In Kaiserslautern the buses hat to be replaced and this replacement would have been too expensive. There was also some need to expand the lines to other suburbs, but building trolley bus infrastructure is pretty expensive around here and the city did not want to pay for that
In the western hemisphere trolley buses got out of fashion in the late sixties and were abandoned nearly everywhere. Only a few cities kept their trolley buses. Only big exception were France and Italy, where they are still operating today, even if in the late 90s/early 2000s many of them were abandoned too. In Spain, England, Ireland, Denmark and many other countries no network survived until today...
The problems of trolley buses here are the fact that they are pretty expensive and need extra infrastructure. And they are mostly not noticed as something "special" and don't gather extra passengers. They need normal bus-drivers, so they can not be operated cheaper than diesel buses. This fact broke the neck of the most surviving networks in the 80s or 90s. Today you can watch this problem in Romania, where many cities abandon their trolley bus network today in favor of diesel buses. The old buses are worn down, new buses are very expensive...
In the Eastern Hemisphere, things were a bit different for the trolley buses. First of all there was a certain communist affinity for this kind of transportation, it was considered as being "the socialist mass transportation system". Second, the oil was quite expensive (more correct, the SU wanted to export it instead of delivering it to its "brother" countries), electrical energy instead could be produced with the help of "homeland" resources (in the GDR it was brown coal). And last but not least, the buses were much cheaper than in the western countries, the infrastructure could be built cheaper, and trolley bus drivers did not need a full-scale bus-drivers license. In the West, in the 80ies there were no trolley bus manufacturers active, making the buses much more expensive.
Today, there are only 3 trolley bus networks active in Germany, in Solingen, Esslingen and Eberswalde. Kaiserslautern was the last full-scale trolley bus network to be abandoned...
Greatings, sepruecom
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