How did WeGo’s electric buses end up as urban decay?
There’s a piece of infrastructure in downtown Nashville that is about to go away. When it does, there may not be any clues left from a fascinating — and brief — chapter in the city’s transportation history. Do you remember when WeGo had a fleet of super-quiet all-electric buses running for free throughout downtown? Bus commuter Joe Pagetta does. He wrote to Curious Nashville with this question: In the not-so-distant past, Nashville used to have a free electric bus circuit called the Music City Circuit, which connected downtown to Bicentennial Mall and the Gulch. And then it just disappeared sometime around COVID. I’m curious about that, but even more curious about the abandoned electric bus charging infrastructure that’s still standing … like dystopian props from Old Detroit in Robocop. If there are no plans to bring the electric buses back, what is going to happen to that decaying infrastructure? The question reached the right place, as WPLN has covered the rise and fall of those buses since 2015.