Electric Trucks and Buses

HawkTheSlayer wrote:

vege57 wrote:

HawkTheSlayer wrote:

Calypso Jones wrote:https://sfist.com/2023/11/06/apparent-tech-bus-accident-damages-multiple-cars-on-castro-street/

San Francisco has pretty much gotten over its outward animosity toward tech buses, but a handful of people who were parked on Castro Street Monday morning have fresh reason to be resentful of the tech bus shuttles. A Monday morning Reddit post asking “Why have the police closed Castro Street?” brought numerous commenters saying things along the lines of “A tech bus plowed down the hill backwards through a bunch of traffic.” KPIX has confirmed that a commuter bus struck multiple vehicles on Castro between 20th and 21st streets, and adds that at least one person was injured.

San Fransicko deserves the fruits of its labor.
What bothers me here is, who in the hell will be held accountable in one of these "tech accidents".

Im not sure I wanna be on a bus carrying a ton of lithium ion batteries, like riding on a bunker buster with a dodgy trigger mechanism  

Yep .  
Fruits of  labor fly through everyone here.
Google.  bus , my friend.

I Googled bust and this came up

I should drink and Google at the same time

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4213681/posts

It says there are a lot of e buses sitting unused in cities across the nation...why? Because they cannot be fixed...either impossible or too expensive.

Calypso Jones wrote:https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4213681/posts

It says there are a lot of e buses sitting unused in cities across the nation...why?  Because they cannot be fixed...either impossible or too expensive.

Ah.  I knew it would end badly; I didn't know it would end this way.

I expected dead buses on roads and/or a fireball leveling a bus garage or two.

No...this is another problem.

Before I drove trains, I worked as a busman - first, with Kent State University's student-run Campus Bus Service (served the whole county; later, a "public interest" group sued to have the county take it over and run it with civil-service hires) and then, out of the Navy, with Greater Denver RTD.

Meantime, as a taxi driver in Cleveland, I watched my competitor - GCRTA.  Which was a circus - like "On The Buses" in blackface, without semi-pretty women around.

Cleveland had a similar problem - with diesel buses.  Many people don't know, but for a short time American Motors made buses.  It was their AM General division - that's where they assigned all the government jeep contracts when AMC took over Kaiser Jeep.  AM General made military trucks, and all of a sudden, the Federal Government (during the Carter years, on to today) essentially bought ALL buses for ALL urban transit systems. AM General wanted in.

RTA took delivery of 20 of those AM General buses.  Which were lemons.  Absolute lemons.  Unlike the Grumman-Flxble 870, or the new GMC RTSII, it wasn't unitized fiberglass, but riveted sheet steel - like a school bus.  It was based on an obsolete Canadian design, by a company called Flyer.  They didn't sell outside of Canada.

They were cold and noisy and troublesome.  After five years, and with AM General pulling out of that market (AM General had been sold, as the French company Renault had bought AMC-Jeep, and couldn't own US government contracts, being a foreign corporation)...

...with no support, RTA wanted to scrap those six-year-old buses.

The Urban Mass Transit Agency stipulates a ten year lifespan.  Scrapping or selling for lower than FMV during that time, results in fines and/or rebate of the purchase price.  Those things were not worth the cost of rebuilding; no refurbishing company (there are specialists that do that) had experience, desire or parts to refurbish a nearly-new AM General-Flyer bus.

So they sat in back lots for four years; unused except occasionally as service rigs.  Yeah, put a mechanic's tool kit in the passenger area, and it can be a rolling workstation.

But RTA had to wait that time to scrap them.

This is gonna be the same thing.  Those battery buses are not usable.  But I'll bet there's older buses in the outdoor storage lot, that ARE serviceable; and they're gonna be cleaned up and put on routes.

Until finally they can scrap the battery rigs.  Or until management decides they would like a new bus garage, and puts them all in there, and sets things up to really launch a fireball.  It can be done...impacting some of the cells with a hammer...