Know-It-All: How Far Can a Trolley Bus Go Off Its Cables?

Have you ever watched Speed, the 1994 action-thriller and salute-to-transit-systems? Starring a young Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock’s best haircut and 11 GM New Look buses? They have to drive a bus at over 50 miles an hour or it explodes? Ferris Bueller’s best friend Cameron is there too? They all have some laughs? Remember?

I bring this up not just because I only saw the first half and I’m hoping someone can tell me how it ends. (Action movie idea: a 37-year-old mother has to stay awake over the course of a full movie or her apartment building will explode.) I mention this cinematic classic because I’m sure that you, like me, once watched it—or most of it—and immediately wondered what would happen if a disgruntled Dennis Hopper had tried the same stunt on one of Vancouver’s trolley buses.

If you aren’t aware of the trolley bus, well, congrats on owning a car. There are more than 260 of ’em in our fair city, currently running along 13 routes, all powered by electricity gathered from overhead cables. Anyone who’s taken the #14 around a sharp corner on a snowy day knows that a ride on a Vancouver trolley bus is thrilling even without Wile E. Coyote-level explosives involved: at any moment, the cables could become detached and you could get to see the bus driver heroically don a safety vest to fix it with an Official TransLink Whacking Pole. Break out the popcorn! This is my kind of action!

In the case of a Speed-style emergency, though, Whacking Poles and vests just wouldn’t be enough. A true action-ready bus needs agility, freedom and, you guessed it, going-fast-ness. Yes, there are 320 kilometres of trolley line we could circumnavigate to bide time, but the strictness of the route would really hamper our ability to dodge traffic jams or the crosswalk-deniers of Commercial Drive. Unfortunately, though, we’d need to stay tethered if we wanted to make it through the Speed experience, because, offline, trolley buses can only go 30 km/hr, and can only travel up to one kilometre. It’s what the L.A. Bomb Squad might call “a bit of a pickle.”

Hopefully, TransLink and the Coast Mountain Bus Company never find themselves in the same situation as Keanu and Sandy, and can just focus on operating the only trolley bus system in Canada—North America’s second-largest fleet, in fact. (San Francisco technically has more trolleys, though according to a helpful TransLink rep, we’ve got more kilometres of overhead wires, so our electric buses actually cover more distance; this is a transit nerd equivalent of a mic drop.)

Maybe they wouldn’t be able to survive the 1 hour 56 minute runtime of the most popular public transit film in history, but trolley buses have their own strengths that some might say are even cooler than the catchphrase “pop quiz, hot shot.” For instance, trolley buses run on 600 volts of direct current, and have the ability to generate electricity through braking that actually goes back into the circuit to power other buses. They’re creating their own sequels, in a way… ones that, even at a plodding 30 km/h, still have more oomph than Speed 2 did.