Trolleybus Emoji

A trolleybus. An electric bus that draws power from two overhead wires through a pair of spring-loaded poles on its roof. Looks like a bus, drives like a bus, but runs on the grid like a tram without needing rails. Approved in Unicode 6.0 back in 2010 as part of the first big Japanese carrier import (proposal L2/09-114).

The emoji was never a big texting character in the West. Most Americans have never ridden a trolleybus. The four U.S. systems left (San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Dayton) are outliers from a mid-20th-century world where dozens of cities had them. In Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, and China though, 🚎 still means your actual daily commute, and the emoji gets used the way 🚌 or 🚇 gets used elsewhere.

Because the character ships as a red, boxy, wired-up vehicle across most platforms, it reads as "old-fashioned city bus" to anyone who doesn't know what a trolleybus is. People pick it for vintage transit posts, Eastern Bloc aesthetic photos, Muni and Seattle Metro sightings, and the occasional 🚎💨 "let's get moving" joke. Rarely a first-choice emoji, but it has loyal users.

Heaviest usage is in Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian posts about the daily commute, where троллейбус (trolleybus) is just the word for bus-with-wires. Czech, Slovak, and Swiss German transit enthusiasts use it for spotting posts. In English, 🚎 mostly shows up in three contexts:

1) Transit nerds posting photos of San Francisco's Muni electric fleet, Seattle's King County Metro network, or European systems. The 🚎📸 combo is near-unmistakable. 2) Nostalgia and Soviet/Eastern Bloc aesthetic posts on TikTok and Instagram, where the trolleybus is shorthand for a specific grainy, wired, concrete-and-linden-tree city vibe. 3) Misuse as a generic bus by people who didn't realize there's a plain 🚌 a few slots over in the emoji keyboard.

On X (formerly Twitter), Muni Diaries and transit accounts use it alongside 🚃 (tram) and 🚊 (streetcar) when distinguishing modes. Posts tagged with 🚎 often cluster around infrastructure debates since the trolleybus revival is a live planning topic in 2026.

The trolleybus itself predates the emoji by over a century. Charles Van Depoele demonstrated the first working trolley pole in 1885, and by 1911 Leeds and Bradford had put the first British trolleybuses into service. The Soviet Union turned it into a defining piece of street furniture after 1933, when Moscow's first line opened.

The emoji came along in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as part of the batch of Japanese carrier emojis that Apple and Google convinced Unicode to standardize. The original Japanese character was トロリーバス, and its inclusion reflected Japan's own trolleybus lines, most famously the Tateyama Tunnel Trolleybus running under the Alps from 1996. That route, the very last trolleybus line in Japan, shut down on 30 November 2024 and was replaced by battery-electric buses in 2025. The emoji outlived the Japanese trolleybus by default.

The character was coded as U+1F68EU+1F68E in the Transport and Map Symbols block, one slot after 🚍 and one slot before 🚏, and added to Emoji 1.0 in August 2015. Its reference glyph was a wired red bus, which most platforms still follow.

1. 1882Werner von Siemens demonstrates the Elektromote in Berlin, considered the first trolleybus↗
2. 1911Leeds and Bradford open the first trolleybus systems in Britain on 20 June↗
3. 1933Moscow opens its first trolleybus line, seeding the Soviet Union's largest-in-the-world network↗
4. 1941San Francisco's first trolleybus line opens. The Muni fleet is still running on its descendants today↗
5. 1972Soviet factory ZiU begins production of the ZiU-9, which will become the most-produced trolleybus model in history at about 42,000 units↗
6. 2010🚎 is encoded as U+1F68E in Unicode 6.0 alongside the rest of the Japanese carrier transport emojis↗
7. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, making 🚎 a universal first-class emoji across iOS, Android, WhatsApp, and web platforms
8. 2023Prague revives trolleybuses after a 50-year gap, putting Solaris Trollino 24s on the airport line↗
9. 2024Japan retires its last trolleybus (Tateyama Tunnel) on 30 November; emoji remains but the Japanese vehicle does not↗
10. 2025UITP counts 257 active trolleybus cities and 22,137 vehicles globally, with a clear revival trend in Europe↗

• •The Soviet-era ZiU-9 is the most-produced trolleybus model in history. About 42,000 were built between 1972 and 2013, which is more than the combined production of every Boeing 737 variant ever made.
• •Shanghai has been operating trolleybuses continuously since 1914, making it the oldest trolleybus system in the world still in service. It survived two World Wars, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution.
• •Japan's last trolleybus ran through a tunnel under the Tateyama mountains until 30 November 2024. The line switched to battery-electric buses in 2025 because the tunnel's narrow diameter made the wires a maintenance headache.
• •Trolleybuses and streetcars were systematically dismantled in dozens of US cities in the 1940s and 1950s by a National City Lines holding company owned partly by General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil. Known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal, it led to a 1949 federal antitrust conviction.
• •Modern trolleybuses often come with a battery pack that lets them leave the wires for a few kilometers. The term is "in-motion charging," and it's the bridge technology that convinced cities like Berlin, Prague, and Marrakech to re-invest in the mode.
• •The "midnight blue trolleybus" of Moscow, celebrated in Bulat Okudzhava's 1957 song, was usually a real vehicle called the MTB-82. It was the standard Soviet trolleybus of the 1950s, built on a wartime chassis design, and it appears in dozens of Soviet films and poems.
• •The double-articulated Solaris Trollino 24 is 24 meters long, seats plus standees hold around 200 passengers, and it now runs on Prague's airport line. It's essentially a short train on rubber tires.
• •North Korea's Pyongyang Trolleybus Factory has been building the country's own trolleybuses since 1961, based originally on Czech Karosa designs. Most North Korean cities rely on trolleybuses because the country has limited oil imports.
• •San Francisco's Muni trolleybuses can climb 23% grades, steeper than any tram or metro in North America can manage. The electric motor's instant torque is what makes the city's vertical streets possible.