Várnagy Zoltán: Urban Transportation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
is the fact that the lower price of tram, trolley, and underground tickets lost much of its attraction as soon as inflation first appeared. Today’s tendency is that fares are becoming uniform, or rather, dependent on distances covered, on every means of public transport. Alongside many of the radial tram lines bus routes, too, have been opened, in many places providing rapid and express services. People have often gone over to these in large numbers. To counterbalance the slowing down of services caused by heavy car traffic, express buses have been introduced. The most successful of these is probably the “red” 7, which daily carries people from the city’s largest housing estate to and from the centre. With the financial help of the municipality, BKV is gradually replacing its smoke and soot emitting buses with Rába-Man engines with more modern models, but as yet there are no signs of an organic development of transportation in which buses are replaced by trams when the number of passengers exceeds the recognised limit-5-6,000 passengers per hour travelling in one direction for buses. The reasons are financial. Trolleybuses The bus with overhead wires, the trolleybus, was first introduced in Berlin in 1882. Even though it requires no tracks of its own as it runs on the road, and does not pollute the air due to its electrical engine, the trolleybus did not really come into general use. In Budapest, for example, it took fifty years before the first trolleybus line-between Vörösvári út and the Óbuda cemetery- was opened in 1933. This line was destroyed in World War II and was not later reinstalled. Although BSZKRT suggested in 1945 that several trolley lines should be opened in the hilly areas of the city, no funding was provided for the purchase of the 45 vehicles requested. Later, in 1949, the authorities began to install overhead wires in Budapest, following the example set by the Soviet tlnion, where trolleybuses had become a widespread form of transportation, so much so that even long distance trolley lines were-and still are-in operation. The ceremonial opening of the first Budapest route was 35
