My daily transportation is a 2007 Ford Focus hatchback. Nice little car with loads of headroom and enough oomph to pass 18-wheel behemoths going uphill thru Sepulveda Pass on the 405 freeway. When the Metro Rail Expo line is completed (which is supposed to be sometime in 2016), there'll be a light rail line all the way from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. I may actually use it from time to time.
My first love . No air-con but TWO sunroofs. And no diagnostics. My current favourite ride... + our trams
When I was a kid in Seattle we had electric buses that ran on cables like that, though they were definitely buses, not trams, and could go off the cables as well. I adored those buses as a child -- I'm not sure if they still have them though, it's been a long time since I lived there. Ah, a quick google shows me they are called trolly buses and I think they're terrific.
When I visited Budapest, I was amazed by all the different forms of public transit available. The underground Metro trains run as three major arteries through the city, then you have above-ground trams which run the lengths of major thoroughfares. Then trolley buses to handle most of the mid-traffic streets, and finally traditional buses to cover popular routes not necessarily handled by anything else. You could really get anywhere in that city in a reasonable amount of time just by leveraging the public transit system. (They also make these neat tourist cards which give you access to the entire public transit system for a single flat fee for a few days.) Uh, I would mention that this was before everything in Hungary went to shit so I wouldn't necessarily recommend going there now. Anyway, this is what my real car looked like a couple weeks ago:
When I lived in Cairo I made an effort to use as many modes of transport as possible. I ended up traveling by small plane, bus, train, taxi, two kinds of boat, horse-drawn carriage, camel, and my favorite of all: hitching a ride down the highway on a bale of alfalfa (does alfalfa come in bales?) in an ass-drawn cart.
This makes me so jealous. Being a huge rail and public transit nerd while living in America is... frustrating. I have this long-term project I've been working on to create a fictional country with badass transit systems (local and national); the large-scale rail networks in western Europe (France and Germany in particular) have provided a LOT of inspiration. One thing I hope I'm able to do one of these days is visit Europe, as I have never been there. If I ever make it (which is dependant on having the money to do so, bleh), I will probably spend a good 50% or more of my time riding around on trains! Tell me about it! We do have a high-speed rail project here in California, but... its current status would best be described as "on life-support." And to quote a certain TV show that I'd wager a few people here would be familiar with: life support is failing. The whole thing is so bogged down in politics, infighting, territorial disputes, NIMBY-ism, an out of control budget, and other problems, that I wonder if it'll ever be built. And even if it actually happens, more problems await - the station being built as the intended northern terminus in San Francisco is badly designed, the HSR commission is set on implementing airport-style security theater and passenger routing at all of its stations, the situation with Caltrain along the peninsula between SF and San Jose is still completely up in the air... It's a gigantic mess. To say nothing of the fact that really, we have no business jumping straight to high-speed rail - a far better idea would be to begin to address the utterly terrible nature of our regular passenger rail. A protracted, comprehensive overhaul and expansion of those systems over a long period of time could be much more useful. Implementing high-speed rail would be a logical end to that process, not a beginning. But such a process isn't flashy or exciting enough to get people behind it. Nice! Love that sleek look that a lot of modern trams have. That's in London, right? These? They do still use em, these particular buses (made by Italian company Breda) were originally dual-mode - capable of running off of either trolley wire-fed electricity or an onboard diesel engine, and have since been converted to electric-only. Seattle also has standard trolleybuses, as well, in the form of old Gillig Phantoms, and they are slated to get some shiny new trolleys from New Flyer sometime this year. Trolleys are not run in the Downtown Transit Tunnel anymore since the light rail began running, so they are used on surface street electrified lines instead. The Bredas always had a lot of reliability issues, but I agree that trolley buses in general are a great thing. We have tons of em in San Francisco, partly for the same reason that there are so many in Seattle: hills. No other transit vehicle can compete with an electric trolleybus when it comes to zipping up a hill with ease. Oh, and since I don't own a car, this is my ride: Recently acquired, locally-built Gillig commuter bus for AC Transit's Transbay Express service. They're quite comfortable.
2013 2nd-generation Kia Picanto 5-door hatchback in Titanium Silver Metallic. Sorry for the weird filter. Still sorely lacking slick light-alloy wheels. Something to shoot for when my birthday rolls around
Trolley buses are everywhere in my city. They are nice, but the aerial wiring is a bitch when you want to take a picture of a buikding or monument. Public transport here is unfortunately inadequate. We have buses (regular and trolley), and some suburban train, but the main problem is that we sorely need a subway system, but there is no political will to realize it. There is a plan to improve the interconnectedness of bus and train lines, but it went down the toilet because of corruption and scandals.
The car is about to go Super-Saiyan I think. CAR-ME-HA-ME-HA, get it? Get it? It's funny because it's a car.
Especially as it doesn't even show the continuation of the old Great Western main line southwest from Bristol to Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Of course that line was a wee bit damaged at Dawlish during the recent storms.