A Trolleybus Named Desire

Someone in comments quipped sarcastically when he read I was going to be in Geneva that he was looking forward to jejune commentary on Geneva public transit. I don’t really know what jejune means, but it doesn’t sound good. At any rate, as this alert fellow noticed, I don’t like to go anywhere without offering uninformed remarks on local transit issues.

So as for Geneva, let’s start with the trolleybus. There seem to be quite a lot of these around, and I also saw a bunch in Nizhny Novgorod and a few (but only a few) in the Boston area but I think they’re generally rare in the United States. The idea is that you take a bus (albeit in Geneva a long articulated bus) and power it by electricity rather than gas or diesel. The electricity is supplied not via an awesome new engine/battery technology, but rather by an overhead wire à la a streetcar. This combination gives you the low emissions of a streetcar, the low operating costs of a streetcar, and much of the air of permanence of a streetcar but with fewer of the fixed startup costs of a streetcar. In other words, it’s some pretty useful technology that would probably be worth considering in many cities for the most popular bus routes.

That said, whenever I see a low emissions modification of a bus (trolley bus, bus powered by natural gas, etc.) I worry that forests are getting missed for the trees. Even if you take the dirtiest bus imaginable, two dozen people taking the bus to work every day creates much less pollution than two dozen people driving two dozen cars. And the availability of a good bus commuting option for some of your city’s citizens also reduces the volume of car ownership per capita which has further pollution-reduction effects. In other words — getting people to take the bus, any bus, rather than drive is a big win for the environment.

Under the circumstances, the precise environmental quality of your buses should be a distinctly secondary consideration. Your primary concern, even in strictly environmental concerns, shouldn’t be trying to reduce the footprint of individual buses it should be trying to make the bus a more appealing option. Spending marginal dollars on increasing the frequency and overall cleanliness/appeal of your buses and bus shelters can have major environmental impacts. So can creating and enforcing key stretches of dedicated bus lanes. Better maps to help sporadic users and new residents come to understand their bus network are nice. And using modern technology to allow shelters to provide digital readouts showing how soon the next bus is coming (as the DC Metro does for trains, and as a few of the shelters here in Geneva seem to do) makes the whole enterprise lower stress.