Conveners
Electric Sparks: New and old perspectives of Electric Buses and Trolleybuses
- Wladimir Sgibnev
Description
In the course of the last decade the battery industry, the battery cars and buses, is ever growing. The topic is hot and the fascination is great. Multiple municipalities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere promote and advertise their progressiveness by willing to introduce (for now in the future) new battery buses wherever and whenever possible. On the other hand, the trolleybus technology is still widely spread throughout the post-socialist countries and offer an electric alternative to the battery bus. This session invites scholars interested into the introduction of the new technology from the perspective of the older, socialist one – the trolleybus. The host of the session will provide insights from local interviews and data from the capital of Bulgaria, where his paper will explore the potential of the decolonial perspective when addressing public transport developments in a post-socialist, Eastern European, supposedly backward context. I look forward to gather more insights on trolleybus and e-bus practices from other post-socialist countries and to create space to discuss the trolleybus technology from contemporary, as well as from historical perspective.
The transition from fossil fuel-powered to electric mobility is widely discussed as a trajectory towards more sustainable transport infrastructures. Widely ignored in academia, this transition has occurred earlier, faster, and more profoundly in Bangladesh than in Europe or the US but under conditions almost diametrically opposed. Without any national policy to support it, the transition has...
This essay introduces the concept of "techno-cannibalism," a metaphor used to describe the practice of cannibalizing parts from one machine to repair another. It explores the potential of the concept through the examples of trolleybus cannibalization in Bulgaria and other former socialist countries with trolleybus networks. It is based on anecdotes, personal encounters and visual...
The trolleybuses system in Bishkek was opened in 1951 as a gift for citizens for Independence Day and this year - 19 June 2024 - trolleybus wires were started to dismantle. Citizens started a campaign against this and appealed to the court.
There was a loan from the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development that funded the procurement of almost all trolleybuses and we still pay the...
