A Miscellany of Buses

[marmar]

A Miscellany of Buses
Curitiba | 10/26/2012 6:59am |
Alex Vuocolo | Next American City



[font size="1"]Credit: John Ward on Flickr[/font]


The camel and the llama, distant cousins on the same taxonomic scale, emerged from history in vastly different niches: One in the thin atmosphere of the Andes Mountains and the other on the flat desert ranges of Africa and the Middle East. The bus, similarly, has split and molded into various forms as it has spread throughout the world. Like any evolutionary creature, the bus has changed based on both its own innate qualities and limitations and the conditions of its environment.

With this week’s Forefront story featuring Mexico City’s evolving bus rapid transit system, here we take a minute to look at a partial history of bus transit in general. These four examples, in particular, show its veering evolutionary paths, and the factors — autonomy, reliability, comfort — that have shaped it.

Electromote and the Trolleybus

If you look far enough back at any given technology, you begin to see that its features blend with other technologies close by on the family tree. This is the case with the Electromote, which is a mix of an electric trolley and the early horse-drawn bus. First presented to the German public in 1882 by inventor Ernst Werner Siemens (founder of the now-multinational electrical and telecommunications giant) on a 540-meter cobblestone test road, the Electromote was the first so-called trolleybus. Its carriage was bound to an overhead electrical line, but its wheels remained trackless.

It would be another 20 years before an electric trolleybus system was implemented on a commercial scale, and another half-century before becoming a prominent form of transportation. Still, the invention of the Electromote marked the beginning of a divergence which has defined the development of bus travel: Car-like autonomy versus a consistent source of energy and a set path. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/daily/entry/a-miscellany-of-buses