“I grew up in San Francisco during the 1950s. We had electric buses and trolley cars.”
Wait a minute. They’re powered by overhead wires and arms off of the top of the bus that contact the wires. Interesting that they had some battery power.
I remember when they ripped out the streetcar rails and overhead wires in my home town.
Johnny Carson told a joke:
A old lady was standing by the trolley rails. She asked someone nearby if she touched both rails at once would she be electrocuted. The person said no, you’d have to throw your other leg over that wire up there to be electrocuted.
Often, one electric bus would want to pass another. They'd unhook the poles at back, and run on battery power to pass the other bus and then hook up again. Something about wanting to keep on schedule, and different routes traveled along the same segments within the city. As for the streetcars on tracks, once the pole slipped off the power line the streetcar was dead. During the first half of the 20th century a lot of streetcar tracks were ripped up and removed, because cars were the future. During the last 20 years of the 21st century, new tracks were laid for new streetcar lines and auto cars were blocked from using some main boulevards. Cars are no longer desired in the city.
Muni in San Francisco, TransLink in Vancouver, and Beijing, among others, have bought trolleybuses equipped with batteries to allow them to operate fairly long distances away from the wires. Supercapacitors can be also used to move buses short distances.