Experiments With Trolley Trucks (Siemen's eHighway concepts)

http://youtu.be/kMev1FCMQLU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kMev1FCMQLU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u93-k83EPiI&feature=player_detailpage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPQwjolnYDI&feature=player_embedded


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG76DcXySuw&feature=player_detailpage

Please see the demonstation video above.
Folks:  Look what I ran across from "Trolleymotion" accidentally!  Siemens is doing experiments with trolley trucks.  If highways get trolley wires for trucks, perhaps intercity trolley buses can use the same overhead and this will encourage trolleybus use.   Also, Swedish videos provided showing historic trolley trucks of the past.   All of this will come in handy if peak oil is reached.

Please take a look.

Tramway Null(0)

A Trolley by Any Name

As a child that loved subways, trolley cars and trolley buses, I used to draw pictures of trolley boats and trolley planes.  Why not, if you can have a trolley car or trolley bus, why not a trolley boat, particularly in Venice Italy?  Little did I know that such a thing as a trolley canal boat really existed, even here for a short time on the Erie Canal.  In the previous post, I gave the link to a wonderful site that deals with the history of electric canal boat transportation.  Most of the examples were from Central Europe around the end of the 19th Century.  One line may exist today in France.  Trolley trucks, are more common and I have been told that they helped provide street maintance duties in Moscow. Big gigantic type of tractor vehicles that are used in connection with mining operations probably still exist in Canada and South Africa.  Here in Brooklyn, we did not have a system of trolley trucks but we did have the South Brooklyn Railroad that ran electric locomotives on trolley trackage on McDonald Avenue hauling box cars.  What does this have to do with the future?   Two professors, Perl and Gilbert wrote a book titled "Transport Revolutions-Moving People and Freight without Oil" in which they predict that in the future the oil supply will become very limited due to what is called "peak oil".  I am not familar with the cons and pros about this, but let us say that it is a given.  According to their analysis, it is not battery, hydrogen based or carbon based fuels that are efficient and sustainable, but "grid-connected vehicles" or (GCVs) that are efficient and the wave of the future.  The modern rendition of a trolley-truck speeding along a super highway is connected with their work.  They advocate for cities in invest in streetcar and trolley bus lines and that the superhighways be equiped with two sets of trolley bus wire.  This is a very interesting concept and I am not sure if in Europe, where trolley bus transportation is very common, if a major super highway was equipped with trolley bus type of overhead.   In the trolley canal boat picture on the previous post, you can see that the poles and overhead wires appear to be very similar to regular trolleybus equipment.  This is very interesting and I will write more about this later.   In jest, if Red Hook did not get a trolley car, why not put a trolley canal boat in the Gowanus Canal?  This would be a big tourist attraction without polluting the environment.


Tramway Null(0)

What a difference 88 years make!

In the reworked ARCGIS map below, I added an aerial photograph from 1924 showing the Canarsie Depot and the Hegeman Avenue Private Right of Way.  In the aerial shot, you can see the path of the PRW and it should be contrasted to the line drawing by Bernard Linder.  When we say that we want to reinstate streetcars for the sake of the environment and pehaps as a hedge against Peak Oil, I came to the conclusion that the route of any reinstated streetcar line or light rail line cannot be exactly the same as in the past.  Much of the area shown in the aerial photograph are now covered by multi-story housing developments and hospitals.  Where will the depot and repair facilities of a reinstated streetcar line be located?  It will probably result in a great deal of opposition by people who do not want anything " not in my back yard ".  In the end of the 19th Century, the area shown in the photograph was mainly vacant land and farms and there was no opposition to the new techology of electric streetcars.

Tramway Null(0)

Streetcars and Spatial Analysis - Picture Credit: Frank Pfuhler Collection - Dave's RailPix-- 1015 at First Avenue Loop

If you came to this blog, you probably love streetcars and perhaps trolleybuses as much as I do.  I live in Brooklyn, New York which is part of New York City.  The last streetcar that was city owned ran in October 1956 and I remember it, although I was in the first grade.  Trolleybuses, as someone said, is transit's stepchild, also ran in Brooklyn.  I remember them on the Cortelyou Road route in Flatbush.  The last trolley bus ran in Brooklyn in July, 1960.   As you probably know, streetcars, also known as light rail, are coming back all over the world including many cities in the United States.  Unfortunately, they do not appear to be coming back to Brooklyn or in the other boroughs despite the efforts of various groups such as Vision 42 http://www.vision42.org/ or Brooklyn Historical Railway Association.http://brooklynrail.net/.
       About a year ago, Yonah Freemarkhttp://www.thetransportpolitic.com/ wrote an interesting blog asking the theoretical question:  If streetcars did come back to Brooklyn, what would that system look like?  He produced a great map that stole my thunder.  I will comment on his map later but for now, I would like to present the aims of this blog:

1)  If streetcars came back to Brooklyn, what routes would they run on?  What would a map of these routes look like?  Would the route be the same as in 1956?  What routes do you think should come back and why?  How about streetcar and or trolley bus routes in other parts of the city? 
What do you think about "peak oil" and electric surface transportation and how about trolley boats and trolley trucks in a limited oil environment?  We all know that electric surface transportation is good for the environment.  Perhaps we can show this using maps.

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/12/trolley-canal-boats.html

2)  How can I make better maps using ESRI ARCGIS to display this information?


3)  How can I use some of the geoanalytical techniques available in ARCGIS for making better maps that show proposed streecar lines?  For example, should new streetcar routes be established in neighborhoods that are far away from existing subway/bus lines and have light/heavy concentration of population?

4)  If my edition of ARCGIS cannot do not regression analysis, can I use Geoda or "R" to do analysis for proposed routes?  What methodology should I use? and finally:

5) Although not streetcar related, what geospatial /analytical techniques can I to study isolated communities that receive a form of social services if I have demographic and other type of census data including rapid transit line data?  What software do you suggest other than ARCGIS, Geoda, or "R" can I use to study isolated populations?