A recent study found that over the 20 th century, the number of towns with active electric tram systems has declined by more than 90% in France, England and Italy. Europe in particular has seen a massive decline in its electric tramways over the past few decades. The same cannot be said for many other major cities in the US or for other countries around the world. Credit: Robert Szymanski via Shutterstock. A trolleybus manoeuvres its way through San Francisco’s suburbs. Meanwhile, the ancient cable car, which has now been servicing the city for more than 150 years, has even managed to last through a devastating earthquake at the start of the 20 th century and the rise of the more efficient, hugely popular streetcar which, had it not been for public protests, would have replaced the cable car altogether by mid-century. Today, that number has shrunk drastically to just five: San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston and Dayton. Among these, San Francisco has maintained the largest fleet. The city currently has 278 trolley-buses in use, representing around one-third of the total number of rubber-tyred transit fleet in the city, including diesel-powered buses. In the 1950s, the trolleybus, often considered the ‘original’ electric bus, was at its peak of popularity in the US and operated in at least 30 major cities throughout the country. However, what stands out most about San Francisco’s story is that every mode of transportation introduced since the late 1800s has stood the test of time and remains operational today. On top of this, San Francisco’s transport operator, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), also known colloquially as Muni, is the oldest publicly owned transport operator in the US, established officially in 1912 after previous private, for-profit owners of the transit network faced a major workers strike over poor pay and working conditions. However, on the financial side, a look into the history of the city’s public transport network and its enduring legacy today reveals a slightly more perspicacious story. On policies regarding zero-emission vehicle mandates, California is a world leader, according to the IEA’s electric vehicles tracker – one explanation for San Francisco’s electrification success. In San Francisco, however, electrification has endured. In many cities across the world, the prevalence of electric public transport has been in steady decline over the past seven decades. The former becomes especially true for the electrification of public transport fleets that have historically run solely on diesel or petrol-fuelled engines, such as buses. Today, two of the biggest barriers to an increase in the rollout of electric public transport across the world are large upfront costs and a lack of strong local or national policy. The gold standard of business intelligence.ĭespite this, there remains great disparity among countries and even cities within the same country on the proportion of electric transportation versus internal combustion engine transportation in its transit fleets. All major international energy and climate change bodies, including the International Energy Agency (IEA), the World Resources Institute and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agree that electrifying both personal and public transportation is key to effectively lowering global emissions and limiting the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Electric transport has become the biggest recipient of private and public spending within the energy transition, growing 36% in 2023 from the previous year and overtaking the renewable energy sector. The electrification of public transport systems has become central to climate policy around the world as efforts to meet national and international decarbonisation targets ramp up. In the water that surrounds the city, the world’s first emissions-free ferries, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, are also beginning to be trialled. San Francisco’s fleets of buses, streetcars, trolley-buses, cable cars and trains are either already fully electric or in the process of becoming so. Pulled tight from each side of every road, filling the gaps between every house and tree, floats a vast network of electrical lines that provides power to, among many things, the city’s public transport system, which is now almost entirely electric. Walking through the streets of San Francisco’s inner city might feel, to those less used to skies saturated with cables and wires, like stepping into a different, more connected world. A retro cable car negotiates the steep hills of downtown San Francisco.
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