Why living near a freeway is bad for your health. (CityNerd) At 15:25 he mentions the Seattle Comprehensive Plan and the Roosevelt neighborhood.

Trolley buses are better than battery buses. (Alan Fisher)

This is an open thread.

75 Replies to “Double Feature: Trolleybuses & Living Near Freeways”

  1. This should be the weekend!

    Has anyone seen, or seen a picture of, a Link LRV on the 2-Line between IDS and JPS? According to the service interruption announcement for this weekend that should be what is happening:

    https://www.soundtransit.org/get-to-know-us/news-events/news-releases/link-light-rail-service-will-be-temporarily-suspended-9

    I’m sure this will be a dead tow test, but it still represents significant progress on the way to opening Full ELE . And hopefully, once they get these tests completed at the junction of the 1 and 2-Lines, they won’t need to shut things down in the future to continue testing on the rest of Full ELE.

    Progress a plenty.

    1. For signal tests, I would think they’d want the train under power. The electronic noise from the inverters under power can interfere with signal voltage if there’s a break in the shielding somewhere. The high frequency switching can cause really odd induction in various other objects.

      1. @Glenn in Portland,

        They always start with a dead tow test first and slowly work up to self powered testing. Usually it is more about clearing the static envelope, so I was a bit surprised that the press release mentioned system integration and control signal testing.

        But hey, maybe they already did the dead tow as far as JPS. Or maybe they are combining some testing to gain a little time in the schedule. Getting Full ELE open by the end of the year is still a big challenge, so every little bit helps.

        I still expect at least a dead tow test on the floating bridge sometime in the next few weeks. Assuming no surprises of course.

      2. I’m somewhat surprised ST is not taking advantage of Presidents Day to do extended work.

        I’m also curious why the closure has to be all the way to SODO, but not to Beacon Hill, the first station past the train base.

        And I am also surprised ST is bothering with a 1-day closure next Sunday. I know why they aren’t closing the downtown tunnel Saturday (opening night for the Sounders and Seattle Opera’s The Magic Flute, the return of the Kraken, and a double-header of Hamilton at the Paramount).

        I hope the opening of Downtown Redmond Link does not push back the possible date of the Great Conjunction.

      3. Beacon Hill would be a terrible place to stage a bus bridge. You’d have to fill and empty the trains with the elevators.

        No. If trains can’t get to SoDo, a bus bridge would have to begin and end at Mt. Rainier.

      4. Beacon Hill also has terrible bus access. It’s all slow, local streets. SoDo has the busway for buses going downtown, and halfway decent access to I-5 should they want a quick way to UW for some through routed buses.

    2. Come on. It’s sound transit. They can’t even get their trains to not stall for reasons they can understand. Look forward to more system shutdowns.

      3. That would be a Frank question, or somebody who knows about WordPress. Maybe Frank will see this and answer.

    3. Why would ST need to shut down service on Line 1 for a dead in tow test of the Judkins Park stub?

      Yes, the donkey and DIT car have to move from Forrest Street to CID, but that can happen during the night-time closure.

      By the way, does anyone know what ST uses for the donkey? I have never seen it mentioned or shown in a photo. Thanks.

      4. I guess I’ve mostly seen the ones that supervisors and crew chasers use, which are basically SUV’s with wheelsets. The ones in your videos are more little switch engines. Cute! But they are defintiely trackmobiles because they have the interchangeable wheels.

        Thanks for a good chuckle.

    4. I drove by that section yesterday, saw a car operating under its own power. Guess I should have taken a pic.

      1. @T R,

        That is very good news indeed, and it would imply that they have already completed the dead tow on the IDS-JPS part of the line. Excellent.

        One thing about ST under Sparrman, they sure don’t like to talk about their accomplishments. I sort of wish they would, because these things are important.

      1. @D M,

        Excellent. Good catch. Thanks!

        And I believe you are 100% correct. That looks like a dynamic envelope testing vehicle.

        And supposedly we will see an LRV on the floating bridge “soon”. Progress!

    6. On Friday night, I saw a LRV stopped in the tunnel just east of the Judkin Park station on Saturday night when I drove on I-90 eastbound. The light of LRV was on. It was my first time seeing LRV at the cross-lake segment

      1. @Hz,

        Thanks for your report.

        ST has been running test LRV’s as far as Mercer Island Station on the east side of the floating bridge, and now they appear to be doing the same on the west side as far as the Mt Baker Tunnel. That is good news.

        Theoretically we should see an LRV on the floating span by the end of this month. That will be a major milestone!

  2. The first video shows one of the major flaws with a lot of the Link expansion. Having the stations so close to the freeway causes all sorts of problems. You greatly limit the amount of development that can be built as the freeway itself takes up a lot of space. If it has a crossing street then it probably has major interchanges nearby which adds to the amount of space wasted by car-infrastructure (e. g. 145th). If it doesn’t have a crossing street then it is difficult to serve with crossing buses (e. g. Northgate). You want something like 155th or 185th (but there are only so many intersections like that and Link managed to skip one of them).

    But arguably the worst problem is that if you do have TOD it is literally toxic. The people living in those places suffer as a result. Roosevelt isn’t even that bad compared to some other areas. It is not right next to the freeway but set off a bit (about 1,000 feet). The problem is the zoning which allows apartments close to the freeway but very few the other direction. Even without light rail this is common. It is part of a bigger problem — forcing density to less desirable areas. Want to build an apartment next to the freeway or a busy arterial? Go for it. But not on this quiet little street. Thus you have places like Phinney Ridge or Aurora where you have apartments along the main arterial but a block away (either direction) they are banned. I get that you want to have density in areas that are convenient from a transit perspective but this really isn’t about that. If it was the high-density zone would extend several blocks (since people can walk a couple blocks to the bus stop). In many areas it would extend all the way to the next arterial. No, this is the same NIMBY attitude that leads to high rent and ultimately homelessness.

    1. “Thus you have places like Phinney Ridge or Aurora where you have apartments along the main arterial but a block away (either direction) they are banned. ”

      Sadly, this is essentially the case at Alaska Junction too. But yet ST is still wanting to build a 100 foot deep hole the size of a football field so a deep bore can reach the station at over $1B just for the end station segment.

      1. Yes, you are right about the zoning surrounding Alaska Junction. But the zoning can change. It is really two different things. One is the location of the stations the second is zoning in the city.

        In the case of Alaska Junction, it is not that close to the freeway. It is a little more than half of a mile to the start of it. There are plenty of busy streets but it probably isn’t that bad from a toxicity standpoint. (The other West Seattle stations are worse.) Even though it is unlikely that it will ever have really high density (i. e. residential towers) it is really not a bad place for a station. The problem is that it is one of only three new stations and the cost is just way too high. It also adds next to nothing from a connectivity standpoint. It has too little bang for the buck.

        There are stations that are much worse in terms of their location. 185th Station for example is right next to the freeway. There is now an apartment building just north of it which means it is also right next to the freeway. If the station was anywhere east or west of there any TOD would be much healthier (for those living there).

        I wouldn’t blame the city for that but in a lot of cases there are still things the city can do. For example consider Pinehurst Station (which is similar). There is very little next to the station so they want to upzone that area. But that means upzoning right next to the freeway. Like many of the stations in the north end the whole point of the station is to connect to the buses. Rather than hope for a few apartment buildings in the area (which will never account for a huge number of people simply because of the freeway) they should upzone the east-west corridor (125th/Roosevelt/130th) instead. That would give a lot more people a chance to live a healthy life *and* have really good transit. Some of the corridor allows density but not all of it, which frankly is ridiculous. They just built a huge new housing project (with just single family houses) which is a huge waste. They should rezoned the entire corridor by now.

        Of course the ideal solution is to just upzone the entire city (like Spokane did). Eventually transit responds. We should allow density and then assume that transit will serve it. The only time you want to do things the other way around is with new rail — in which case it shouldn’t be close to the freeway. Unfortunately “TOD” is often used as an excuse for more NIMBY zoning and more people suffering from various terrible diseases.

      2. Delridge station will be much worse: The station and its TOD will be sandwiched between the steel plant and the WS freeway, can you imagine the emissions and noise level?!?

    2. Somebody commented that people won’t live in freeway apartments because they’re undesirable. But there have been freeway apartments along 7th Ave NE in the U-District for as long as I can remember, and people live in them. And now there are freeway apartments at the Ash Way P&R and at Mountlake Terrace station, and I haven’t heard that they have chronic high vacancy. People live in them because it’s the best or only thing they can find in their price range or with acceptable transit access or there’s a vacancy. That points to the overall housing shortage and the inequality in our society, that there exist people with lower incomes who can’t compete for better housing locations.

      1. >> People live in them because it’s the best or only thing they can find in their price range

        Exactly. The problem isn’t building apartments next to freeways. It is that it is the only thing they build. So your choices are:

        1) Live next to the freeway.
        2) Live in a very expensive apartment somewhere else in town.
        3) Move to the suburbs (or some other city).

        The video had examples of this. A couple was stuck living in a very toxic place that literally made them sick. Then — only after they had a bit more money — could they move to a place away from the freeway. It doesn’t have to be that way and it shouldn’t be that way. We should allow builders to build a lot more apartments and condos in nicer areas. They should have decent transit as well.

      2. I went with 1 + 3. I now rent out my condo in the suburbs on the freeway for a solid rent with great tenants.

        Ross is right – we need to build more housing in nice places – but if Link stations are by freeways, so be it: go build a ton of apartments there too.

    3. The same problem exists for hotels too. Hotels exist downtown and along freeways or car-oriented stroads like Aurora. But, there aren’t any in many of the nicer neighborhoods away from the freeway.

      This is a big reason why I started using AirBnb. Not so much price, but to open up neighborhoods full of single family homes that would otherwise be inaccessible.

      1. Hotels should be downtown, for the same reason major retail and jobs and cultural amenities should be downtown. That doesn’t mean it’s the only place they can be, but we should return to the pre-1960s vision of having a larger share of them in downtowns, secondarily in other urban villages, and only minor outposts outside those.

        The biggest problem is, again, freeways going through downtown. That causes a lot of disruption and externalities, of which major pollution is only one.

      2. Whenever I’ve stayed in a house in a single-family area when visiting friends, I’ve found it both an inconvenient and an oppressive environment, because the houses and neighborhoods are not designed for that: they’re designed for nuclear families where everybody drives. It’s not just the physical inconvenience: it’s the feeling you’re a second-class citizen and not wanted.

      3. I disagree. I’m not talking about places like Sammamish here. I’m talking about neighborhoods like Ballard or Fremont. Of course, hotels should exist downtown too, but sometimes a quieter neighborhood is nice when you’re trying to sleep, so long as there’s good transit available to the city center during the day. And, sometimes your ultimate destination is not downtown anyway. I don’t feel like a second class citizen staying in a rental house.

    4. Euclidean zoning is a classic case of grabbing the tiger’s tail: we’d all be better off if our ancestors had never done it, but now that we’re here, nobody wants to be the first to let go.

      I have a little hope that a state-level override may eventually end the whole mess at once; we’ll see.

    5. Having spent most of my time in Seattle living literally next to a freeway: it’s not that bad. My home was well built (good windows are key), and my family had no problem walking on the sidewalk immediately next to the freeway on the way to our closest park.

      The pearl clutching around “we can’t allow people to live next to freeways” reminds me of the pearl clutching around “we can’t allow people to live in tiny apartments” that led to banning mico-units. Is quality of life better further away from freeways? Yes. Is quality of life better with a larger home? Yes. But let’s not pretend that living in an apartment building next to a freeway is anything like living in a tent. To ban housing that clearly has a market rent of thousands of dollars a month is paternalistic and is bad policy during a housing crisis. The home I bought I could not have affording if it was a few blocks further away from the freeway.

      1. The pearl clutching around “we can’t allow people to live next to freeways”

        I’m looking at the comments here and I can’t find anyone who has said that. What they have said is that we should build more places away from the freeway. If we also build places next to the freeway that is fine. It would be a good option for temporary housing (it beats living under the freeway).

        The problem is two-fold. We have zoning that makes it easy to build next to the freeway and difficult to build away from it. Look at the example from the video, Roosevelt. Most of the places they have added are close to the freeway. It doesn’t have to be that way.

        Likewise it is crazy that we build so many of our light rail stations close to the freeway. This means that the only people who can enjoy really good transit at those places are those that endure a toxic environment.

      2. Nobody has suggested banning apartments alongside freeways, but Tacomee has repeatedly said it’s a bad real-estate choice to invest money in them because people won’t live in them.

        People have enacted bans on microhousing saying it’s indecent to house people in less than 250 square feet. There’s a similar argument against homeless shelters (they distract from building permanent low-cost housing or acquiring long-term apartment buildings).

        The upshot of this is creating a gap between $0 income and the level required for a $1400+ “decent” apartment (I’m guessing that’s a general minimum in Pugetopolis’ lower-cost suburbs). Just like how not having robust public transit forces people to pay $700+ a month in car expenses. Banning microapartments or discouraging apartments along freeways just means lower-income people encounter fewer choices, higher costs, and fewer vacancies.

  3. The second video is amusing. Of course I agree with the key points. One key advantage to having wire is that you spread out the charging. Instead of having one big charging station (or even several) you have wire spread out over much of the city. The video also shows how easy and quickly a bus can get back on wire. For a rider it just seems like a normal bus stop. Thus with relatively small batteries you can have the best of both worlds. A bus that is electric but doesn’t require wire for the whole route. Even freeway running buses are plausible (with wire on both ends). This is relatively common in Europe it is nice to see it being expanded in the states. In my opinion this is the future of transit electrification (especially for areas like Seattle that already have a lot of the existing infrastructure).

  4. By the way, the reason the freeway video is first but the trolley video is ahead in the title, is the freeway video is more of a major and wide-ranging issue that has gotten debate in the comments, but I struggled with a title wording “Living Near Freeways & Trolleybuses”: it would sound like living near trolleybuses too, when that’s not what the trolleybus video is about. So I put trolleybus first in the title to avoid that.

  5. The topic of living near a freeway seems much more complex than just saying “don’t”.

    First of all, auto technology changes. Electric cars remove most localized CO but not brake or tire particulates. A better understanding of how much hazard is created needs to be better understood. I do note that many of the cited studies are pre-Covid with some as old as 20-25 years.

    Second, if brakes are a source wouldn’t an arterial present just as much of a hazard? The percentage of vehicles braking is going to be higher, even if the speed is lower. Is living next to SR 525 in Snohomish County that much more risky than living next to an SR 99 intersection there?

    Third, not all freeways are the same. A modest freeway can be relatively non-invasive while a big one can be. Isn’t the pollutant level more related to the volume of vehicles than the mere design of the roadway? Maybe it’s the traffic volume or speed and not the mere roadway classification itself that is the better correlation to health risks.

    Fourth, I am a little surprised that noise pollution isn’t discussed. Freeway noise can be bad for someone’s health. There are plenty of studies correlating noise to sleeping difficulty and this in turn greater negative health outcomes. A holistic look at health should include sleep quality and the effect of noise while both sleeping and doing other things on stress.

    Finally, I’ll just note that the often low humidity on the west coast seemingly keeps pollutants floating around in the air for a longer time and distance. I live two miles from a freeway but I notice a dark layer of dust on everything. Did it float over from the freeway or is it a result of other things — from traffic on a nearby clogged arterial to aircraft pollutants to sea vessel pollutants to nature in the Olympics?

    The issue just doesn’t seem as clear cut as the video implies.

    1. “Electric cars remove most localized CO but not brake or tire particulates.”

      Regenerative braking also reduces brake particulates, so electric/hybrid cars reduce those as well.

    2. In terms of noise pollution, good quality windows help a lot, but as soon as you open the window or go outside, you lose the benefit.

      In terms of tailpipe pollution, yes, EVs help, but it will take awhile before enough EVs are on the road to make a large impact, especially with the most polluting vehicles (heavy trucks) being slower to electrify, compared to consumer cars.

      Bottom line, you really don’t want to live next to a freeway.

      1. On the topic of noise pollution from freeways, I’ll also add that the single best mitigation for that is not to look at the cars, but the pavement. The grooved payment used on the 520 bridge and some recently redone sections of I-405 is definitely quieter. And quieter pavement near residential areas is something the state DOT can just do themselves, without waiting decades for the vehicle fleet to change over.

      1. It actually depends a lot on the vehicle type, and it’s important not to over-generalize. In my car, for example, it’s a 1000 pound battery replacing maybe a 400 pound engine, transmission, and fuel tank. The difference is no more than about 3 adult passengers. So, yes, batteries so matter a bit in terms of vehicle weight, but sedan vs. SUV vs. pickup truck matters far more.

        As for micro plastics, the amount of emissions per mile has to be far less than the amount of tailpipe exhaust per mile in a gas car, if not, cars would need a new set of tires every few miles, which is clearly not the case.

      2. Regenerative braking (hybrid & fully electric) greatly reduces particulate emissions from braking, which is also important.

        Lower vehicle weight is another factor in favor of trolley bus over battery, as trolley bus has only a small battery.

        It’s the hybrids that have the most weight, which is why a purely diesel bus is more efficient for long haul routes; for an intercity routes that mostly avoids traffic congestion, a hybrid is net worse for the environment (OTOH, if there is a significant elevate change, like running over a mountain pass, the regenerative braking comes back into play)

    4. > Fourth, I am a little surprised that noise pollution isn’t discussed. Freeway noise can be bad for someone’s health.

      > On the topic of noise pollution from freeways, I’ll also add that the single best mitigation for that is not to look at the cars, but the pavement.

      The problem isn’t really the freeway but with zoning. If freeways didn’t have noise/air pollution then cities wouldn’t be approving apartments next to them. They approve them there because it’s the “bad” land or just areas that will not complain about apartments being built.

      The cities should be approving apartment in areas with standard noise/air pollution and this solves all of the problems.

  6. Had a bit of nerve wracking experience last night riding the bus home when riding the 550 to connect with the 594 in Seattle to go home, there was a man who was clearly having a mental health crisis on the bus when I got on. Talking and screaming to a person who wasn’t there and banging on the bus itself. He fortunately got off at the next stop when the driver told him to leave the bus, but everyone (including me) were on edge and dead quiet during the whole ordeal because he seemed very unpredictable in what he’d do next. I was honestly worried he might assault another passanger or the driver from how he was acting.

    I personally have a high tolerance for a lot of stuff when riding transit, it comes with being in an enclosed public space for extended periods and most of the time people are just minding their own business and at most mildly annoying (like playing their music loudly). But even this was a bit much for me leaving me shaken for a few hours afterwards and can see how this would turn off more first time riders if they ever saw this happen and say “never riding the bus again”.

    You’re also worried as to what to do, do I try and send something to Sound Transit who can get a security person to come to the next stop and deescalate the situation or wait it out and hope it resolves itself by them voluntarily leaving or being asked to leave. You aren’t sure as to what is the best solution in the here and now as both have their pros and cons in a way.

    This does get to a finer point I’m making, ST is going to have to likely figure out how they do security operations once all these extensions in the next couple of years are done as they’ll have more area to cover and need to respond situations quickly if they do happen. Because seconds and minutes matter in a situation that could escalate quickly.

    1. I honestly think forming a police department fully employed and staffed by ST would make way more sense than having KCSO contractor officers. That way ST could both better control and pick the officers in its system and manage the resources better than kcso might.

      BART is a highly successful example of this, with a 4 minute response time that’s a pretty hard concept to beat. The busses, of course, would be harder to manage but for the light rail it would be nice. LA METRO is also looking at forming its own department if I recall correctly.

      1. “BART is a highly successful example of this, with a 4 minute response time that’s a pretty hard concept to beat.”

        Two words to refute that: Oscar Grant.

      2. @Al

        That’s a policing issue in general, which is why I would rather ST have control over the hiring, training and selection. At the present moment it’s whatever king county sheriff’s office has. And a police murder doesn’t negate advantage of a speedy response time either.

      3. While it sounds effective to have a policing force, it’s ultimately a function of the way the department is funded and officers are hired and paid.

        It was well known in the case of Oscar Grant that BART hired guys who wanted to be cops but failed the behavioral qualifications to be ones elsewhere. BART cops got paid lower at the time too — so applicants tended to be people who wanted the role of policeman but could not meet the hiring requirements applied elsewhere.

        So it’s really important for any transit police force to be screened and monitored. More than with any other law enforcement agency, transit police come into contact with the public directly than even someone who works in law enforcement for a city or county.

        It’s easy to be dismissive and say “it’s only a transit cop” and think that’s a lower bar to meet and a lower salary to pay. However any time anyone gets hired as a police officer and handed a gun, that person has been handed lots of power over others and needs to be hired and trained very carefully.

      4. It’s easy to be dismissive and say “it’s only a transit cop” and think that’s a lower bar to meet and a lower salary to pay. However any time anyone gets hired as a police officer and handed a gun, that person has been handed lots of power over others and needs to be hired and trained very carefully.

        Agreed. The only reason to pay them less is if they are expected to do less. That would mean not carrying a gun which is quite reasonable. I used to be a security guard. One of the first things you learn is that if you carry a gun you make more money. But a lot of people (myself included) had no interest. The biggest thing people want (more than anything) is more security, not necessarily more armed security.

      6. My point in all this isn’t to have many armed police around, but if ST is going to have police in some capacity, I would rather they have more control over them rather than having some sheriffs deputies riding around playing candy crush for half their shift. I’m advocating for a higher standard precisely because I don’t think that as the system expands into Snoco and Pierce the KCSO will be able or willing to staff the light rail with enough officers and also have those officers be the best they have (my bet is they would put people who are interested in transit and then staff with whomever they think would handle being “just” at transit cop). I certainly don’t want lynnwood pd or kent pd on the trains.

        On the other end of security, ST actually has quite a few contracted security guards at the stations but they vary in quality. A lot of this is due to turnover in the guard pool I think. I’ve heard that Intercon isn’t the best to work for. The Allied employed security that does on the train checks have been more consistently good in my experience though.

      7. if ST is going to have police in some capacity, I would rather they have more control over them

        I agree with that. It makes sense for them to have their own security firm and not contract out. But I’m not convinced they have to armed. The number of incidents when being armed would actually help are pretty low if not nonexistent. In most of those cases they can radio the real police. Either way though it makes sense for them to hire their own staff.

        I could also see a mix of armed and unarmed officers, especially since we have fare enforcement. The “ambassadors” can check to see if you paid. They can also act like unarmed security guards (and unarmed police) and handle abusive or dangerous behavior. If it gets too bad they call the armed officers (whether in house or the local police).

        From a security staff there are other improvements that could be made that wouldn’t require any additional staff. For example they could have open gangways between train cars. This allows security to more easily patrol the entire train (not just one train car). It also means that if you have a mix of security (armed and unarmed) the unarmed guard can more quickly summon help (in the rare cases when it is actually needed). Even if there are no officials on the train it allows people who feel uncomfortable in a train car to move to another one.

    2. @Ross Bleakney: It’s interesting to hear you mention that open gangways could help transit police/security do their jobs, because a major argument against open gangways in America is security. If a guy with an automatic weapon gets onto a subway car, an open gangway means he’s got free reign over the entire train; whereas, with closed gangways like Link, he’s contained in one car, so fewer people are affected.

      I know, it’s ridiculous that this is an argument against a common-sense transit improvement, but with this country’s gun crime problem, it’s an unavoidable topic. NYC Transit Reddit got into a “spirited” discussion about open gangways and safety, and say what you will about Reddit, but some of these posts represent what kind of a pushback open gangways will get about safety from gunmen (and vagrancy, something Seattle transit riders know about). https://www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/10tt9c3/are_opengangway_trains_unsafe_for_passengers/?rdt=50249

  7. The tradeoff between battery buses vs. diesel buses is a bit more nuanced than the video suggests. In general, trolley wire works best on routes which are short, frequent, and unlikely to change much, so that the required fixed investment in the wire serves as many trips as possible. The video uses SF Muni as an illustration, but the entire city of San Francisco is both small geographically, and dense enough to justify frequent service on most routes, plus it has lots of legacy trolley infrastructure to reduce cost.

    But, when you start getting into routes that are longer and/or less frequent, the case for overhead wire weakens. For example, I don’t see it ever making financial sense to run overhead wire out to North Bend to run a bus planned to operate only once every 90 minutes, nor for peak-only routes, like the 311. In fact, I would argue that peak-only routes actually represent the strongest cases for battery buses, as the short service span, plus midday break, allows for both significantly smaller batteries and significantly slower charging speeds. School buses are also good candidates for battery buses for the same reasons.

    This gets into the question that you have to ask what the goal is. If the goal is for KCM to get 10 more routes running on electricity, relative to the current network, for as possible cost as possible, overhead wire and trolley buses is the way to go. On the other hand, if the goal is to electrify the entire fleet, trolley may help in specific route cases, but battery buses now become impossible to avoid.

    1. I think it should be mentioned that Muni gets trolley bus power from the City’s water department. The power is generated at the Hetch Hetchy dam (controlled by San Francisco) so it’s hydroelectric “clean” energy.

      The low price of electricity there offsets the cost and hassle of running wires.

    2. This logic also extends to making the electric grid zero carbon. Converting the grid to 100% carbon-free is so prohibitively expensive that any policy to do so is little more than virtue signaling because it will fail at the margin with existing technology & economics.

      Same for Metro. Some routes should remain diesel powered for awhile, but that shouldn’t stop KCM from investing heavily in both more trolley wire & buses and a larger BEB fleet.

      1. What does virtue signaling mean? It’s been use a lot the past few years, that such-and-such person or government is virtue signaling, but it’s hard to tell whether they are or aren’t without a definition. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt that they really want to fix things or think this will work, and that the accuser is just throwing an empty trolling accusation at them.

      2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

        Basically, “virtue signalling” is when a person or organization does something to appear virtuous, but the action itself is not meaningful or effective. Adopting meaningless or ineffective policies is the most common form. At the individual level, hollow advocacy (like verbally supporting a cause without actually doing any direct action to support the cause) is probably the most common form of virtue signalling. It’s sort of a light version of hypocrisy.

      3. Right – it’s policy that makes the policy implementer (in this case, either a politician or senior management) appear virtuous, but in reality has no impact or negative impact.

        Typically the virtue signaler is earnest and unaware of emptiness or counter-productiveness of the action at hand, whereas hypocrisy is by definition self-aware. Virtue signaling can be hypocritical, but not necessarily.
        It’s a bit ad hominem because it does imply either shallowness or sloppiness, but accusing policymakers of shallowness or sloppiness seems inbounds for STB, since the policy is transit.

    3. If the goal is for KCM to get 10 more routes running on electricity, relative to the current network, for as possible cost as possible, overhead wire and trolley buses is the way to go. On the other hand, if the goal is to electrify the entire fleet, trolley may help in specific route cases, but battery buses now become impossible to avoid.

      That is a false dichotomy. Your choice of 10 routes (or any number of routes) is meaningless. If there is a partial goal to be met it should be based on the amount of CO2 emitted. Even if your long term goal is to completely eliminate emissions this would be a short term goal. For example reduce emissions 60% in ten years, 80% in twenty years and 100% in thirty. This is exactly the type of approach we should take. It means you for the next ten years you focus on that 60% goal (while also building an infrastructure that helps achieve our ultimate goal).

      We may also change our mind and find the 60% (or 80% or 73.5%) is good enough. We have a tendency to focus on the last little bit when it comes to these type of problems. But when it comes to global warming that isn’t the issue. In general we are talking about a subset of a subset of the problem. There are other reasons why we may want to electrify those routes (easier long term maintenance, no local emissions) but that should be largely independent of the electrification efforts. Maybe it is cheaper to maintain an electric fleet, maybe it isn’t. Diesel buses are a lot cleaner now and maybe biodiesel would be the way to go. If we eliminate the bulk of the emissions then it is much easier to deal with the relatively small number of vehicles that aren’t part of that system. It also allows us to better leverage technology (and infrastructure) improvements.

      To meet our short term goals in a cost effective way we need to revisit the choices. Someone on the comment thread of the video wrote about some of the differences. I removed some of the details and it boils down to this:

      Battery electric busses are cheaper for electrification of those routes that have low or irregular frequencies. Electrification as a trolleybus becomes cheaper on routes with higher frequencies and more vehicles in operation.

      Routes with higher frequencies and more vehicles in operation are also the buses that use the most energy. These are the buses we should focus on — not a bus like the 311. Don’t even worry about battery-electric buses right now. It isn’t worth it. We should instead enhance our trolley system. We should have more buses on wire, even if they are on wire only part of the way. As the technology improves this will get easier and cheaper. Running wire on all of Aurora would probably be really expensive. But running wire from Aurora Village to 100th and then downtown would be a lot cheaper. This simply wouldn’t work twenty years ago — now it could. An iterative approach — focused on getting the most bang for the buck given today’s technology — is much better than focusing on the converting the entire fleet to electric buses.

      1. To be clear, I think you’re right. But, my understanding is that the law requires 100% electrification by a certain year, so transit officials don’t have the luxury of considering a partial solution, whether they privately want to or not.

        I will also add that battery solutions are much more expensive in the United States than in other counties, due to “Buy America” rules, our trade war with China, and a limited market for transit buses in the U.S. that doesn’t support any bus manufacturers beyond a lazy duopoly. Europe, for example, has been buying battery buses from China for less per bus than what a U.S. agency spends on diesel buses. It doesn’t need to be this way, but the way national politics works practically dictates it.

      2. But, my understanding is that the law requires 100% electrification by a certain year

        If that is the case they should change the law. That is really the point. Having a hard deadline of a 100% electrified fleet by a certain date is a really stupid idea. Goals should be much shorter and much smaller. Even then the goal should be just that — a goal, not a mandate.

  8. I’ve never understood the reluctance to hang more wire. The buses are lighter than any other, they storm up hills, they give power back down the same hills, and they are quiet, quiet, quiet.

    asdf2’s straw man from North Bend is obviously not serious, but Seattle and San Francisco both have pretty lengthy routes running under wire, and the rider experience is the best available. For sure the 48 needs to be converted, RapidRide or not; it’s plenty frequent and more than half is already wired. And when the R line is converted please, Metro, do not run diesels on it. You can have a little shuttle do the Prentice Loop. One bus over and over….. Talk about getting to know your riders.

    1. We should definitely run a lot more wire. But we should also be a lot more comfortable running our trolleys off-wire, at least for part of the route. This just makes things a lot easier to manage. It means we can convert a lot more buses to trolleys for a lot less cost. It also means we can modify routes without freaking out about it. To be fair sometimes the city doesn’t want buses on that street for other reasons (it is too narrow, the road needs to be hardened, etc.) but running wire — or building little places where the bus de-wire and re-wire — should not be that big of a deal.

      1. I would be curious to get a trolleybus operator’s opinion on the difficulty and dangers associated with running a route that regularly detaches and reattaches to the wire as part of the route. Do our trolleybuses support it? Would there need to be technology/design changes made to support it?

        I’ve seen trolleybuses detach from the wires and the operator has to get out to make sure they reattached correctly. Would they have to do that every time? In an environment where we’re considering putting operators in closed cabins for safety, is it contradictory to have routes where operators have to get out in the middle of every run?

      2. One thing I’m curious is how fast a trolley bus like the one Metro currently has is able to charge its batteries while on-wire. This matters because the father the batteries can charge, the less of the route needs wire, and the better the economics of electrification becomes.

    2. “I’ve never understood the reluctance to hang more wire.”

      Battery vehicles are the new hotness and investors are pouring money into those companies, so they must be better. It’s the same tendency as uberization instead of a major surge in the fixed-route bus network.

  9. A few years ago, I lived in an apartment complex by a segment of Interstate 75 where sees 183,000 daily traffic in 2023. It is noisy but it is mostly white noise that really didn’t bother me much except more frequent siren sound. After that I moved to another apartment all surrounded by local streets and it was actually more noisy on the road, but living by freeway definitely makes your home more dusty.

    To me, what I have on the arterial side is more important. On these days, even if you live in a lovely neighborhood, chance of having a corner store within walking distance in certain area is low. Therefore, if that kind of apartment has good transit access on arterial side, I am sort of okay if the other side is a busy freeway.

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