Hundreds of commuters in Vancouver shared taxis, walked or even thumbed rides Thursday morning after the city's new trolley buses were out of service because overhead lines were coated with frost.

Moist air and cold temperatures overnight halted almost the entire fleet of 188 new trolley buses in Vancouver Thursday, causing problems for hundreds of commuters.
(CBC)

The Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority said drivers were forced to park their buses all over the city as moist air and cold temperatures overnight left the trolley lines frozen.

Although equipped with ice cutters like the old buses, the new trolleys are so technologically advanced and sensitive that the thin coat of ice on the overhead lines tricked the onboard computers into thinking the lines were dead, said TransLink spokesman Drew Snider.

"They assume that the poles have lost contact with the wires and they retract the poles — this is designed to keep the poles from failing above and bringing down trolley overheads," he said.

The new bus fleet has 188 high-tech trolleys, which rolled out in the summer of 2006, and almost all of them were grounded when the German-made system couldn't detect electricity, TransLink said.

A bus driver was forced to park his vehicle on the side of the road because the system couldn't detect electricity.
(CBC)

Snider said the new trolleys were back in operation and engineers were working on fixing the problem so commuters don't encounter the same problem Friday morning.

TransLink spent most of Thursday retrieving dead trolleys and formulating a solution — keeping the wires warm through the night by running four extra buses along 300 kilometres of line and watch the weather.

"We're certain it's going to work," said Stan Sierpina, a spokesman for TransLink's customer service. "We will make sure it works … We'll have the ice cutters or the frost removers out there."

Questions are being raised on Thursday if there was enough testing done on these buses in West Coast conditions before they were purchased.

This is the third major issues with the fleet. There were problems with power steering in January of this year and trouble with the bike racks.

"It's very, very highly technical equipment and it's going to take some years before we finally get it all finalized," said Bus Mechanics Union spokesman Joe Elworthy.