While driving around Seattle, it’s hard not to notice the overhead wire that runs above about 70 miles of pavement in and around the city. King County Metro Transit has a fleet of 159 electric trolley buses that operate along those lines, which had 19.7 million boardings on its routes in 2009—about one-fifth of Metro’s total average weekday ridership.
Photo courtesy of King County Metro Transit
Queen Anne is a neighborhood that happens to have quite a few trolley lines going through it, (including routes 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, etc.).
The county needs to replace all 159 existing vehicles by 2015, with an order deadline at the end of 2012.
(Photo provided by the City of Seattle, depicts the central corridor of the King Country Metro Trolley Bus Network as of 2010).
King County Executive Dow Constantine has sent the King County Council a plan for a proposed evaluation in its imminent replacement of this fleet. It focuses on the technology of electric trolleys and diesel-electric hybrid buses, with a goal toward finding the most fuel-efficient, best value for the system. The Trolley Bus System Evaluation (.pdf) is expected to continue through the middle of next year. It will explore the costs, impact on the environment, funding opportunities and legal issues.
Metro plans additional public meetings for discussion of the evaluation as results become available. The next one is in Mount Baker on Sept.13.
Metro has already conducted a preliminary evaluation of several potential propulsion systems, including electric trolley, diesel, diesel-electric hybrid, compressed natural gas, electric battery, and hydrogen fuel cells.
Tweet
4 responses so far ↓
1 vanderleun // Sep 1, 2010 at 9:16 am
I’m sure we can trust Metro to select the most politically correct, greenest, and by far most expensive option.
2 Matt the Engineer // Sep 1, 2010 at 9:26 am
This is an issue we should be vocal about. Electric trolley buses (ETB’s) are clean, they’re quiet, they use no diesel, they’re fast (ok, not the way Metro runs them, but that’s not the buses’ fault), and in theory they’re cheaper and require less maintenance than diesel hybrids (same components, minus an engine). The feel of QA would change substantially if we had loud diesels spewing exhaust past our houses and running up and down QA Ave (ever walk down the Counterbalance when a 2X is trying to get up the hill? it isn’t pretty).
All signs point to Metro trying to get rid of our ETB’s to keep their fleet consistent. And don’t get me wrong – diesels make sense on Metro’s long-haul routes. But in-city buses should absolutely be electric and we should fight to not only keep our ETB’s, but get more electric transit within the city.
3 Steve C. // Sep 1, 2010 at 7:03 pm
If the KC Council tries to take our trolleys away, we need to pull Seattle Transit back out of Metro Transit and run the trolley system, our selves.
The 2012 cut-off point for orders (2015 for delivery) is highly arbitrary. Trolleys routinely have had service lives of 25-years or longer.
One option is to retire only trolleys that exceed a maintenance cost ceiling, while continuing to operate the remaining trolleys. In the meantime, other buses could fill in for a temporarily reduced trolley fleet. That way, an order to replace all 159 trolleys need not be made until 2015, for delivery in 2018.
Save Our Trolleys! (S.O.T.)
4 metro employee // Sep 2, 2010 at 5:42 pm
From personal experience trollies pull hils better because they do not have a transmission that fails. Diesels that pull hill have a high transmission failure rate are a more expensive to maintain.
New York is using a Hybird style electric bus that could be coverted and have a power supply that can replace the diesel electric power plant.
The present forty foot trollies are only ten years old using a twenty year old propulsion package. The county could retrofit these exsting with a new drive package cheaper than buying new complete trollies.