Where I live they recently bought a bunch of electric and hybrid public buses.
Hope they simply bought trolley buses and didn’t waste money on battery buses
It’s such a waste to put batteries in inner city buses
That’s better than the buses breaking down.
Trolley buses are a weird niche. They require permanent overhead cable infrastructure like trams do but don’t have the other benefits of trams - higher capacity, greater speed, better ride and no tyre pollution. I figure if you’re going to install a trolley bus route you probably might as well install rails at the same time and get the benefits of trams. (Aka streetcars for the North Americans out there)
The City of London did assessments on trolley buses and found that the added capacity of trams made them the better choice pretty much anywhere trolley buses were proposed, despite the slightly higher install cost.
Actually electric buses make a lot more sense, as the utilisation and environmental impact would be much greater compared to normal EV cars.
Plus you are conveniently omitted mentioning the energy losses of the cables, the maintenance cost, the installation cost, etc.
id be genuinely surprised if the energy losses of the cables are more than the energy losses of charging the batteries even if they are they are more than likely offset by the weight difference of batteries vs the weight of the cable connecting mechanism.
Then there is the issue of range and the uptime of the vehicles while you can use a trolley 24/7 you have to charge the bev buses
Then there is the issue of extreme weather cold or hot where due to AC and or heating and the temperature itself affects the range a lot
Then there are the maintenance costs of the battery the power capacity since you need space for the batteries
So all in all you exchange a bunch of negatives for the benefit of not needing overhead cables
A trolley with a small built in battery for those last few miles you might need to connect but don’t want to pull cables is the best of both worlds.
Hope that was a comprehensive enough dismantling.
