Old tech bad / New Tech Good

Riiiiight... Here is a story to illustrate this fallacy. From the Canadian Broadcasting Company:

Frost knocks out high-tech trolley buses in Vancouver
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.

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.

Here is the obligatory picture: No word on cost yet. Fine German Engineering indeed... And for the record, here is one of the trolleys I grew up riding on in Pittsburgh, PA. This one is from November 25th, 1950 -- I was 22 days old when the picture was taken. Fast (for its day), cheap and efficient.