were running trolleys out there all night for work... just horrible mismanagement. Nowadays, they filled in the area with some greenery in the middle of the road; which looks nice I guess, but seems like a waste of space. And there's a lot of old businesses & buildings that were obviously built along the line now abandoned or decaying.
They're* switching to hybrid buses*, not fully electric ones. They've tried battery buses and it didn't work out due to harsh weather in the northeast part of the country, among other reasons.
You've made the argument before that trains (trams in this case) are better because of the lack of rolling resistance, rubber pollution and associated energy efficiency improvements. That all applies here. Like so many others have said, the city needs to just bring the hammer down properly on cars that park on or too near tram lines. There are very few places where it's seen as acceptable to do this so whatever mindset is causing that can be changed.
Philly 🤝 Boston 🤝 NOLA 🤝 SF: Keeping their trolley systems and resisting car dependency and suburban sprawl But they have to learn from the failures of other cities and continue long term investment and maintenance of them, otherwise there’s no point.
I would have been interested in the reasoning why you say trolley busses would be the better choice. Some of the turning seemed to be really tight, that would probably be a reason, but the old routes looked rather straight. I mean, sure, cars can block tram tracks but I see parking adjacent to trams in Germany all the time and parked cars blocking the trams basically never happens. It actually peaked my interest, what happens when a parked car blocks a tram in Germany? It turns out, the passengers get picked up by taxis and the vehicle owner has to pay for the taxis and towing on top of the penalty for blocking the tram. And of course they have to pick up their car at some towing lot, so they also have to waste their time. I’d say, implement something similar and that problem will get solved real fast.
there is no need to develop transit from the scratch. Come over to Europe abd we will show you how it works. Modern Tramways/LRTs have a much bigger capacity than trolley busses. We use buses to feed our tramways and tramways to feed our subway and regional train systems. There is not one system without the other.
I lived near 1 of those trolley routes. They spent money upgrading the tracks and raising the bed. They ran it for about a year then went back to buses. All that new raised bed was torn up
Philly parked dozens of surplus PCCs under a bridge ... where they rotted from weather and vandalism. SEPTIC has almost zero sense when it comes to history. Those cars could have been sold, donated, rehabbed for historic use ... but no.
I remember the trolleys in Center City. They were kind of ramshackle and covered in graffiti. Then they were taken away in the early 90s. Back in the early 1990s Septa said they would bring them back. Never happened. The PCCs should be rebuilt for Center City as much as a tourist attraction as a form of transportation.
Mass transit is a must in modern day. We have to have it grow to replace people individually driving their cars. This is a very sad and misguided story of mis-management. Living in Detroit, this is critical for us too. We have very little useful mass transit. Downtown is growing with no place to park vehicles. Trolly busses are not an improvement.
We build roads all over yet we still end up stuck in traffic. Maybe it is time to rethink and provide public transit and get cars off the streets. We make the cost of living in the USA so high, because we will not think in a community way.
I liked riding the heritage W cars on the Circle Line. A bit like a live-action museum. Of course here in the US there've been services that never upgraded, and were effectively 100% museum operations even though it was revenue service (!)
Counterpoints for trolleys over trolley busses you didn't address ☺️: 1) long term cost savings from cheaper maintenance and running costs of metal wheels vs rubber tires. 2) Can safely run longer guided vehicles than unguided -> increase capacity without increasing running costs 3) lower floor cars &/or level boarding easier to do
I forgot to mention Roz actually talked about one of the routes in particular before if you want more info on what Philly has lost.
ruclips.net/video/zcxezjtw1Ak/видео.html
Yay Rocz!!
What happened to the original thumbnail from MS Paint? I liked that one better! :)
I love trolley but damn septa is frustrating example the westmoreland loop is open after a trillion years seriously why did a small loop take so long and thank you I've been saying for years E-buses(trolleybuses) in the 23,29,47,53,56 and 79 just to name a few
Please make videos more often😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊
Better trolleybuses than hybrid or battery powered buses.
The way to solve "cars in the way of trolleys" is to tow them away and make people pay fines to get them back. After people understand that's what happens when you block them they'll get the message pretty fast.
i like the idea of fining the offender, but what if they cut away and remove just the section of car blocking the tracks, like a tree that’s fallen across a trail 😘
Put a cow catcher on the front, trolly keeps going.
@Adora Tsang Why do you think so? EDIT: I asked before you added "Because car owners pay more tax than trolley riders" after just "It makes more sense to just get rid of trolleys."
My response to you is: Car owners and trolley riders are all taxpayers. Some car owners pay more taxes but so do some trolley riders, similarly, some car owners and trolley riders pay very little or nothing in taxes. Everybody pays, so we might as well pay for nice cities and neighborhoods rather than ones that are simply fast and easy to drive through at the expense of everything else, if the trolley bothers you so much just take a different route, it can't after all. Slow down, enjoy your life, perhaps take a break and ride a trolley.
Easiest to just put a big steel bumper on the trolley.
@Adora Tsang The amount of infrastructure necessary to allow everyone to drive will always cost more than the revenue we could capture from those drivers. This only appears feasible because cities have spent the last 50 or so years bankrupting themselves in an attempt to accommodate cars. Most people are unaware of how insanely expensive all the car infrastructure we take for granted is.
Though a trolley fare is comparatively less than whatever taxes drivers are paying in PA, the trolley can transport a lot more people at a much more reasonable cost per person.
I remember when SEPTA trolleys cost 5 cents to ride on. Favorite SEPTA story from those days: A man got on the trolley and gave the driver a $20 bill, saying “I’m sorry, I don’t have a nickel.” The driver answered; “That’s fine; in a minute you’re going to have 399 of them!”
Nickel fares were back in pre-SEPTA days when it was called PTC. If there was an open window I'd hop on the side, put my feet on that sideboard and hold on to the window bars - save myself 5 cents for a candy bar. School shoes were hard, sneakers were best. The 13 was my trolley line, it's still runnin.
George - d'ya know the story about crowded trolleys and open fire plugs on a hot summer day? - with the best time for that stunt being late afternoon rush hour.
Okay... but what it used to cost is inmaterial in 2024.
😅
I'm 75 and I don't remember that.
alan as a south philly resident and someone who rides the trolleys everyday, you really hit the nail on the head with this video. its incredibly frustrating to see other cities swoon over light rail and streetcars and race to build them, while septa just lets our unused tracks rot away, ESPECIALLY when the tracks are grade separated (like the 56). what i wish septa would look into and that no one talks about is converting more west philly bus lines to trolley...the tunnel definitely has the capacity because they did this in the past and this would legitimately speed people's rides to center city vs all surface streets
For the 23, 29, and 79, one would need Southern Depot (and possibly Midvale-the 23 is too long to be just out of Southern) to be able to equipped with that infrastructure.
I used to ride the 56 trolley years ago. I do not recall a grade separation from Cottman Ave to Broad Street. I do remember delays due to double parked cars.
Get involved locally. Share transit videos with your friends and family. It's a lot easier to make stuff happen locally - it's actually doable.
SEPTA has a lot of positive plans in the works from what I gather, and if modernization improves the service enough, then it may well be a reality.
Trolleybusses are so great! They are environmentally friendly as they don't require batteries or a combustion engine. recently I was filming at the largest trolleybus network of west europe which is in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Great video Alan!
Seattle Trollybuses yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You know some asshole out there is trying to create a battery-electric trolley just to get the worst case of battery powered busses and inflexibility of trolley rails.
Pretty much everywhere in the UK used to have them till the 1960's then they were replaced with a variety of busses from old AEC RT's & routemasters to complete different and newer leyland, bristol, volvo and dennis busses that ran under council liveries till privatisation.
@@nitehawk86 haha probably
They are not, they realease tyre dust
As someone who uses the trolley in west philly everyday to get to work, I’m so excited for the renovations soon! The trolley cars are not great and we need so much more space. I don’t want to deal with 3 trolleys passing by my stop because they were too full 😭
I take the 34 into work, I'm a bit sad to know they'll be consolidating stops, but I know it's for the better to stay on time and to have the larger vehicles work
I take the 102 and 101 trolleys to work out in Media, and understaffing has apparently been a problem. I wish SEPTA was appropriately staffed & funded!
@@gabrieleortiz5041 they are but they squander and waste the money
@@gabrieleortiz5041 - Everyone is dealing with staffing shortages. Agencies are competing with trucking companies for a decreasing pool of commercial drivers (these trolleys are still considered Class 8 commercial vehicles).
They're planning on buying a whole new fleet of articulated trolleys, but as always in Philly and PA someone has to come up with $$$ planning.septa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SEPTA-TrolleyMod_ProgramGoals.pdf
In before Europeans saying "Why don't you call them TRAMS?!?" 😆 To reactivate a disused trolley line in the US, they'd probably have to do a 30-year long EIS and economic-impact study after which NIMBYs would scuttle it anyway after they found out they'd lose a few parking spaces here or there.
Okay fair but what's that got to do with the name? Trollry Bus is an automotive bus with trollry wiring attached to it...this here is a rail based system thus making it a... Tram Trolley I guess? But basically all Trams run on overhead lines so why not just call it a Tram?
this is quite possibly the most based thing ive read all day
@@hurricanemeridian8712 trams have panthographs
@@hurricanemeridian8712 I was just making light of how many people criticize US-Americans for calling them trolleys. Which would be like me telling a Brit he's using the wrong word for a spanner... that's a wrench, dude!
A tram is a box suspended from a cable like a ski lift, silly limeys
It would be interesting to see SEPTA run the old K-car trolleys up in Chestnut Hill once they complete (if they complete) the modernization project. My dad thinks that those are the original trolley tracks, would probably throw and old man fit if he found out they were renovated and never used.
Everyone I've talked to at SEPTA has been extremely firm about the 23 not coming back until at least after trolley modernization is complete, which they say will be 2030 at the earliest, and they don't seem amicable to bringing the 23 back ever.
K-Cars actually ran on the 23 into Chestnut hill on a couple occasional fan trips in the 1990s
@@tealmer3528 I can't see it ever being a priority since most of it runs parallel to the Broad Street Line and the rest runs parallel to both of the Chestnut Hill lines which terminate exactly where the trolley did.
@@tealmer3528 That makes sense because everyone at SEPTA above the driver level needs to be yeeted into the Delaware
@@nathaniellindner313 The lower levels of SEPTA Planning have actually got a lot of really cool people that aren't morons, and people like Lex Powers are doing a lot of good work there. The issue is the higher-ups, as well as the structural issues both plaguing funding and giving the city basically no vote (SEPTA's board is 2 votes for the city, 2 votes for each of the 4 suburban counties for a total of 8 votes for the suburbs, a vote for the state house, a vote for the state Senate, and a vote for the governor)
In Romania, if you park on any tram tracks, you get a ticket from the police and a lot of meat in your fridge from the travelers. And if the police gets to lift your car, depending on how important that line is, you can also make it to the local news in a negative way. The worst problem we have in Bucharest are drivers that go on the tram line (something which is also forbidden at a national level, but largely ignored) which is why we started separating the tram tracks with fences to the rest of the road. This is really useful on large boulevards as it turns the tram lines into an effective emergency lane for ambulances to go through as well. They even added some bus lanes through, though this feels weird and is quite problematic when two buses going opposite direction meet in a fenced area.
Unfortunately, tram systems in Romania have been quite neglected in the last 30 years, with 2 cities (Brașov and Constanța) getting rid of them completely, and another one (Botoșani) having it in tatters. There are cities, however, such as Cluj or Ploiești which have rebuilt their system from scratch, with Reșița doing the same at the time I post this comment. In Bucharest the system is both old, massive and complex, and attracts a lot of riders, despite the bad press caused by the old rolling stock (long story-short: the most widely used tram model is the V3A series, which was designed as a cheap communist copycat of a west-german tram and improved upon until today; the tram does not have an inch of low floor, except the models produced after 2000s, they are noisy, swing sideways a lot and do not offer too much to the travelers). Many important lines were completely rebuilt in the last 2 decades, but there are still 1/3 of the lines that need urgent replacement. Despite that, however, and the pressure from some politicians to do away with it, one cannot imagine Bucharest without the tram system. The bus&trolleys do not have dedicated lanes, and although we have a metro system, it does not reach every point of the city, is expensive to build and takes a lot of time and nerves of the residents, as they are usually built underground (see the M5 line which took 9 years to build a chunk of it, although they promised to build it in 3 years). So there is definitely a use-case for the tram here, even in the most "American" country in Europe (sorry, no offense).
Seperated Public transit routes are very important emergency lanes (Vienna for example as well)
what does meat in your fridge mean? lol
@@PerfectPrinceX1 swears basically. lots of them!
In San Francisco, half the time it’s a cop car double parked on the tracks…
@@pbriffy lol
Philadelphia: Switches to trolleybuses to get around parked cars that are in the way.
Amsterdam: Removes the parking spaces that are in the way.
Alot of people in Philadelphia work in the Suburbs, going against cars, reduces quality of life for most of us, many of us need cars for various reasons
Well, as a philosophy student I‘ve heard of worse trolley problems
Oh, this one still kills people, it's just less obvious.
Well played!
😁😁😁
Like 0:48 ?
I would allow the trolley to hit 4 people because its not my problem
Be glad Philly's tracks and wires still exist.
Quite alot of places arn't as lucky to only have them abandoned....
alot is not a word
most of the overhead wires don't exist any more; very few parts of the city still have them. The wires are a bit maintenance headache; and dangerous for large vehicles to cross.
@@billjohnson9472 Yes, but even where they do exist, you don't necessarily get streetcars. There were overhead wires in Seattle for the trolley buses that were relatively common until hybrid buses came along. There were even hybrid buses that could operate on either diesel or electricity for routes that needed to be electric to go through the tunnel, but they couldn't or wouldn't run those power lines for.
Even with those lines in place, there wasn't much interest in streetcars and we didn't get them until some developers managed to convince the voters that it was a good idea. Newsflash, it was a horrible idea that just made the roads even less safe for bicyclists and added a ton of expense for something that serves no practical function.
Very interresting, yet very frustrating video. I really appreciate all the work you put into you videos. All are really high quality. Thank you.
True, I think it would be cool (and important) to talk about futur and curent transit projets in the rust belt. Don't change the fact it's a good video
I could be wrong but when I moved to Philly in 1975 there were trolleys running up and down many of the north-south numbered streets all throughout Center City. I recall at the time being told that Philly had the distinction of having the most still-operating trolley routes of any city in America. Then I saw as, one by one, they were either paved over, tracks ripped up, or left partially in place not used anymore. At some point there was talk of removing the asphalt to expose the tracks again, or rehab existing rail, or lay new ones, which I believe did happen in places. I left in 2011 and, as you mentioned, cities all over are building trolleys where none existed. What a missed opportunity.
You are right. A trolley was still running on 3rd St then. Today the 57 bus runs on 3rd.
I remember when I visited Philadelphia in the summer of 2015 and saw streetcar tracks by the Reading Terminal Market in Center City. Given that I'm from Toronto, Canada where just like Philadelphia we retained our streetcar system, I was kind of looking forward to seeing a streetcar pass by, turns out it wasn't the case. This video makes sense now as to why I didn't see any trolleys in Center City, thanks Alan!
It's ashame a lot of tourists don't get to see any trolleys because they head underground in West Philadelphia way before they reach Center City
@@veonnisual Now THAT is a transit snafu!
@@veonnisual Yes, trolleys are much better at hitting cars first.
We rebuilt the Pyongyang streetcar system as the original system got significant destruction during the war, with the first line opening in 1991 as the result of overcrowding on trolleybuses. There are currently four lines, operating on both sides of the Taedong but only one actually crosses it, Line 3. Line 1 uses to cross it but it was shortened to Pyongyang railway station with points east replaced with a trolleybus.
Three of the lines uses trams either made in the former Czechslovakia by Tatra or in-house, while the Kumsusan shuttle line which goes to the Kumsusan mausoleum of my father and grandpa from Samhung on the Pyongyang Metro (this service has replaced the Kwangmyong metro station that's been closed since 1995 due to the site being home to the mausoleum), uses a VBZ Be 4/4 from Zurich.
I'm 67 but I'm gonna say this like a teenager, it would be truly cool if they make the trolly trains, like the ones in Europe. I saw one of those proposed pics in your video with the middle of the street barrier and waiting stand, thats cool. Plus it upgrades all those decaying, delapidated, potholled streets, left that way because they can't repave them over the existing tracks.
Trams in Berlin or Prague are awesome, fast, cheap and everywhere, non of my friends even has a car anymore .... it just has to be maintained like everything ...
To the Point of parked cars, if a tram is blocked, the support tow truck is there in 10 min and it cost 300Euro fine and you have to travel forever to get back your car, so no one does dare park on the tracks ^^
@@xuedi This also works with people blocking bike lanes! 😆
the trams in berlin are not very reliable many times you have to wait 8-9 minutes for a tram supposed to come every 5 minutes only for 2 of them to arrive at the same time
@@johnq1753 Waiting only 10 minutes for transit in most of the US would be a utopia in comparison!
@@johnq1753 LOL imagine… in my city they always arrive on time
I will argue that the 56 trolley should come back. Very low priority project but the 56 trolley in Philadelphia does have some space for a dedicated ROW for more than half the route
I completely agree with this, and think that there are a few routes in Northeast Philadelphia that would be better off as trolleys, especially since the bus revolution is straightening a few out (though that would mean the laying down of new track). I think the 54 would also be a good idea for a trolley, since most of its route is spent on Lehigh Avenue, a very wide road.
If the Feds had any sense we'd have something akin to a PCC-2 developed for the 21st century. There's many expanding light rail systems in the US, and it'd make a ridiculous amount of sense to standardize and mass-produce them.
@@ranyamaelstrom I almost want to argue for the 60 as well since it can link up to the 15 trolley loop
Great video! Trolleybuses are great but like you mentioned Philly streets are small and double parking would still be an enormous problem. A way to fix it would be to eliminate parking on one side, but that’s a story for another time.
This too is a sore spot for me as I was a child when the 6, 23, 50, 53, 56, and 60 were still trolleys. What I’ve always hoped could happen was that some west Philly bus routes were converted back to trolleys and rerouted through the subway surface tunnel.
A bigger idea would be connecting some north and south Philly routes through unused tunnels like under Arch street and Pennsylvania Avenue. I think the schuylkill valley metro was to use the latter.
I love the trolley buses
Philadelphia "at least it ain't Columbus", Pennsylvania
Actually, it's probably more like "at least it ain't Pittsburgh". 🤣
@@danielkelly2210 grumbles while driving along the last set of surviving rails on Chestnut street.
And "Pennsylvania, your Gateway to Ohio!"
Torontonian here! Philly needs to improve and invest in their trams! If it got some TLC, it would EASILY rival Toronto and Melbourne. It’s honestly a real shame especially since everything seems to still exist. It’s truly a shame how many cities have removed their tram systems. It would be a really really big shame to see Philly become one of these other cities…
Edit: Trolleybuses are also awesome! Much better than these fancy shmancy battery electric buses, and I wish Toronto kept its Trolleybus network. We can only hope there’s a future for the trams and trolleys of Philly!
the problem with that is SEPTA is a state agency not a city agency and the rest of the state already doesn't like how much of the state budget Philly consumes, even though we also generate most of the revenue
@@jasonjacksn the other counties that have voting rights and veto power over septa don't like funding projects that benefit the city unfortunately
some The Learning Channel?
@@benfelps as a Torontonian that sounds very familiar.
Two of the trackless trolley routes 59 and 66 are actually owned by the city. Ridge Avenue was a former trackless route
I used to schedule for SEPTA
Bob Campbell
Usually I'm all for trams/trollies, but in this case I agree with you. If the city is not going to completely redesign the city center streets to be more trolley accommodating; then trolley-buses would work better in this case.
In other words (and if it makes sense to do), the city centre streets should be drastically improved. Why are we letter some things push transit around?
You could run them underground for some parts like any other Stadtbahn/premetro in Europe.
@@SomePotato that's not practical. Is already existing underground structure. And the expense is just off the charts. Nor is ridership particularly growing.
I would agree with you. I think folks are sort of living with rose tinted glasses and are just train fans.
Adelaide, South Australia had an extensive Tramway Network which mostly got Ripped out.
Now it is slowly being rebuilt at huge financial cost.
Appreciate the history on why there aren’t any trolleys outside of west Philly. I’m really hopeful about the 15 being the first sign of movement back toward trolleys/trolley buses on this side of the river. Additionally, I know there is near 0 information outside of the like 90 page document for the regional rail “lifestyle” transformation but if you were to try and do a comprehensive review of Philadelphia’s transit that would be an interesting discussion of “what’s next”. Pair that with a discussion of the bus revitalization project and you’d have a better story about what SEPTA is doing than they can write.
I’m sitting at Richmond and Westmoreland as I right this comment and they just spent millions of dollars and it took 3 years to redo the bus and trolley station but they aren’t going to run the 15 down to this remodeled station , it will go to Delaware and Frankford and turn to go back to West Philadelphia. I don’t know why they spent all of that money putting the trolley tracks back on Richmond street to not run the trolley . They also just replaced the tracks at this new station and they didn’t remove them from Richmond street yet but what’s the point of having trolley tracks with no trolleys?
@@mrbig4532 the trolley itself isn’t and they’re not planning on running trolley buses either? I’m familiar with the stop but from what I’ve seen running all the way into port Richmond they have wires and tracks. It’s a damn shame if they’re not running it out here but I haven’t looked at the plan to be sure one way or another.
@@gekquad116 it just seems like such a waste of money to relay those tracks and they just designed Richmond street making it a lot different then it previously was , they must have some type of plan to bring a trolley or tram up to the end of the line at Richmond and Westmoreland because they raised the curbs to a high height from the street at all of the stops from Allegheny Ave down to Ann street. It would really make me question whoever makes the decisions at septa if they didn’t put the trolley back onto Richmond street , the tracks were removed in the early 1990’s and then at great expense layed back down in the early 2000’s and now they don’t want to run the trolley that everyone loved by the way. I haven’t been on the south side of Allegheny Ave for a while until the other day I just avoid it because of the congestion and road work but I live in the area and I didn’t even recognize it when I saw all of the new buildings and the remodels it’ really nice down there with bars and coffe shops , restaurants are coming, and all of the old closed stores that have been sitting there for decades have all been reopened as other businesses but it looks great .
@@mrbig4532 I live in the area as well and I’m down that side regularly. It is great, I’d be really surprised if they didn’t run the trolley. I did some research last night about the plans to being the trolleys back and it certainly seems like they intend to with the time scale having shifted to fall 2023 for the full line. There was a Philly Inquirer article from earlier this year on it. Part of the delays, as I understand, is the construction not being completed in Brewery town (that’s scheduled to be worked on until the end of this month) along with i95 construction (which seems to have been cleared up on Richmond) as well as waiting for the old trolleys to be renovated. We’ll see but I do believe the plans for the trolley to return are there.
Hi Alan. Great video. The best cure for parked cars is tram (trolley) mounted anti tank gun. They will learn very quickly!!!🙃
Nah you just put a cow catcher on.
Then do what the trains do.
Think that's depressing? In central Indiana we have about 6 old main lines, some with existing over and underpasses that have been abandoned since the 80s. Some were lucky enough to be turned into bike paths though
Long as theres no housing estate built ontop it's a win.
As someone from Pittsburgh, I know what it's like to lose a robust Trolley system. The city used to have an extensive system that spread out from the heart of the city. Today we have busses that are fine but, less extensive and a lite rail system that only supports the neighborhoods and suburbs south of the city.
You know you have been blessed when you refresh YT main page just to see new Alan video 30 seconds ago... Poggers
My thoughts exactly
thank you for including accessibility details!! ❤️👍
Just be glad Phily has transportation. Used to live in Indianapolis and all we had was bus lines. Do you know i lived there 2 weeks before i even saw a bus? Yeah i never even considered it a reliable form of transportation even with a bus stop across the street from my house.
This just reminded me of the fact that when I lived in Jersey City, there's this North Hudson Health Center right across from the Supremo supermarket and I always hated going in there because it was always packed and had a long wait eating out of my day. Later on, I learned that the building where the doctor's office is now was once a trolley house as part of the North Hudson County Railway/Public Service streetcar system, and streetcars went from Palisade Ave to either go down an elevated trestle or take a funicular wagon lift to get to Hoboken.
And that made me hate it more for using the space for a doctor's office instead of trolleys. Sure, Hudson County learned from getting rid of its trolleys by building the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, but it's not the same.
As somebody living in a city with absolutely great public transport, I can tell you: Busses are absolutely not better than trams. Trams are great. And if people park on the street, they are in for a very expensive surprise.
I have 8 tram lines in a 5 min walking distance, the whole public transit network in the city is HUGE, and it transports us everywhere. Trams go every 5 to 15 min (depends on the day, there are fewer on saturdays and sundays). The trams are efficient, reliable and much faster than going by car (for most routes in the city) and since the city acknowledges the importance of public transport for the wellbeing of the city, it pays part of the fees, so people only pay 365 Euro (388 US-Dollar) per person for one year of transportation all around in the city of Vienna. It is just great. I can recommend that. Maybe you could have a look and implement something like that in America too.
I wish, Americans are really territorial when it comes to their cars, in South Philly they couldn't even get a slight decrease in road width in order to make room for bikes & pedestrians, let alone public transportation. People here in general have a huge blind spot for how much space parking takes, and generally have no sense of how much time and effort they actually spend storing 2 ton appliances on public streets. It's a huge waste and an eye sore.
Sorry, but we spend too much on Defense. In an ideal world we would exit NATO and spend that money on domestic issues, like transit.
Trolleybuses require different infrastructure than streetcar. The former requires two catenary wires to complete a circuit, while latter uses a single wire, as the track itself is the return. So, while it's possible to convert trolley line to a trackless trolley one (streetcar line to trolleybus), it would require completely new electrical infrastructure.
the REAL solution is to build dedicated sites for major tramways lines (this means no car can drive on trolley tracks and no cars can park near the site except if there are specific parking spots) and for less frequented lines they remove tracks for trolleybuses. And for major trolleybuses lines they make exclusive bus roads.
No, trolley bus is worst version of tram, period. Tire wear and tire is usually the main source of PM2.5 pollution causing the most health damage. As a European (from Prague), the nobrainer stuff do are:
1) fixing the tracks so that it doesn't look like something from former soviet union (think of Volgograd or Cherson level of awful)
2) get modern tram vehicles with pantographs
3) give trams a priority in the roadways rules (basically, on a intersection, tram has always the priority over cars and pedestrians because it's bigger, heavier and carries more people)
4) get to frequency of 10-12mins at worst on any line so that the network is remotely useful (half hour to hour frequency at night)
5) restore the old tracks and build new paralel/redundant routes so in case of dumbo parking on the tracks, the trams can go around skipping couple stops and having delay in 10mins at worst instead of 45mins
Contract out to tow companies so that cars in the way of trolly lines will be towed in under 10 minutes. Institute a hefty fine to pay for this service.
Meanwhile Prague is reintroducing trolleybuses. They are cheaper and more flexible than trams. Trolleybuses are great If ridership is not enough to justify a tram.
@@ganz3995 Except trolleybuses are either temp fix for incompetence of other gov. agencies or just electrification of current bus lines in steep hills or elsewhere where it doesn't make sense to build full fledged tram tracks just yet (and if they want to, they have half of the shit ready and just have to laid down the track and move couple overhead wires)
One of the most charming quirks of this channel is how *aggressively* Philadelphian it is, and what makes it a *great* channel is how it leverages this extremely narrow context to make excellent points about transit in general.
As someone who lives near Toronto and uses streetcars every now and again, seeing potential reopened routes in Philly end up decaying and get built over is so frustrating! Philadelphia deserves way better than this.
I'm old enough to remember riding the Yellow Cars in LA. They were killed off in 1963 because; 1) the original LAMTA was more interested in promoting buses and freeways connecting the suburbs with downtown; 2) the money from the city and county wasn't there to fix the aging fleet and overhead wires; and 3) the 5 lines that remained by 1963 all went through Black and Latino communities in South Central LA and East LA; communities the cities considered "irrelevant". The only reason the Blue/A Line got built and opened as quickly as it did in 1990 was because most of the old Pacific Electric Red Car tracks between downtown LA and Long Beach were still being used for freight trains,and could easily be converted to light rail. Like its predecessor,the Blue Line is a heavily used route. The E/Expo Line to Santa Monica also follows an old PE route and is heavily used. Ironically,the new K Line along Crenshaw follows part of an old Yellow Car route. I also grew up riding Muni during both the PCC and current LRV era. The streetcar lines were saved from being replaced by buses because they utilized tunnels(K,L,M,N) or had ROW that was too narrow or hilly for bus(J). They've added the F,T and Central Subway in the last 25 years. Plus the trolley buses are heavily used.
As for SEPTA? It needs better funding. And more representation from Philadelphia in addition to Delaware and Montgomery Counties. That's why the 23 and 56 were killed off as trolleys. The K Cars are 43 years old,long past their expiration date. The Modernization Project will certainly involve construction and disruption of trolley routes. But you NEED trolleys and stops that are ADA compliant along those routes: the 11 and 36 immediately come to mind. That's my one peeve about Muni: the LRV's aren't all accessible at every stop once they leave the tunnels. Hoping SEPTA doesn't go in that same direction.
6:00 If the only reason to prefer trolley busses over trams is ''to get around illegally parked cars'', there's a serious priority problem. This is a failure of policy and policing, not of trams.
How about fining those drivers instead of allowing this kind of behaviour??
In my city in europe, if a driver is parked in the way of trams, they have about two minutes to run out and move their car. If not, the police is notified who proceed to the spot immediately with a tow truck. 10-15 minutes later the car is towed, with no argument possible. The driver receives a hefty fine of over 100 Euro, plus an extra fine the public transport company itself is allowed to issue legally on top of the police fine. And if the car was towed, to get their car back the driver has to get it at the impound lot and pay another impound fee.
So you bet parking or even standing still on tram tracks is a VERY rare occurrence here.
If parking in the way of a tram is so commonplace in the USA designers need to design around it, this just another sign of drivers and cars having been given WAY too much leeway, and of car-centric design and policy that's gotten out of hand. You don't park blocking a tram or public transit. If you do, you should suffer the consequences. Simple as that. Public transit serves the many, your car doesn't.
One thing that SEPTA's current fleet of trolley buses have an advantage over the older fleet is that the buses also have a diesel engine that can be used if the route the trolley buses take is closed due to a major incident, but have not been substituted with regular buses.
At the same time, much like the Subway-Surface Trolley routes, SEPTA's current Trackless Trolley routes are now just down to one, the Route 66, that operates between Frankford Transportation Center and the Frankford-Knights Circle at the Philadelphia-Bucks County Line. At one time, the system was widespread, but like the Route 23 and other surface trolley routes, were replaced regular buses. One route, Route 79 (in South Philadelphia), uses battery electric buses, but due to potential issues, is now back to hybrid buses.
EDIT: I forgot that SEPTA operates two other trackless trolley routes out of the Arrott Transportation Center (the old Margaret-Orthodox station on the Market-Frankford Line), being the Route 59 to Rhawnhurst and the Route 79 to Wayne Junction and Nicetown.
Yes, it is sad that Septa have not followed through on the old promises. Trolley buses are a better option than diesel buses, but anything which uses rubber tires is also polluting.
Steel is not polluting?
@@RestrictedProceed The manufacturing of steel is, of course, polluting. However, steel wheels on steel rails do not wear anywhere nearly as much as tires which exude huge amounts of tiny plastic and rubber particulates into the atmosphere. These, in turn, accumulate onto the road surfaces which eventually pollute water courses and drain into rivers and seas.
SEPTA is (in)famous for failed planning. They proposed a long exurban metro line that went near all sorts of important locations but not TO any of them. Every single trip would require a transfer to a shuttle for the last-mile part. They came up with another commuter rail system that would have cost 2-3 times as much per km as anything else planned in the country. On top of that a citizens' group looked at the plans and found that SEPTA could only run a single train back and forth because they hadn't considered scheduling conflicts.
so a pedal bike is polluting? what do you propose tires be made out of so they wont pollute
Trams are better than trolleybuses in terms of energy usage. Trolleybus is still a bus - rubber tire on a concrete road, while tram is steel rolling on steel. That's up to 10x less friction. However, trams are heavier, so you end up with 4-5x efficiency.
Of course trams are more expensive. So, when there is no money, probably it's better to start with trolleybuses and later replace them with trams on the busiest lines.
Even Berlin had trolleybuses...but the last lines got taken out of service in east-Berlin as they tey tended to de-wire at railroad crossings.
But yeah they're an awesome type of transportation that's very underused here in Europe...aside from the former soviet states and Poland.
On the other hand we do have working street cars aka trams.
Berlin is considering reintroducing trolleybuses with 15 lines in the Spandau district. Trolleybuses are common in Switzerland, Italy and all over Central and Eastern Europe so not exactly underused.
@@ganz3995 Berlin is thinking about reintroducing Trams in Spandau.
And i don't know any system in the BeNeLux region, France, or Scandinavia. I know Salzburg in Austria has them, in Germany it's Eberswalde and Solingen...but that's it lol
@@BruscoTheBoar France has trolleybusses in Saint-Étienne, Lyon and Limoges.
Netherlands in Arnhem, Norway in Bergen and Sweden in Landskrona.
@@BruscoTheBoar munich had a Trolleybus system for exactly 10 years as a temporary replacement for some tram lines because the tram lines were destroyed during the 2nd world war. They removed the Trolleybuses again when the tram lines were usable again.
Mass transit (especially in populated areas), makes sense not only for carbon emissions but for just ease of getting around.
The current model is 1 car one person (roughly) in the US. This means that highways and roads need to be larger as population grows and when they can't get larger then this means congestion.
Mass transit can resolve that issue (as long as they have dedicated lanes - nothing gets solved if they use the same traffic lanes), but you have to have a convenient and reliable mass transit system. However, even if it takes the same amount of time to get to the location you want on mass transit then people may chose that option instead of the stress of driving in a congested area.
Convenient and reliable transit is also a must. If I have to wait 1 hour for a bus/trolly/light rail to get to a place where it takes me 30 minutes to drive to then no one is going to take the mass transit. Additionally, if I have to walk 3 miles to get to the mass transit and another 3 miles to get where I am going, then again people will opt for them more convenient option which will lead them door to door or close enough.
Maybe the 15 is a harbinger of things to come? The rolling stock is almost done and the tracks are now running along Richmond St. as of this week. We need the one going up down Delaware avenue, at the least.
They did move the stops over to Richmond but I don’t believe the tracks are completed over in Brewerytown based on the notifications I’ve gotten. They’re still running buses sadly but I hope that when the trolleys are done, we’ll see them rolling!
Oh, and on the Delaware Avenue line, it frustrates me to no end that I see it sitting there whenever I’m on that side of the city. I cry inside every time I see it.
@@gekquad116 It's awful. It would take no enormous amount of effort and would be hugely beneficial for every neighborhood along the Delaware. There's so much development in that corridor!
@@Charles-yq8vv there really is. Between the connection to the various bike trails, attractions up and down the coast line, and relative ease of access from center city (allowing connections via regional rail and Amtrak) it’s a damn shame we don’t make it easy for people to go up and down. It’s not like people aren’t traveling that way! The number of tourists and clueless people I’ve seen walking in the bike lane would benefit tremendously from the trolley service. Plus, it’d be a great excuse for the redevelopment of the abandoned buildings further south in Delaware.
Great video. Worst part of unused trolly tracks for me is how dangerous they are for bicyclist. It's why I switched to a mountain bike with wider tires.
I laughed pretty hard at 1:34 , hits close to home lol. MARTA’s street car line isn’t exactly very useful at getting people anywhere, its literally just a 1-2 mile loop around tourist spots downtown. At least they’re planning to expand it up to Ponce City Market if it can get past this NIMBY protest phase its in rn.
As a Melbournian living in Santiago, Chile, I've gone from a city with one of the largest tram networks in the world to a city with absolutely zero trams. The worst part is there are still tracks on many streets, but trams haven't run here since the 1950s or thereabouts. There is a pretty decent metro system here though, so that's nice. Although it gets crazy crowded so that's not so fun.
I grew up in Philly, and its been wild watching the whoel city decay in real time...but that's American cities in a nutshell. For every 'modernization' project they put through, they demolish 5 historical sites or cut five important programs.
Trolly-buses are so freaking smart, especially combined with a smallish battery bank/supecapacitor bank giving them the possibility to reroute around problems on the line and the overhead cables doesn't need to go round corners.
Here they have battery busses on the short flat routes they can manage, and diesels on all other routes.
Well into the city the routes merge and runs along a few streets that easily could be electrifyed
In Montevideo, Uruguay you randomly see tracks peeking out of the asphalt all the time, at least we have a bunch of bus lines but sometimes I wish we had more alternatives
Big problem with trolley trains: doesn’t solve road maintenance. Heavy weight is why trains trolleys and trams work- gliding on girders doesn’t take much maintenance. Asphalt has to be upkept replaced/recycled constantly. It’s expensive
I remember reading a report on the minimum turning radii for Toronto and Philadelphia trams. Toronto had the second sharpest of existing systems in North America and Philly had the sharpest, by about 3 feet. Toronto could not use an off the shelf low floor vehicle and had to have on adapted to our curves. Philly would be even harder. Also Toronto had to have the centre truck powered to be able to push a disabled car up some of our hills.
That`s not a big issue now.
Most of european tram networks have their specialities about curves, incline ets, and cars are being ordered with taking these specialities into account.
When you`re ready to pay - tram producers will make anything. Even low-floor.
In Helsinki they have trams now with articulated bogies so each bogie bends in the middle as well as the entire tram and this seems to handle tight turns very well.
Pittsburgh can join the club. Aside from a few lines in the South Hills our trolley network was ran into the ground by Port Authority. 2 of the remaining lines might be cut as the result of a “best use study”…
If you think it’s bad in Philly, you should come to Tampa or basically anywhere in Florida with the exception of Miami. All we have is a few lousy buses here in the Tampa area where the population is exploding. We have a 2 mile historic street car line but in 20 years they haven’t been able to expand it, we even had a ballot measure to add a transit system and it passed unanimously but the state government overruled it and canceled it. Best part is they haven’t figured out how to refund the half cent sales tax we paid for two years to cover the ballot measure.
Yeah, that money was redirected to fund the DEI Gestapo.
You know what else needs to be fixed? The friggin trolley diversion to 40th St. That entire are of West Philly becomes a traffic nightmare, the transit slows to a crawl, and the trolley’s bunch up as they vainly attempt a 3 mph left turn across traffic. I realize this is supposed to be the little-used backup route, but my goodness it is terrible.
the worst thing about the trolleys is that they share their space with cars. I live near media and it's a nightmare to drive down state st when the trolley is running, the roads are too narrow to pull over, especially because there is street parking on both sides of the road. Things would run way smoother if the tracks took up one side of the road rather than going down the middle.
This comes only from people who thinks streets are only for them and their cars. No, streets are for all citizens, and when people want to travel in trolleys you have to respect and share space, even when it makes your journey slower.
@@T0MT0Mmmmy I totally agree! I think I worded my comment a little bit weirdly. I'm not bothered that I need to pull over for the trolley, I'm bothered that there is no space to pull over to let it pass. it clogs up the roads when the trolley is trying to move and drivers have nowhere to go. In hindsight, I think a better solution is wider roads or no street parking in spaces with trolleys.
In my city, the trams get their own lanes on every new line
It should be noted under said Modernization Plan there would be the following addition of track:
-15 Extension to 69th Street Transportation Ctr.
-34 Extension to East Lansdowne (Terminal tbd)
-36 Extension to Eastwick Station
-102 Extension to Darby Transportation Ctr via Street-Running on Chester Pike.
-New Depot off the 36 at Greys and 41st St for all new LRVs
-Rebuilt Darby Terminal with 3 tracks for the 11, 13 and 102.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the 15 and 102 extensions as it would finally physically connect the City Trolley Lines to the Suburban and it would make it easier to move around cars. All of the new "bendy" trolleys who are coming in will be double-ended so they can be used universally. Also Darby, East Lansdowne and Eastwick Terminals are slanted to be regular end sidings, no Loops.
There are also proposals (not necessarily on any list yet) to extend the 10 to the Overbrook station on the RRD, and do something similar with the 101 to meet the Media RRD station.
Philadelphia has the same attitude that NYC had when it decided along with the Philadelphia mayors, and city council in not bothering to have their representatives in the state legislature and in Congress to fund the trolley lines and improve them. The last trolley line in NYC was also the last trolley line in New York State ended in April 1957, the Queensborough Bridge Railway.
Cost for NYC is likely one of the reasons the city moved away from trolley lines. The subway system is second to none and probably contributed to the city not looking back. Places like Staten Island, Queens, Part of Brooklyn, and northern parts of the Bronx could use trolley lines. Philly might have had the same attitude as NYC but lacked the funding to expand its subway system to cover some of the losses of the trolley lines.
taxing cigs, sugary beverages are more important. how else is Filthadelphia supposed to fund council members destination vacations, buy their McMansions etc
Philadelphia politicians have to deal with representatives of the rest of the state who tend to hate cities. Philadelphia just won a court case to try to get equal funding for our schools. 😕
I am surprised we don't see more "trolley problem" references that are about actual trolleys.
As a kid in the 1960s, we'd be in Philly almost every weekend. Our grandmother often take us to many places in Philly, the old PTC trolleys, loved getting on those trolleys, usually the 13, 11, 34 routes. Going into the tunnels extra exciting. In the suburbs, just a few months ago, SEPTA been closing the 102, 101 routes every weekend for upgrades. That has been going on over 2 years!! How long does it take? Especially to get to various events. What is done on weekends is shuttle busses. Trolleys have a more comfortable ride, get around faster, due to sections of tracks free of street traffic. However, after 2 yrs you'd think the work be finished on those 2 routes.
From what I heard the Germantown/Chestnut Hill lines didn't come back because the cost to install a new power station was to expensive.
bah, Filthadelphia could just find more stuff to tax. cigs,booze,sugary beverages arent enough, well tax every dirt bike,four wheeler in the city. auction off the confiscated ones, confiscate them again. it's win win win all the way around
That's total and pure BS from anti-trolley SEPTA. Modern substations are compact and inexpensive.
Love the philly videos keep them coming. Fully agree about trolleybuses, and frustrating to see Septa doubling down on battery electric when we already have the infrastructure there. We've got a crappy subway system compared to Boston, NYC, Chicago, and DC, and that's not gonna change anytime soon (my kingdom for ambitious city leadership), but we have the bones for a better transit system overall. And I def credit SEPTA for the trolley/bus/RR modernization plans - for an underfunded agency they are doing smart stuff with the money they have and (mostly) not doing vaporware nonsense
I live right by the Girard station trolley stop you have pictured at 5:25. I am so excited for that street to be completely redesigned. A bonus - see the low, single story bank building behind the light rail car? That's going to be converted to an apartment block. Good things are happening in Philadelphia!
As a German it is funny to see the trolley almost stopping at every junction. In Germany trolleys have almost everywhere, every time the right of way and traffic lights give them the right of way when they approach.
Average america moment
But the 5 lines they have in West and Southwest Philadelphia have that exact same problem the route 23 had. Double parked vehicles when they’re not in the subway.
This video really hit home with me - at the 6:22 mark, it shows the stop at Levick St. where I got off the #66 trackless trolley as the last leg of my trip home from the Philly airport yesterday morning - Airport Regional Rail to Jefferson Station, MFL to FTC , Rt. #66 to home. What outrages me is that the Airport Regional Rail has only hourly service on the weekends. That is unacceptable for a major airport. Weekday service is every half-hour, but every 15 minutes would be better. Any thoughts on ways to pressure SEPTA to provide better weekend service to the airport? I keep thinking that the airport would be better served by more frequent Light Rail service as in Portland, or more frequent heavy rail as provided in Atlanta and San Francisco. It should be possible to provide a type of fully or partially automated service that is dedicated for the airport line, using the same tracks and number of stops that exist now.
I wasn't aware of the plan to modernize the present trolley system. Where can I find information on that? Thanks.
I am a 76 year old who was born and raised in Philadelphia but no longer lives in the area. I loved the trolley rides and rode the 15 and the 47 quite often. I even rode the 8 before it became a bus route. Too bad they are not all still in use.
All the rolling stock in the video looks like it could be replaced by a single bus. That's probably part of why that is happening (chicken vs. egg...).
One point with trams is that connecting multiple cars increases capacity without having to hire a second driver.
of course, another is that trams are just flat out cheaper to run (certainly per passenger) due to lower fuel and maintenance costs. This is pretty much always true of electric vehicles (especiall those that draw their power from overhead wires), the bit that keeps getting it put of is that it's more expensive to set up.
@@laurencefraser Exactly. When a city is strapped for cash, buying buses at 1/2 or 1/3 of the cost of a tram is a tough sell. It's easier for the system to come back in 10 years and ask for more money to replace them, versus the higher up-front costs of trams even though they might keep running for 30-40 years.
Trolleybuses might not be the best replacement.
Compare two cities; Phily and Prague, Czech Republic (my hometown)
citizens: 1,6 mil : 1,3 mil
area: 370 km2 : 496 km2
metro lines: 2 ; 3 and building 4th now
tram lines: 8; 35 (including ca 8 night lines with 30min interval and 2-3 special lines).
rolling stock: 977 vehicles on 79 lines: 2019 vehicles (802 trams + 1216 buses + 1 trolleybus) on 179 lines (35 + 143 +1)
Our trams go on surface in road in city center (due to space), on separate rails from vehicles outside the city center wherever possible and they have few short tunnels for themselves in the outskirts. They are usually double-articulated or go in couples (except 1-2 shorter lines and night lines). And there is a need for the capacity. In peak times just one line (22) that goes through the whole city and a city center goes EVERY FOUR MINUTES and from 9am to 2pm "only" every 5 minutes. Trolleybuses won´t have the capacity if needed and there is no way to make them longer.
What I saw in the video was a really bad infrastructure. You need to maintain rails properly so trolley can go fast and comfortably for passengers. Levelled platforms and vehicles without steps is a leap forward and necessity for a modern city.
Philly has a 1/4 smaller area than Prague, CZ while having 1/4 more of citizens. Trolleys are a perfect solution for public transport if they can get you to a destination you want comfortably enough and without too much waiting for another trolley on a stop you need to change lines (and without too much detours, of course, cause time).
If you all want to see some videos of trams from my city, visit channel Honest Guide for entertainment and information at the same time. You can start on Crashes caught on camera, cars/pedestrians vs. trams where you will see most of infrastructure and vehicle types we have here :)
Trackless trolleys (we call them that in king county metro as well) are amazing! They are all electric and can get around obstacles! They are so fun to ride too
The trolleys actually only run in West and Southwest, and Center City Philly. The Route 15 on Girard Avenue, they are talking about bringing the cars back at some point. Swpta was fixing the rails in a recent project but no set date fir the return.
Blown to bits during WW2 and restored before 1950, the German Trams are awesome
Philadelphia (SEPTA) once had the nation's longest and world's longest trolley route. The 23 Trolley. Now broken in half by two bus routes 23 and 45.
Dual Track drifting.
Same here from Kolkata,West Bengal, India 🥲our most beautiful trolly line(Maidan Line) got ditched during COVID,and it has been 3 years since then,with no response from the government. The issue here is lobbying by BUS and TAXI union😔
Bruh at least you still have trolleys there. Pittsburgh's light rail has been downsized to basically 2 crappy lines that have the utility of a minecart on a thousand acre farm.
I'd be interested to hear your analysis of the MBTA Green Line, the light rail of Boston's system. The E branch shares roadway with cars for one terrifying stretch of road, and its the last place in the system where this still occurs. But the MBTA just opened its first expansion in over 30 years, the extension of the Green Line to Medford/Tufts University. The tunnel that the green line is funneled into under downtown is the first subway tunnel in the western hemisphere!
Us New Yorkers would call it a trolley tunnel not a subway. For us a subway has trains.
@@luislaplume8261 it was a trolley tunnel, our other three lines are heavy rail “New York style” subway tunnels. The green line tunnel was a way of funneling street trolleys under the downtown streets when NYC tried elevated lines instead
@@cityonahilltours And what's more, the orange and blue lines started out like the green line and had trolleys instead of full-sized trains (that's also the reason both use narrower trains compared to the red line which is build closer to the standards of NYC Subway).
I was in Naples, Italy in the 1970s and there were unused streetcar tracks everywhere. The tracks ran along the curbs and that's where people parked their cars. There still were several active streetcar lines and I wonder if it has change at all. Here in Toronto we have several streetcar lines that are having major track work done. There hasn't been a streetcar on my street in two years (Roncesvalles Avenue) and the work might be finished by this spring.
I'm not so sure that making a streetcar into a light rail line is the answer. Ottawa has an LRT and it stops at every stop where a streetcar only stops on request. But an LRT is sure better than a bus or abandoned tracks. We had trolleybuses on several streets until about 1993 but a guy from the TTC told me that they can only support so many kinds of technology and the buses were pretty well worn out having been in use since the late 1940s. The overhead wires were in place until about 1998 but were finally taken down.
There has been talk of a new car line east of downtown along the lake shore but I probably won't live to see it. It's supposed to serve a new residential area that is going to be built near the harbour in an old industrial area. The money won't come from the province as our provincial premier hates mass transit except for subways.
I find it amazing that parked cars blocking streetcars are taken for granted. Why? Why should a transit system be planned around badly parked cars? Portland and San Francisco often have painted clearance lines, parking anywhere inside is clear, anything over or outside can get you a good fine or a tow and as a result, while there are times where a blocked streetcar has to blow its horn in a quiet neighborhood to bring out the planet gang rapist to take his effin car off the clearance zone, most of the time folks know where to park, even when the “clearance line” in SF is merely a crack between the concrete underneath the asphalt and the rest of the lane.
And, it would seem MOST frustrating that you have what you have when once, long before 1990, a transit system that had streetcars on 90% of its N/S streets and 50% of its E/W streets. THAT was a system!
But really, STOP treating the entitlement of cars and their drivers as a given. It’s time to start demanding laws that knock some sense into drivers, and remind them that driving is a privilege not a right and they have no entitlement, tthey do not own the road and moreover, should start losing their licenses for infractions that endanger other motorists, and especially pedestrians and cyclists. Stripping motorists of their entitlement has to start somewhere and videos like this should stop treating the bad habits of drivers as some sort of law of nature.
Philly used to do that years ago. I went to school at Temple and took the 23 on 11th and 12th streets. If a car was blocking the tracks the PPA would send out a special truck with a big "pusher" on the front. If they damaged the car, tough shit.
Then the yuppie types started complaining so the practice was abandoned.
You shouldn't be surprised the streetcars/trams are gone as this is after all SEPTA -
Slowly
Eliminating
Passenger
Transit
Altogether
As you mentioned the only reason the west Philadelphia lines still run is because of the center city tunnel to city hall. The only route that doesn't go into center city is route 15 which is currently run with buses. Rumors are it will never come back as a streetcar/tram line. Elsewhere SEPTA simply doesn't want to deal with streetcars, the tracks they run on and the wires that power them. SEPTA is really a bus company that also happens reluctantly to run trains.
Next up on the chopping block are the trackless trolleys that mostly serve south Philadelphia. Look for those to vanish soon as SEPTA doesn't want to upgrade the overhead wires.
It actually predates SCHLEPTA. Back in the 1950s the PTC was taken over by National City Lines, which turned out to be a front for GM, some oil companies, and tire makers. Within 3 years they'd gotten rid of more than 2 dozen trolley lines. SEPTA inherited a lot of NCL people and their anti-rail mindset has infected the system ever since, through multiple managements.
You are so right. And SEPTA management doesn't even try to hide the fact that they hate trolleys and trackless trolleys. They only run what they are forced to run, not what the public wants.
Reminds me of when I was living in Boston... there's B, C, D, & E trolley lines, and it was super interesting to find older maps with an A line & an extended E line. Most of the trolleys run underground or in a separate area in the middle of the road, but a portion of the E line used to run in the streets. The E line originally ran like 2x as far & connected out to the main elevated/underground line, and it was really funny, they "temporarily" suspended the E line service, but then they renovated / built a whole new station for the end terminal of the E line, Arborway, that sat unused for over a decade before they started using it for buses instead. I think they finally just demolished it & are going to build a commuter parking garage.
While I was there, a bunch of local businesses got really fed up with the conditions of some of the roads with the trolley lines, and just paved over the trolley lines & roads themselves, lol. The MBTA got really upset but ultimately didn't do anything.
Sadder was the A line, which I researched a little bit. There's this big curve in the B line where it sharply turns, and that's where the old A line kept running straight. Turns out, they shut down the A line service, but still had to keep all of the lines & infrastructure up & running for like 20 years, because the trolley repair depot was at the end of the A line, so they were running trolleys out there all night for work... just horrible mismanagement. Nowadays, they filled in the area with some greenery in the middle of the road; which looks nice I guess, but seems like a waste of space. And there's a lot of old businesses & buildings that were obviously built along the line now abandoned or decaying.
Actual solution: Just remove street parking.
São Paulo-SP, Brazil has trolleybuses too. They're great.
Their switching the whole fleet over to electric busses so what's the problem?
They're* switching to hybrid buses*, not fully electric ones. They've tried battery buses and it didn't work out due to harsh weather in the northeast part of the country, among other reasons.
You've made the argument before that trains (trams in this case) are better because of the lack of rolling resistance, rubber pollution and associated energy efficiency improvements. That all applies here. Like so many others have said, the city needs to just bring the hammer down properly on cars that park on or too near tram lines. There are very few places where it's seen as acceptable to do this so whatever mindset is causing that can be changed.
Philly 🤝 Boston 🤝 NOLA 🤝 SF: Keeping their trolley systems and resisting car dependency and suburban sprawl
But they have to learn from the failures of other cities and continue long term investment and maintenance of them, otherwise there’s no point.
LOL definitely not SF for that last part
I would have been interested in the reasoning why you say trolley busses would be the better choice. Some of the turning seemed to be really tight, that would probably be a reason, but the old routes looked rather straight. I mean, sure, cars can block tram tracks but I see parking adjacent to trams in Germany all the time and parked cars blocking the trams basically never happens.
It actually peaked my interest, what happens when a parked car blocks a tram in Germany? It turns out, the passengers get picked up by taxis and the vehicle owner has to pay for the taxis and towing on top of the penalty for blocking the tram. And of course they have to pick up their car at some towing lot, so they also have to waste their time. I’d say, implement something similar and that problem will get solved real fast.
I think part of it is that a lot of Philadelphian streets are very thin, where buses themselves sometimes get stuck due to this
there is no need to develop transit from the scratch. Come over to Europe abd we will show you how it works. Modern Tramways/LRTs have a much bigger capacity than trolley busses. We use buses to feed our tramways and tramways to feed our subway and regional train systems. There is not one system without the other.
I lived near 1 of those trolley routes. They spent money upgrading the tracks and raising the bed. They ran it for about a year then went back to buses. All that new raised bed was torn up
that's Filthadelphia for you. spend money on this project only to abandon it shortly there after.
You know who appreciates the old Philadelphia PcC trolleys? San Francisco
How true! It is ridiculous that we don't appreciate the treasures we have, but San Francisco does.
Philly parked dozens of surplus PCCs under a bridge ... where they rotted from weather and vandalism. SEPTIC has almost zero sense when it comes to history. Those cars could have been sold, donated, rehabbed for historic use ... but no.
I remember the trolleys in Center City. They were kind of ramshackle and covered in graffiti. Then they were taken away in the early 90s. Back in the early 1990s Septa said they would bring them back. Never happened. The PCCs should be rebuilt for Center City as much as a tourist attraction as a form of transportation.
Please do a video on Winnipeg’s broken transit system!
Winnipeg has a public transit system?
Mass transit is a must in modern day. We have to have it grow to replace people individually driving their cars. This is a very sad and misguided story of mis-management. Living in Detroit, this is critical for us too. We have very little useful mass transit. Downtown is growing with no place to park vehicles. Trolly busses are not an improvement.
could u make a video on how to make the 43 pennsylvanian better aint no way it should take 7 hours philly to Pittsburgh
We build roads all over yet we still end up stuck in traffic. Maybe it is time to rethink and provide public transit and get cars off the streets. We make the cost of living in the USA so high, because we will not think in a community way.
4:49 you mentioned their trolley modernization. Please do a video explaining what they are planning on doing.
planning.septa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SEPTA-TrolleyMod_ProgramGoals.pdf
There's info on SEPTA's website. planning.septa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SEPTA-TrolleyMod_ProgramGoals.pdf
Thank you
Melbourne Australia never got rid of its extensive tram/light rail system. In fact, its been extended over the years.
I liked riding the heritage W cars on the Circle Line. A bit like a live-action museum.
Of course here in the US there've been services that never upgraded, and were effectively 100% museum operations even though it was revenue service (!)
They used to have trackless trolley options in center city (the 79 & 29) but that was eliminated a long time ago
Neither of those routes are anywhere near center city
Counterpoints for trolleys over trolley busses you didn't address ☺️:
1) long term cost savings from cheaper maintenance and running costs of metal wheels vs rubber tires.
2) Can safely run longer guided vehicles than unguided -> increase capacity without increasing running costs
3) lower floor cars &/or level boarding easier to do