At today’s Regional Development and Sustainability meeting at City Hall, one of the council members announced an upcoming meeting on Transit’s replacement of the electric trolley buses. If you’re interested in the trolley replacement issue which has had some discussion here before, I urge you to attend this meeting.
The meeting will be on Wednesday, June 16th at noon in the City Council Chambers.
Today’s meeting was quite inspiring, with a speech by Van Jones and some great questions from members of our own Umojafest P.E.A.C.E. Center’s Got Green program.
Without Seattle Metro’s trackless trolleys,
Seattle is just another American city.
Why do you want to be like Edmonton, who just
dismantled their trackless network and are
‘paying’ the price with increased polution.
You already have the infrastructure in place.
You should be expanding the trackless ‘wire’,
not trashing it.
Think ‘green’ Seattle.
You’ll be buying Diesel buses every 8-12 years.
Trackless, as you already know, will practically
run forever.
Quietly…polution-free. Forever.
Let common sense prevail, Seattle.
Tom Moran
Thanks for the comment, Tom.
I should clarify. From the Sept 2009 King County Performance Audit, “Transit’s timeline for replacing its current trolley bus fleet is 2014. Audit analysis of lifecycle costs of trolley replacement alternatives noted that hybrid buses would cost $8.7 million less per year to own and operate than electric trolley buses. The audit recommends that costs of replacement options be weighed along with the social and environmental factors when deciding on a replacement for the current trolley fleet.”
The Seattle City Council meeting is to discuss the concerns about the options for replacing the fleet. Many have commented on other stories about their support for electric trolley buses over diesel or hybrid buses. This meeting is a forum for those people, and others, to voice their views. Showing up at these meetings sends a powerful message. I wish I could attend, but I will be presenting at my grad school symposium.
I also created an email list “Supporters of Seattle Electric Trolley Buses”:
http://groups.google.com/group/seattle-etbs