one of the worst decisions the MBTA has ever made. battery buses are inferior to trolleybuses in pretty much every scenario, but especially winter. the battery buses they're replacing the trolleybuses with have diesel heaters to keep the batteries warm.

Wow, why not ethanol heaters or something similar? Volvo did that several years ago in one of their first EV buses.

why not leave the wires up

Yeah having street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City, and I'm not surprised that cities that have them are slowly removing them.

Don't get me wrong, I think they are a great solution electrically and for efficiency / sustainability, but require an enormous geographic footprint, central planning and a lot of overhead space which is difficult to find in dense cities.

> street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City

They've been used in dense cities for generations. How hard can it be?

> require an enormous geographic footprint

What footprint is needed for additional overhead wires?

I wonder is it is more of less efficient for land use as they don’t need fuelling and the associated land that uses, but do need a pair of lamp posts every 10m.

One point in favor of running these lines — city already has lots of lamp posts.

In many cities they just bolt these support wires into adjacent buildings when there isnt a convienent lamp post.

Electrifying core parts of the route (eg: the most heavily travelled bottlenecks these trucks travel) could fix this issue, enabling charging and heating the battery and cab while still en route or plowing snow.

I don't think the reason that street cars lines were removed is because they're hard to implement, I think they were removed for political reasons.

So just to be clear they shouldn't cost anywhere near as much as a subway or even tram rails. With a decent bit of battery on the vehicle, you could even have < 100% coverage and have outage resiliency.