It's a little sad that those went away, but if they can successfully do battery-electric busses, I guess it's ok. It's nice when a simple, hundred-year-old-plus technology can just continue to work though.
I don’t remember the analysis but I recall being effectively convinced that battery electric busses are a huge step down compared to electric trolleys.
If you have trolleys and you replace them by BES then that seems obvious, you need space for batteries & they impact handling and you replace daylong distributed electricity use by spot charge during which the bus is immobilised.
Something I’ve seen mentioned a few times but don’t know has been deployed is having trolley poles on a battery electric bus tho: you still have the battery space and weight issues but if you’re on trolley routes you don’t need to charge, and it allows more flexibility as the batteries mean you can go off-route (useful in case of blockage or roadworks), buses can now jump between sections, if the engagement procedure is good enough you can electrify bus stops with overhead hooks to spot-charge (just get the poles out and engaged), and you have the flexibility to explore bus route layouts and “upgrade” them to trolley routes without touching the rolling stock.
Apparently Lyon (with a continuously operated trolley network just 9 days younger than SF's) has also been deploying electric trolley buses since early 2021. Before that they got some autonomy with small ICE (just 88hp).
