Public transportation is great and I love using it when it makes sense, but in many cities it does not compete with the convenience and security of having a reliable personal vehicle.
The only place I felt public transportation was good enough to go without my own car was NYC - but I lived on a great train line that ran every few minutes reliably. I also didn't have any dependents that I was responsible for. Many people who lived nearby used the train but still had their own cars as a backup.
Even with how convenient it was for shuttling myself around, using it when needing to carry anything like groceries becomes difficult, and made me wish I had a car. Especially during rush hour where sitting is almost impossible.
I'm all for improving public transportation, but I do not see it being a replacement for personal vehicles in every way.
The wealthier people are, the more latency sensitive they become.
Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there?
I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool progressive: no, no one here thinks that the mayor of Seattle would be able to do this.
We have a mayoral election coming up in November. There's an outside chance that things might change for the better, but I'm not really holding my breath.
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[1] Excepting McGinn, who I thought got a really raw deal.
I acknowledge that EV transport has a chicken/egg problem of standing up a support infrastructure as adoption grows and that there are collective interests in decreasing point of service emissions and shifting energy generation away from sources with harmful emissions. However, the problem can be viewed from perspectives outside the personal car paradigm. Why would a rationally goal-oriented city or similar organization spend money/effort on supporting the personal ownership model instead of improving transportation for all people? For example, the same decrease in emissions might be achieved by improved bus/tram service, or public/private partnership to provide EV charging for car sharing services.
What are the cities that have provided street-side charging, what were their goals and by what criteria did they decide to do street-side charging instead of choosing other methods to achieve their goals?
In response to GP, I definitely expect the US government to take a lead on building charging infrastructure (especially with a federal administration that doesn't actively dismiss climate change). A failure to demonstrate competence building green infrastructure in the next few years will quite possibly lead me to seek greener pastures elsewhere (EU). Thankfully San Francisco included charging infrastructure and street-side charging in its 2019 EV roadmap [1].
That said, public transit is by far the better green tech. But since private vehicles won't be going away overnight, might as well transition them to something cleaner.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/electric...
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
More to the point: to meet a climate change goal, why continue to subsidize the overprovisioning of transportation capability in the form of largely unused, quickly depreciating equipment with low watt to work efficiency? Is doing the same thing as before really going to move the needle to the goal? If asserted true, what proof or precedent is there?
They don’t need to take over right of ways. The DOT (or whoever) could help by aiding standardization of chargers and payments, creating a program to fund design of street-side chargers, provide incentives (in the form of taxes perhaps) for cities to meet EV infra quotas.
> why continue to subsidize the overprovisioning of transportation capability in the form of largely unused, quickly depreciating equipment with low watt to work efficiency?
Oh trust me, I really feel this. Maybe you’re right that any incrementalism in reducing carbon emissions is wrong, and we should go all in on the optimal solution, ie ban cars and redesign cities. But even if the govt did radically depart from the past 50 years of stalled infrastructure, and went all in, it would still take a long time until an alternative to the personal vehicle is practical to all urban/suburban dwellers. Long enough for a switch to EVs to be unjustifiable from a climate perspective, probably (I would very much like numbers)
But yes, I am just as tired of the mantra of lesser of two evils. But maybe that’s just how democracy is destined to unfold.
Last week some company announced (in some sense) non-graphite anodes that will (theoretically) make 5 minute recharges of a car battery system possible. Given the amount of energy stored in the system, this is a LOT of juice to have flowing down a wire.
Now imagine that it's about that time of day when a bunch of cars get parked curbside, and plug in to the "new" charging infrastructure. I don't know the numbers, I think we're talking about insane current levels, meaning insane wire sizes being buried in the street.
Anyone know anything about this?
Even if this tech becomes widespread in cars I highly doubt the infrastructure will ever be in place for it be something that the average person can use on a regular basis.
It seems likely that when EVs become the norm people will mostly use slower charging while parked and pay extra for fast charging on long distance trips only. But widespread adoption will still probably require some fairly significant upgrades of power generation infrastructure.
You can't deliver that kind of power to a charging station easily based on the electrical infrastructure we currently have.
At least this my understanding.
Don't forget EVs are beneficial for everyone in terms of less pollution, so cities should be encouraging residents to purchase EVs over ICE with small incentives (in my city you don't need to pay for street parking).
*vehicle cars
The closest gas station to me, on foot, has converted its mechanics bays to a great taco shop, its "office" to a liquor store with a great selection of spirits, and it has a full-size car wash operation wrapped around it.
So it seems like the most likely conversion would be that the gas station would swap gas pumps for chargers, in phases. Of course the best layout for chargers where charging takes the time it currently does is not the same as the best layout for fuel pumps, so it will be interesting to see how the transition goes.
So at present all the gas stations that I know of that seem viable are embedded in businesses that take up even more space, and the retail fuel business is just a part of it.
The only viable path forward for EVs is to reduce recharge time or make it invisible (do it outside rush hour). Until then I see no way for them to displace hybrids as primary family cars.
I feel like this is something that everyone has been saying for decades and I don't really know what it means in practice. There are countless businesses that are successful soaking up excess time that people happily participate in. The mobile gaming business for example is an industry worth tens of billions of dollars that simply didn't exist a couple decades ago.
>The only viable path forward for EVs is to reduce recharge time or make it invisible (do it outside rush hour). Until then I see no way for them to displace hybrids as primary family cars.
Hybrid market share has likely already peaked and they never became the primary family car for Americans. Hybrid's share of new cars only ever topped 3% once and that was in 2013. Plus charge time has already been decreasing for EVs and Teslas have gotten to the point that an average American would probably only need to charge for 10-20 minutes once a week at one of their highest powered Superchargers. That really isn't the inconvenience that some people are making it out to be if there are other business at these charging locations that can keep people occupied.
Gas stations currently make very little to almost nothing actually selling gas (something like 5-25 cents a gallon last I had heard). Almost all of their income is from also acting as a convenience store for snacks and drinks. They need people in and out as quick as possible, not loitering around for half an hour.
Basically, if charging time dropped to the 5 minute range, sure. I would hate to have to use one, though, given how busy gas stations already are during the day around here.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/19/electric...
As is noted elsewhere in the thread, it isn't simply a battery problem.
Being able to supply the “Ooomph” to fast charge 6 or 10 cars with a 5 minute vehicle turn around ( a la Tesla’s fast chargers) but also triple stacked with cars (hydraulic ramps, customer disembarks and uses the time to pay or shop). Chuck in the ‘free' storage space for your ballasting batteries and I can see a great market for buying up old gas stations located in inner city areas - especially those that are currently car washes, vacant lots etc.
We'd need some pretty serious upgrades to our electrical transmission infrastructure to get L2 charging speeds from "every lamppost" as some would propose.
Within a parking garage is there a method of metering/constraining individual charging nodes so that the overall consumption does not exceed the amps available to the garage?
Say for example, all my neighborhood household electric meters have some zigbee coms that allow the electric co to snoop on individual usage closer to realtime. Do EVs not have a method for the charger to understand the EV's % of full charge?
But when we start talking about "every parking spot" scale, then two constraints come to mind: (1) the charging rate is too low to be effective (L1 charging over "regular" 110V wall outlets gets you only a few miles of charge an hour), and (2) if you have too much current going through some common section of cable, it will blow a circuit breaker, or worse, overheat and cause an electrical fire (same as if you plug too many things into an extension cord at home or work).
Edit: I think the current state of the art for sharing is "push notification to tell the driver to move their car" because there is a non-trivial capital outlay for chargers even if you have enough electricity. So any scheme that involves all the cars being plugged in and some intelligent switching of who should go first still requires considerable capital costs, even before you get to upgrading the big transmission wires.
in the case of a general purpose parking garage, this is less okay. I don't want to park in a garage for an hour to shop and not know whether my car will be at 30% or 80% charge when I get back. this is barely better than not having charging infrastructure at all.
On a more humorous note my first mental image had a cyberpunk vibe: someone walking around the city with an unregulated nuke generator (stolen recycled waste or maybe a stolen weapon) selling electricity by the watt from a repurposed hot dog cart. Or maybe WattWallahs if it turns into a semi informal business.
I believe EVs will come into their own as battery technology improves to the point that charging is no longer a multi hour affair. Whether that's the Bill Gates battery, super capacitors, hot swap battery clubs or some combination thereof remains to be seen.
But you don’t need fast charging on public streets, you charge while parked.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/electric-car-w...
This is an absolutely critical point. We can dream up all the beautiful systems we want, but as long as they have some reliance on a high-trust society, they will fail in America. America is a state in decline; the high point of trust was decades ago, and now most Americans live in a situation where they can't leave anything unlocked lest it be stolen.
A lot of pie-in-the-sky sharing service ideas fall flat when we realize that people abuse shared property as much as they can. People like to suggest a future where electric, self-driving cars will be summoned on demand and show up at our doors, obviating the need to own your own vehicle; but the insides of these vehicles will be filthy, and the utility of having emergency stuff carried along with you (from a change of clothes on upward) will be lost. We can imagine banning people from such a service, but we can also imagine someone enacting a law banning banning....
Can you provide a source for that? All of the sources I see show that we're just above 1960s levels of property crime and trending downward.
To me it’s a no-brainer to have such a regulation, but how do other people/cities/country cope without it? You apply for parking permission for “1234 Hacker Rd. space 3A” or do you just find an open spot and consider it yours, like you do for a chair in a cafe?
Approaches I have encountered are:
* Meter-only parking - reserved exclusively for short-term use, usually in highly commercialized areas; long-term use by residents generally prohibited
* Unrestricted street parking - Any car with a valid registration may park in any space not otherwise designated as off-limits (e.g. loading zones, metered zones, specially designated zones for those with mobility impairments). May require periodic relocation to facilitate street sweeping, snow plowing, or other activities sanctioned by the municipality (e.g. clearing space for loading/unloading moving trucks or construction equipment).
* Zoned street parking - Parking in the zone follows the same general pattern of 'unrestricted' above, except vehicles need a specially-issued identifier (usually a sticker) from the municipality to park in the zone.
* Reserved street parking - In conventional circumstances, usually limited to parking spaces for those with mobility impairments, or some special circumstance (e.g. a city might lease spots to a car-sharing service to improve transport access for residents). Sometimes found in cases where there are parking spaces directly off the street (e.g. "pull-in angle parking") in less heavily trafficked areas/neighborhoods.
In my city street parking is free but time restricted. Downtown streets have 2 or 4 hour parking limits, and street parking is not allowed between 2AM and 5AM. I like not having to worry about meters but it's always a pain to wake up in the middle of the night and remember I forgot to put my car in the driveway.
I've lived in Texas a long time and parking space in residential areas was never a problem. Nearly every apartment complex comes with a giant parking lot and private houses either have a garage/driveway or the street is isolated enough to where on street parking isn't an issue, but it's practically impossible or at least extremely inconvenient to live in Texas without a car.
There are a few places where parking is tight, like for instance at a university living space,so you either have to pay for a space somewhere or get a house/apt with dedicated parking (a lot of students don't really need cars though) or take the chance that you will have to play the street parking lottery.
So prevalent in Texas that a now-popular building architype in North American real estate is known as the 'Texas Donut', whereby a midrise apartment building 'wraps' around a parking structure in the middle of the plot.
It makes a lot of sense. The parking is close to where you live, but out of sight for everybody except residents. It makes for a nice-looking neighborhood. And you get to park indoors, out of the weather.
We expect them to propose charging infrastructure, think they have a consensus, and then get sued by someone for some stupid reason, and then 10-15 years later break ground on something 1/3 of what people need.
California is much worse than the east-coast in this regard, but there's a 12 lane freeway bridge in the DC area that is a draw-bridge because the original plan of a suspension bridge was fought by people who complained that it would be an eyesore.
This is the sort of infrastructure work that a Green New Deal should support. But that's a political poison pill, as supporting energy sector jobs is "patriotic" if it's carbon based and "communism" otherwise.
On day 1 of the new US administration, the Keystone XL project was killed. If it's a poison pill it must taste pretty good.
You could have an extra fee on top of vehicle stickers for EVs…and even as I type that, I can imagine the pitched screaming, from both sides of the aisle. “Why are you suppressing clean vehicles?!” “More big city taxes?!”
It is funny how people in the US expect exactly nothing from their government/city. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there?