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Comment by mlinhares | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't get VC money and crazy people screaming about it. Boston/Cambridge is full of those and it's a pleasure to be on them but there's no crazy CEO trying to sell it so no one bothers to pay attention to them.

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Moscow was a trolleybus capital of the world just recently. I'm still salty that they destroyed it in just a couple of years, replacing with regular buses and a handful of electric ones (which still require a small ICE engine in winter to stay warm, ridiculously enough)

Was there ever a reason given?

I guess same like in Prague when they purged their Trolley buses in 1950s - Gas was cheaper back then. MUCH cheaper.

"electric buses are the future", and "wires are ugly and expensive to maintain". Also trolleybus depots are taking some valuable commercial space at the end of the lines, it's easier to have a bus depot on city outskirts. For most of those trolleybuses with a small battery (semi-autonomous) could be a much, much cheaper and reasonable answer, but I guess someone made a good buck on depot real estate or electric buses or whatever.

Especially with all of the problems they've been having over the last couple of years, I had to double-take when I saw you describe riding the MBTA as "a pleasure"

I understand as someone that must have lived their whole life being served by the MBTA it might not be amazing (its also not amazing by european standards, i definitely rode better stuff in Spain, Portugal, England and other places) but by AMERICAN standards the MBTA is definitely one of the best public transportation systems there are.

I'd recommend you take SEPTA in PHL or use the shitty stuff we have here in Miami and Orlando and you'll be praying to go back to riding the Red Line or even, god forbid, the green line.

I meant it mostly jokingly, and I actually agree with you for the most part, though I do think literally catching on fire multiple times is not so amazing. I grew up riding the MBTA and mostly just lament how it's been mismanaged and saddled with debts, resulting in most of their current problems.

USA’s 4th largest city (Houston) has essentially zero usable public transport. Anything remotely usable a few times per week by more than 5% of the city’s population is amazing by USA standards.

Houston population is 2.2M in the city, 7.2M metro area (most of whom at least regularly spend time in or commute to Houston proper).

Same for here in FL, there’s not a single city with any usable public transportation (other than Disney’s).

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