Canada to Welcome Modern Buses and Competition!
Vancouver leaps forward with what may be the best buses on the continent.
Toronto has a big streetcar network, for which it is famous in transit circles and in which it takes significant pride. However, all the way on the west coast my hometown of Vancouver has its own urban electric local transit system — the Vancouver Trolleybus network, which actually has four times the route length of the Toronto streetcar.
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To be clear, these buses had a good run: they were introduced in the lead up to the Vancouver Olympics, and now the fleet is averaging close to 20 years in age, this is a lot older than conventional buses last, if a bit of a surprisingly short lifespan for a trolley — which benefits a lot from its electric architecture.
There also just aren't that many of them. Vancouver has about 260, with about 70 of those being articulated trolleybuses, but on the whole that’s substantially less capacity than is available on the Toronto streetcar network, despite the trolley network being significantly longer.
This problem of a comprehensive network and a decent but dated fleet has an obvious solution — a fleet replacement program, but what's great is that it's been timed such that there has been a real transformation in what is possible with trolleybuses, and so this is starting to look a lot more like a total network overhaul rather than a simple like-for-like vehicle replacement.
Last time around, New Flyer sort of made sense: the company had a number of trolleybus customers all at once, since in addition to Vancouver there are a number of networks in the United States, and their product was fairly compelling. However, it sounds like when TransLink went to them this time, what they found was a very long order backlog (largely of electric buses meaning that spinning up a parallel line to jump the queue seems less likely), high prices, and a product which probably just wouldn't justify that.
So the agency did something a bit surprising to me, something which you sometimes see happening in other cities but which is pretty uncommon in Canada: They called up the Europeans and had them bring out one of their best — the Trollino 12 model, from Polish bus manufacturer Solaris — which is actually part of Spanish train manufacturer CAF.
Solaris literally brought one of their vehicles to Metro Vancouver to test it out, it sounded like it was a real hit, and so when the time to pull the trigger on a fleet overhaul came, Solaris ended up winning the contract.
That contract is initially for about 100 buses, but what's so exciting is that there are options on it to expand to roughly 500, basically doubling the fleet.
My sort of initial fear was that Solaris would sort of North-Americanize their buses, which I've used in Europe and are great. For the record, it seems that they are entering the North American bus market because some of the other manufacturers (okay we basically have two, with “Gillig” as a third-producing what are apparently not amazing buses exclusively for the American market — mostly it seems for cities that don't run their buses very frequently and so don't need very good buses) like Novabus have been on shaky legs, and with the high prices and fairly-large volumes (this continent famously does not have a lot of trains!). This was something I was concerned about even looking at early renders as part of Solaris's marketing effort to North American agencies.
Fortunately, my fears have been assuaged.
I was reading a thread on Reddit, and while some people were loudly complaining that the above bus doesn't look as good as other European buses, which I don't have a strong opinion on, what I do know is that this prototype is already way better than most buses on this continent, and in my personal opinion this looks more like Solaris’ European models.
I think the styling looks great: it’s sort of technical — less like a smoothed out rectangular prism, and looks just like Solaris's European buses (the fenders and the front and the roofline), although as some have noted, a bit of a weird policy in Vancouver around having the rear bus door in a particular location in order to be compatible with bus shelters and the like (this doesn't really make sense to me since the accessible door is at the front and the shelters don't go right up to the curb because the entrance is on the front unlike in Toronto) while in Europe it would be centred between the front and rear wheels.
And to be clear, this is just the first prototype 12m bus, of those 400 options TransLink has 200 would be 18m articulated buses, nearly tripling the number of articulated trolleys the agency currently has.
Three Doors
Probably the most exciting thing to me besides the fact that the styling looks closer to a European bus than a North American bus with some European styling, is that there is a major functional improvement here — a third door! 12m buses with three doors (articulated buses all have three doors) in North America are basically unheard of outside of super weird edge cases like Denver's MallRide and airport buses (which I think might be bought from Europe directly anyways). A third door is pretty common across all varieties of buses in Europe and is useful for the same reason that subway trains have more doors compared to intercity trains: If a route is meant to operate frequently you don't want to have a vehicle sitting at any stop for very long so that you can get moving and the next vehicle can arrive; Reducing dwell time is a lot easier when you have a whole extra door that people can board and alight from. The fact that Canadian cities which operate bus service that's much more in line with European standards than American ones, have basically handcuffed themselves to American bus designs which aren't really fit for purpose for so long has been infuriating. There are numerous bus routes in cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver that move as many people each day as entire light rail lines in America, and so seeing European-style buses with far more door capacity made an option for these routes is extremely exciting operationally, and for improving service speed since if you're not getting off at a particular stop you would like the stopping to actually take as little time as possible! Presumably, if the 18m variant is ordered this will, like with many 18m buses in Europe, have four doors.
Battery Range Extension
The other major innovation is that these buses have a substantial internal battery that allows real off-wire use. The current trolleys have a very short off wire range, which is really only enough to quickly get back to overhead wires (some later versions of the same model used in cities in the US — some of which are abandoning trolleys altogether have slightly more range). By comparison, these buses are meant to have a 20 kilometre off-wire useable range.
There are a bunch of ways this could be used. For one, existing routes could be extended beyond the edge of the current network, for example taking trolleys on Hastings onwards to SFU — which doesn’t currently have trolley service, or taking trolley service along 41st to Marine Drive and the current UBC trolley loop. You could also create new radial services such as by extending the Victoria trolley to the rather underserved River District.
You also could probably simplify a lot of the network: complex junctions could be travelled through on battery, and the downtown core could have a lot of its wires removed based on charging demand and what the state of charge of buses on various routes might be. This would let you have overhead lines where they are simplest to build and maintain as well as operate buses under.
The ideal scenario is that these trolleys function so well that this becomes how bus service in the region is electrified in large part. Buses with longer range like current e-buses, and trolley poles for in-motion charging mean that with a little bit of electrification along a major street — say King George Boulevard in Surrey, or No. 3 Road in Richmond — you could electrify a wide range of routes that touch that corridor. It’s sort of like the opportunistic charging some agencies are already investigating at bus exchanges, but such that buses can keep driving a bit before “unplugging”. Buses like this could also let the Rapidbus routes easily go electric. This makes a lot of sense because Translink already has internal expertise with trolley infrastructure, the region is really serious about its climate goals, and perhaps simplifying the network in Vancouver proper would free up some resources.
I honestly did not cover (or appreciate) Vancouver’s trolleybus network enough over the years, and I hope to do a more fulsome examination of it in the future, in the meantime please enjoy this diagram of the network by Richard DeArmond and Matthew Walker.
Now, I’d like to spend a bit of time reiterating what a problem it is that the bus market in North America is not competitive. For serious transit buses, you only have two options, and since the two companies often have specialties, in many cases you really only have one option. This is good for the companies, and politicians might say it’s good for workers, but the issue is it’s inefficient, and puts a small number of jobs (which would not necessarily be lost in a competitive market!) at current companies ahead of the best, most cost effective vehicles, and the public transit systems and rider experience. That so often transit projects (housing is similar) are used as a means to a achieve non-transit means, is very frustrating, and is a big reason of why transit itself is not as good as it could be.
In most of the rest of the world (like with elevators and fifteen other things), the market is quite globalized. Many firms, from Mercedes, to Man, and Volvo compete with a wide range of designs. Since more companies want the business, and more features are offered you get more reliability, better pricing, and better features.
There have been exceptions. A few transit systems in a few systems have ordered buses from European manufacturers. York Region’s VIVA “BRT” system for example kicked off service with very nice Belgian Van Hool buses, which are notably nicer than the regular buses we see on this continent.
What’s exciting about this move from Translink is it shows us what a future where Canada is part of a global transit ecosystem (which we could then also sell into) could look like. It means dramatically better transit domestically of course — especially in places like buses that don’t get much attention in Canada but are real workhorses, but it could also force our domestic bus makers to innovate and compete, meaning their workers would learn new skills and to make more competitive products, which would make them more employable in other industries as well! Now, obviously we aren’t going to compete with China on bus pricing, but there’s no reason we couldn’t buy some buses from Poland, and sell some to Norway or Spain. This is how the global economy works.
All of this leaves me feeling quite happy. Vancouver of course is going to have a fantastically-upgraded trolley network, and maybe transformed buses regionwide. But, the impact will be wider than that. Other cities might experiment with Solaris, and perhaps other manufacturers.
This is an obvious move for Toronto. Already, the New Flyer Buses we have been getting as of late have been a big step up from the Novabuses in terms of quality. And I think the TTC has appreciated them being quite reliable, the agency, which moves so many people on buses would probably be ecstatic at the improved efficiency, reliability of nice European buses — and the passengers would love the experience. I can just imagine how fantastic the Finch Express could be, operating slick, articulated buses the likes of which we might see in Denmark today.
As a parting note, a few years ago I actually got to check out the main maintenance garage for the trolley network in south Vancouver. It was a very cool experience, and everyone seemed stoked on the new trolleys.
In https://nextmetro.substack.com/i/190537922/three-doors there is a "root" where you may have intended a route.
Trolleybuses seem like a natural option for Toronto to add to the arsenal (as if there aren't already enough transit modes to be managed) given the experience with catenary & trams. Even just as streetcar replacements (there have been a *lot* of busses run for that purpose over the past few years, and probably the next as we slowly catch up on track maintenance.
I am curious how much cheaper trolley busses are to operate when the lack of diesel and (presumably) reduced maintenance needs & longer vehicle lives are taken together.
The ideas you raise around using the ~20km "off wire" capacity feels very forward thinking, have you seen any evidence that Vancouver is actually planning to use some or all of those options?
Three doors on a regular trolleybus is odd to this old NoFunCouver transit nerd but it's what we needed for decades. Na zdrowie (cheers in Polish)!