Monthly Archives: November 2022

Public Transportation ≥ City Busses

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“I went to lose a jolly,
Hour on the trolley,
And lost my heart instead…”

– Ralph Blane

With the ever-present challenge of addressing climate change sitting at the forefront of city planning, policy-making, and leadership, an increasingly recurrent question is how people will get from place to place in a greener, more sustainable future? For many, there is a very possible solution at the table that has been around for years; public transportation. Public transportation is an excellent way to answer to check most of the boxes that we hope to see in a sustainable future if it is properly established and maintained. It’s able to move more people using less fuel while taking up less space on roads and in parking spaces. However, in addition to the aforementioned caveats that are unavailable with public transportation, there is a third make-it-or-break-it caveat to public transit that I believe often remains invisible to communities looking to make the jump into the world of public transportation. That third and invisible caveat to public transportation is that the system of transportation has to be catered to the strengths and needs of the community.

When I say that the public transportation needs to be catered to the strengths, I’m not speaking to the idea that city planners and engineers need to conduct their traffic surveys, collect data, and create rational, and data-driven plans to establish the most efficient roots possible for their cities. That should be common sense to anyone thinking about public transportation from a professional or civilian perspective. What I mean is breaking the mold of what’s commonly perceived to be “Public Transportation.”

When most people hear the words “Public Transportation” they think of bus systems and the occasional subway system in major cities. While these are excellent options available to communities and have shown to be useful and appreciated by many communities around the world, they are far from the only example of what can and should qualify as potential solutions to public transportation in cities of any size. Fortunately, there are cities already coming to this same conclusion and have embarked on developing more creative ways to get people moving in their communities.

For example, last year in the city of Bogota, Colombia, city officials sought out a way to provide more efficient and environmentally savvy methods of transportation to their communities so it invested in upgrading its previously all-diesel bus lines to a fleet of nearly 1500 electric busses by the end of this year. The mayor has also made it a priority to create an additional 175 miles of bike lanes for commuters to avoid motorized traffic altogether. However, Bogota had another issue with its preexisting transportation system.

For a good amount of the city population, the space they call home is a small residence in the more densely packed and underdeveloped hillsides where even diesel busses had a hard time traversing efficiently. As a result, getting to work in the more developed economic center of the city could result in a work commute that took hours out of the day. To address this issue for the people of Bogota, the city officials needed to either come up with a large budget to better accommodate bus traffic and provide what would still be an unpleasantly long commute, or they would have to get creative; so they got creative!


Rather than make buses weave up, down, back, and forth through the difficult terrain of the area, the city thought to invest in a cable car system called the TransMiCable system. The system is a loop of bright red cable gondolas that carries residents of the neighboring hills to the main city of Bogota and is able to do so much more efficiently than the preexisting bus system. For one resident, it cut the 2-hour commute down to only 40 minutes. And, if the incredible time recovery wasn’t enough of a benefit to the community, the gondolas themselves are in themselves an amazing experience. Rather than rocking back and forth in a crowded bus utilizing underdeveloped roads that snake up and down the hillside, commuters can enjoy a quite direct route to the city that provides free Wi-Fi, an excellent view, and personal privacy as it floats peacefully through the sky.

While this solution may not be best for every city working to improve their public transportation, it is an excellent example of breaking the mold and finding an excellent and creative way to move residents in a better way in every way conceivable. The reason that this approach to transportation is not just a possible option but an excellent option is that it is being applied to the city of Bogota. By finding ways to utilize the geography of a city and using its innate strengths, there are easy ways to solve its most challenging issues. For Bogota, that meant using the hills and the open sky above the valleys to bridge the physical barriers to a short commute. For places like Istanbul, Lagos, and the country of Norway, part of the solution to the question of public transportation was much wetter. Despite having very different climates, each of the three of these areas of the world has made use of water-based transportation to ferry commuters around their nation. In the city of Lagos alone, more than 18,000 people use public ferries to get around the city and in Istanbul, the ferries are only one part of a well-designed and interconnected public transit system that allows for easy connections between the city’s multiple modes of transportation that residents may need in one trip. For Norway, the expansion of the ferry system was not only sensible because of its geography, but because they were hoping to focus on curbing its environmental footprint.

For communities and commuters alike in Norway, the switch to electric ferries has been a welcomed change of pace. Compared to the previously used diesel engines, the silence of the electric engine on the ferries is a night and day difference that allows Norwegians to connect with the water in a much more intimate way. In terms of practicality, electric ferries have been a strategic environmental choice as well. For Norway, a vast majority of the electricity produced is generated in through hydroelectric means. Meaning that the 10 minutes it takes to fully charge these ferries at the dock contributes little to nothing in terms of carbon emissions from energy consumption.

Now that we’ve covered air and water options for public transit, there comes the fact that many modern cities are landlocked or have fewer natural opportunities for creative solutions to public transportation. For those cities, creative solutions are still available! In our widespread pursuit of cars, buses, and bikes, our cities have forgotten about other prime options for cities to utilize in their transportation plan; Trolleys and Trams! The Great Depression saw a significant decline in the North American street car, but the ones who stuck around showed their value during the second world war. The street car was an ideal way for a nation rationing rubber and gasoline to get workers cheap transportation to work and to connect the city through arterials built around the established tracks and infrastructure. Ultimately, cities would start to see buses as more economic and flexible as they could be deployed and rerouted without needing to change infrastructure. While these points make sense from the narrow focus of cost-saving on transportation, I think that it takes a bigger picture to think about the benefits as a whole.

When incorporated into a transit system, they are able to carry a higher capacity of riders than busses like trains with the required operating space of any other land transportation with the added bonus of the added potential of acting as a tourist attraction that allowed visitors to the city to see the sights on a smoother ride than anything with inflatable wheels. Additionally, in a world aimed at building and integrating autonomous vehicles into general traffic, it is easy to mention that streetcars would be poised as an easy transportation method to automate and maneuver around by other self-driving vehicles and/or persons in vehicles. Finally, if these points aren’t enough, it should be said that as we pursue a greener tomorrow, we in part share some of the same conservative priorities as they did during the war. If we can reduce the amount of gasoline and rubber that we use to transport workers, visitors, and residents, then streetcars are a good way to go.

For communities that aren’t as keen on the idea of the infrastructure limiting their ability to move their transportation systems as their city grows and changes, then there are similar options that are less restrictive. In Europe, there has been an uptick in electric trolley busses that can combine the benefits of electric trolleys and the flexibility of buses. Such cities to welcome back and embrace these different land systems include but aren’t limited to Berlin, London, and San Francisco here in the United States.

In each of these cases, the city could have easily opted for the same bus lines throughout their community and hoped for the best; but they didn’t. Rather, they opted to use their community as a strength and try to build something different and that alone should be something worth discussing as well. Doing things differently (but still well), gets people excited! In the United States, much of our public transportation has the default assumption of being “alright” at best. Typically, public opinion of even our best public transportation isn’t the most positive, and while I acknowledge that that is likely a result of neglected, mismanaged, or outdated systems but I think more so it’s that people are bored by the same old neglected, mismanaged, and outdated systems. As persons interested in transportation we can be creative and as those in a position to make change happen, we can jumpstart that interest by breaking the status quo by adding some variety and doing things better. We need to stop looking at how we transported people 10, 25, or 50 years ago and start thinking about how we can be transporting people 10, 25, or 50 years in the future.

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