How long must the electric bus poles be? - April 3-7, 1995
"Hey, Tom," asked Brad. "Did you hear we have a sub this week?""Yeah," said Tom. "I heard Mrs. Sib had to go to this NCTM conference, and that's why our quiz is a day late."
"That's cool. Hey, can you give me some piece of mind? There's this problem I've been working on. You know those electric buses that drive down Mt. Auburn Street? The ones with the wires overhead?"
"Sure," said Tom. "I take one to baseball practice on the weekends."
"Do you know how they figure out how far they can go?"
"What do you mean?" asked Tom.
"Well, they're attached to those wires. How do they know how far out of their lane they can go?"
"Let's see," said Tom. "You've got two lanes of traffic each way. Each lane is 12 feet wide. The two wires running above the street are three feet apart, and are centered over the left-hand lane. The buses, which are eight feet wide and 10 feet high, have those two poles on the top, which are connected to the top of the bus and then connected to the wires. I guess the wires are about 15 feet above the street.. So a side view would look something like this:
_________________________________
__________\_\_____________________ overhead wires
\ \
________\_\___________
| |
| |
| bus |
| |
|______________________|
OO O
So you're wondering how long those poles would have to be so that they
could go to the curb, and swerve around things, and stuff like that?"
asked Tom."Yeah. So if the rear view looked like this as the bus is moving into the right-hand lane:
* * <---wires
\ \
\ \
\ \
___\__\___
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|__________|
I I
center line->|| | |<--curb
how long do those poles have to be? I mean, wouldn't it be a pain if
someone were double-parked or something?""I've got a feeling that if someone was double-parked on the bus route, they'd get a pretty good ticket!" said Tom.
"It's more than a feeling," said Brad. "I saw a guy getting one this morning!"
Next problem || Previous problem || Table of Contents || Forum Home Page