Will The Trolley Buses Go Next?

This isn’t about the waterfront, but about how transit service disappears. The disappearance of the George Benson Streetcar was a sobering reminder of how fast the public will can be thwarted, if ‘the fix is in’. If all you can see are vague shapes, it may not be so crazy to shy at them.

There’s been no public discussion of replacing electric trolley buses with diesels- and I would be surprised if there were, as the public would ‘go ballistic’ at the thought of more sound and pollution. But where is the budgetary or institutional dedication to maintaining and upgrading the electric trolley bus (ETB) service in Seattle?

I’m not saying it isn’t there- I just don’t know. In a recent Seattle Transit Blog post, King County Executive Kurt Triplett was quoted as saying we had “3 years left” to make a decision about buying more ETBs. That isn’t very much time, especially considering that this is a total no-brainer. Never since the coming of the trolley have the stars so comprehensively aligned to say “Buy transit that runs on overhead electrical wires”.

Yet, as I write, the Puget Sound Regional Council is consulting projections that the next 30 years will be very much like the past 50 years- fuel for cars will remain fairly cheap and freeways will be built or improved to “ease congestion” for the 95% of the region’s transportation that will still be traveling in private cars. This is the mental equivalent of the British government deciding in 1933 that they had enough airplanes, because the Versailles Treaty forbade the Germans to have an air force.

This is a waterfront streetcar blog, so I’ll mainly post about the ETBs at Orphan Road, where y’all are invited to click often anyway for our goofy transit musings. But remember how suddenly the streetcar disappeared, and how little say the public had in it. Don’t let that happen to the ETBs.