For garbage trucks you have stop and go movement so EVs eliminate idling. Given the size of the trucks it's probably not a big deal to make sure they have adequate battery capacity.
Plow trucks have a completely different use model where they're run at speed for long periods and one day of plowing could have the same distance traveled as weeks of trash collection. Hybrids would likely be an improvement in efficiency but the same way they do for other trucks - batteries support high demand periods while the generator is fine for the lower sustained loads.
Edit: a drawback of the smaller fleet for snow management is that garbage trucks aren't as well suited for salt/sand/deicer distribution. Nobody designs their garbage trucks to spray. I hope.
Eventually there may also be more options with battery swapping - that's a lot more feasible with a fleet within a relatively small geographic region.
The vehicle, when stopped, has other functions to perform. It has hydraulic lifters and compactors that need quite a bit of power to operate. It's a working platform, not a simple garbage transportation mechanism.
Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 times per day.. and during one of those legs the truck is fully loaded with possibly up to as much as 20,000lbs of trash.
Finally, they have to operate in all conditions, in both very low and very high temperatures. The logistics of this aren't as simple as it would be for a standard vehicle.
The engines in diesel garbage trucks often run at idle when those hydraulics are working, lifting a 100 kg residential can or a 1-ton dumpster through a few meters of motion is not noticeable to a 350 HP diesel, accelerating 30 tons of truck and trash in the same amount of time is why they're equipped with so much more engine power.
Power in kW = Pressure in bar * Flow in liters per minute / 600
2.5 kW = 150 bar * 10 l/min / 600
or a little more than 3 horsepower. That gives you about 15 tons of force. Maybe the trucks use two cylinders, one on each side, so double it? Plus 10% for pump inefficiencies, and 5% for electric motor inefficiencies (200% for diesel-to-kinetic losses)?
Still negligible compared to accelerating a huge steel box plus dozens of tons of trash to roadway speeds 1000 times a day.
Looking up some existing PTOs and pumps on munciepower.com, it looks like typical refuse systems are provisioned with PTOs and pumps rated for on the order of 10-50 kW, and diesel "prime movers" of 200-400 kW.
EV's are great at delivering high power on demand, for short periods. A selling point of Tesla since the Roadster days was the astounding acceleration. Peak torque at a dead start is a key characteristic of electric motors.
What's far more challenging is range, a problem Tesla has addressed quite capably for passenger vehicles, though which remains largely unmet for cargo and heavy-transport equipment (including snow ploughs).
Interestingly, there was a period where a non-electrical power network was fairly frequently encountered at neighbourhood or city scale: hydraulic power networks. These often operated high-power loads, though typically for short periods or efforts as my first paragraph describes. Hydraulic accumulators lifted weights or water and provided on-demand power for moving lock gates, cargo hoists, and other typically industrial tasks. These were developed in the early 19th century and many remained operational well into the 20th, with the Wikipedia article below listing several operating into the 1970s.
Smaller such networks exist in dentist's offices, auto repair shops, and in many Amish workshops, based on compressed air, and utilising similar principles.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_power_network>
(I'm presuming LeifCarrotson knows much of this, others may not. I didn't myself until a few years ago.)
In much of London, they drive a relatively short distance to offload the waste. Some is handled locally (e.g. composting food and garden waste). The rest is taken the much longer distance by barge or rail.
Barge: https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/news/2019-news/june-2019/thame...
Massive upfront cost (infrastructure and NY seems to be a bit fraught) and also likely expensive to run, but with high population density it’s got to be better.
However this would then have a fleet of snow trucks that weren’t used 99% of the time, as the rubbish was mostly sorted.
They're trying to map these things out but it will probably take more than a decade. Until that happens you can't even begin to budget for a new city-wide underground infrastructure project. Any project has to be point to point and focused.
Let alone the issue of the rats.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-10/nobody-kn...
Ironically one of the largest vacuum trays system in the world IS in NYC… but it serves Roosevelt Island, not the “mainland”
Swappable batteries at the dump depot? There's a company in Australia doing swappable batteries for trucks (https://thedriven.io/2022/03/25/worlds-largest-electric-truc...)
I may be biased by my experiences. At home the transfer station is about 4 miles away, and at my parents' place that I've been cleaning out it's probably 1.5-2 miles by road - or less than half a mile if I could go up a couple hundred yards of steep forested hillside.
Having driven a Hybrid 'Truck' (really more of a ute[2]) for just under a year, I can say that EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most [3].
[1] - On the whole, this is still better than doing nothing with it and just allowing it to vent, or burning on-site (which, sometimes you do see at local landfills.)
[2] - The Maverick -does- do a decent job IMO of showing what's possible with a small purpose-built hybrid truck or truck-like thing; However manufacturers that make bigger EVs are likely reluctant to build a truly 'minimum viable product', as it will bite into fleet sales of larger EV/Hybrids introduced.
[3] - Recently, we had sustained sub 10F temps. My overall mileage went from 35-42MPG to 25-30MPG.
Not necessarily. The heaviest snow falls just below freezing. Very low temperatures bring light, fluffy stuff — the kind skiers crave, and that a human can lift huge shovels of.
Be interesting if they're able to clean/compress/use methane produced by the dump itself instead of having it flared off - or drive a generator tied into battery charging. It really needs to be burned instead of just being released as-is, might as well get use from it.
Caternary lines have always seemed like a good solution but there must be a good reason they aren't more popular.
Also, garbage collection in NYC seems to be a weird mishmash of rules and providers. Again there must be a historical reason but from the outside it has never made sense to me. https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly...
What reason?
However, you don't need availability on every street, just enough to charge the vehicles sufficiently for the smaller streets.
This is a good chance to share a link to the guy with a Prius modified to run on the bus power in San Francisco: https://thebolditalic.com/hacked-prius-running-on-muni-power...
Anyway, I'm guessing it's been considered and I'd love to see the study.
The maneuvering in case of trouble situation is covered by a tiny diesel engine that can move the bus around to the point where it can reconnect to a working segment of the network.
One problem with reducing the coverage is that it is relatively easy to take away the lines but the poles are in large chunks of concrete and not easy to remove at all.
Because it's a complete fabrication -> every ton of conducting wire could replace 100 tons of battery in busses and trucks. It is also over 10 times cheaper per ton, so in material costs it is less than 1/1000th of the cost.
The only issue is that the city needs to pay for the wire, but it does not know how to charge a large array of private companies that might want to use the wires, there is lack of standardisation and metering.
https://www.mbta.com/news/2022-01-27/beginning-march-2022-mb...
Don't get me wrong, I think they are a great solution electrically and for efficiency / sustainability, but require an enormous geographic footprint, central planning and a lot of overhead space which is difficult to find in dense cities.
They've been used in dense cities for generations. How hard can it be?
> require an enormous geographic footprint
What footprint is needed for additional overhead wires?
Electrifying core parts of the route (eg: the most heavily travelled bottlenecks these trucks travel) could fix this issue, enabling charging and heating the battery and cab while still en route or plowing snow.
Garbage truck fleets are expected to cover every street and every block in their service area which adds up to more of a city than bus services cover since they don’t stop on every block at every house and building. The lines also require maintenance and you also need to train operators to re-establish the connections not if they drop but when they drop. Doesn’t seem worth it to me, at least not for New York.
That said, a wholesale change is what they need.
It seems to me this sort of trash deposit system would greatly simplify trash collection.
It would be prohibitively expensive, because there's no master record of which pipes/wires/cables/etc. exist in any given location. It's very expensive to dig in Manhattan[0], because you basically have to dig carefully and see what's actually there, rather than having some knowledge of "the gas pipes are in this spot, so we can dig around them". So much of the infrastructure was installed before detailed record-keeping was standard practice.
As far as trash collection in NYC, the main thing that needs to happen is containerized trash collection. Right now, trash bags are just left on the sidewalks 3-5 times per week for 12 or more hours at a time, creating an absolute buffet for rodents.
[0] This actually applies to most of the city, but Manhattan is a combination of the oldest-built and most-densly-built infrastructure, so it's particularly expensive there.
Another politically untenable solution is to do what Taiwan does and force people to put out their garbage in very tight time windows and otherwise store it privately in their houses and businesses, but that is a unproductive use of human time on net.
NY has a lot of row houses, there's no room for a dedicated garbage area. And the alleys are not wide enough for a garbage truck.
Before criticizing a place, at least understand it first.
In NYC, in very dense areas like of Manhattan, I would expect it would make sense to put a container in the bottom of every building, but in rowhouse areas it is reasonable to expect the occupants to walk down to the corner.
The main thing is like so many other aspects of American life we have no domestic examples of best practices. You have to visit foreign cities and pay attention, or invite their experts to come teach your city.
Transport infrastructure in dense areas is "solved" by reducing individual means of transport and increasing shared means of transport. This doesn't align with hyper-individualistic people seeing car transport as their right.
A "fat government" helps building out shared infrastructure, America doesn't have that.
Some people like sharing and cooperating, some people like living under the false impression that they're independent of society.
In certain states there are still laws around water rights that cause unnecessary shortages that could be solved by cooperation, but the laws are there and the big consumers upstream lobby to keep them that way.
Not saying the US isn't great, you've been the economic powerhouse of the world for awhile now, you have accomplished many great things (research topping my list). I just think somewhere you forgot to invest back into shared infrastructure, and that "ours" is better (with exceptions both ways).
There's a bit of my reasoning, which if you wildly disagree with makes us both unreasonable to eachother, whoever is right is up to the future to decide independent of us two.
That's 4-5 stories of ~4 apartments per floor, times however many of those buildings fit in the 900ft/247m length of a block. There's nowhere near enough space on the corner (here's the corner: https://goo.gl/maps/aszPHqrQVGftcqTCA) to collect that much garbage, much less to do it three times a week.
Yes they could build big underground containers. Yes they could reduce the amount of garbage generated. But both are massive projects far beyond "why can't they just".
Obviously. (What else?) Why would that be a massive project?
Also contrary to movies, Manhattan has almost no alley ways either. There's no space for anything. Even when it snows in many areas they have to take the snow and dump it in the East River.
Or, you know, a commercial-sized dumpster.
The trash is already taking up space on the sidewalk. Putting a dumpster to contain it would save space, by keeping it contained.
It is always fun to see people resort to completely illogical arguments to defend the current habits and rat-feeding status quo.
We were talking about the row houses, right?
Most buildings in NYC already have a dedicated garbage area. The issue is that there isn't a dedicated spot for pickup.
That's a solvable problem: put containerized trash receptacles on the street, so the superintendent can put them in the containers, instead of dropping them directly on the sidewalk (which is what they currently do).
Most apartment buildings in NYC don't have garages.
If they tried it people would just leave their garbage on the street. Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.
If you think there's garbage everywhere in NYC, I advise you to never visit most European capitals, and especially not the asian subcontinent. Which is not to shame these places, but more so to say that NYC is doing OK.
Nobody would have to do that. They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb. Unless they live in a multifamily building (which is most of the city), in which case the building superintendent would do that.
> Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.
Because that's the city-sanctioned way for
This is incorrect. That does not describe the majority of housing units in NYC.
> The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.
I don't know why you're so confidently making this claim, because that's not what's being proposed or being done. There already is a pilot program for containerized trash collection, and - surprise - there's not just one container per block.
The status quo is sanitary and efficient. All things considered, New York’s garbage problem is on par with its snow problem. Well managed enough to work, but annoying enough around the edges to be fun to bicker about.
If you live in low-density New York, your experience mirrors suburbia; high, and your trash disappears down a building chute. It’s only we who live in the middle density who have to haul garbage to the basement and hear the beeping trucks at night. Even then, it’s clean and works.
Are we talking about the same NYC? Visit Manhattan in mid July/August. Bags of garbage leaking juices and oil out onto the street into a huge greasy spot where the designated collection spot is near the curb. The whole city smells like a toaster oven roasted ballsack.
Then combine that with all the cumulative liters of urine per day from dogs and humans all throughout the city.
<https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...>
Cleaning up after horses (including, often, the horses themselves) is a large part of why and how NYC's municipal waste system evolved to its present state.
You might not haul it to the curb yourself but the building as staff still has to unless you're in a building big enough to have a loading dock that can accommodate a truck to haul away a roll-on container. Most high rises don't even fall into that category. I live in a 20 story building with 157 units and the building staff has to drag the piles of trash out of the compactor room to the sidewalk on collection days.
Every borough except Staten Island is larger than San Francisco [1][2]. Manhattan together with Queens or Brooklyn is bigger than LA, the second-largest city in America. (Staten Island is about the size of Raleigh or Atlanta.)
New York solves problems at a scale no other American city comes close to imagining.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/planning-level/nyc-populat...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
I also noticed your sleight of hand. "Greatest city in the world" includes Tokyo, Paris, Seoul. All far superior to NYC in almost every way, with similar issues of scale.
I love visiting Manhattan and Brooklyn, but frankly have a hard time imagining living there. And I live in SF, which is far from being an ideal city.
Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
I'm forced to consider the likelihood that you are a typically provincial New Yorker with no real perspective on global megacities.
My Uber driver said that to me within the first ride of my landing, and I heard it again and again, from millenials, Gen X, Boomers, basically every type of person I met and from every walk of life, during the many years I lived there.
You guys play this game where you don't say what you mean, and you don't mean what you say, in any context where it's marginally convenient/inconvenient to do so. It's eat or be eaten in NYC. I would hope longtime residents like yourself are just BS'ing the HN community, and not actually delusional about the waters you swim in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...
That's pointing to this spreadsheet hosted by the census:
https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/2020_Census_ua...
But, if we go to this fact table, they give that ~470k number.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/raleighcitynort...
Edit: oh, you must mean noisy garbage trucks
You must recognize the general GOP-led campaign that democratic-run places like NYC and CA are nightmares. It was Trump's theme for the 2020 GOP convention, but was overshadowed by Coronavirus. I think it spreads here too. NYC (and CA) need to take it on and remind people what makes them so fantastic.
I live in NYC, and I'll go on the record stating that NYC's trash collection system is an absolute disaster, because the city has long-refused to use containerized trash collection (the way every other city in the developed world does), and instead tells people to dump trash bags on the sidewalk 3-5 times per week, where they sit for 12 hours at a time before being picked up.
This is not an effective system at all. It exists only because elected officials have not wanted to give up a few free parking spaces every block in order to allow for containerized trash receptacles.
Thankfully, there's a pilot program on one block in midtown Manhattan to "trial" containerized trash collection. It began a few weeks ago, and is scheduled to last one year. Hopefully that will be followed by a wider rollout.
Other cities have alleyways.
We think "Well gas cars transport their own energy source, so electric cars must too" and that will probably be one of the things future generations laugh at us for (in the same way older generations thought flapping wing costumes could generate heavier-than-air flight).
Hydrocarbons are an extreme outlier in terms of energy density (vs. weight) and the fact that we are trying to replicate that model with other non-outlier materials is crazy.
Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.
The sad part of Elon being so successful is that all he does is see places where we used to do things well (we electrified the whole country very quickly, built an advanced space program in 2-3 decades, etc.), notices we lack the will to keep doing those things (even I understand the overhead wires thing is a moonshot), and comes up with the pragmatic "OK but not really great" solution.
Seriously, if you had said in 1960 "the richest man in 2020 will focus on cars, low-earth-orbit rockets, and tunnel boring machines" people would be extremely bummed by the lack of progress.
One thing I have often wondered is how often they'd need access to electricity if they had a small battery to cover for the times they're not connected.
i.e., do they need to be connected at /all/ points of their journey? Or just often enough that they can get enough of a charge to make it to the next point? e.g. if there was induction charging at stop signs or traffic lights, would that be enough for a majority of trips?
This seems like it should just be a bit of a game of statistical coverage of charging points, time spent at them, speed of charging, and so on.
So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?
I think that is a much more solvable problem than charging and batteries yes.
Do I think it will happen in my lifetime? No. But there's a reason that we don't have battery-powered trains, and it's not like in 2022, cars are that much more "off-road" than trains are "off-track"
https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...
Do you think adding hundreds of KG of batteries to two billion cars is more reasonable?
We produce enough conductors to wire every street in America in a couple years. At the current rate of battery production, replacing all cars in the world will take over 100 years.
It only seems like a daunting problem on roads because we don't already do it.
Further, electric lines exist mostly on shared poles. For safety reasons, shared poles require a buffer space between MV and distribution voltage power lines and communications lines. This means that the typically 600 VDC trolley bus power cannot be added at the level of communications lines (well, can be with some work, but in practice it is expensive and complex) without compromising this safety buffer, requiring deenergization when communications utility work is underway. In many cases they cannot be near communications cables even if communications work is prohibited when the system is energized, because of the risk of inadvertent contact putting 600VDC on coaxial or telephone lines which could create fatal situations. Additional expense is required to mitigate this problem.
Trolley lines also have more complex physical loading requirements than power lines because they must cope with the lateral forces of vehicles, so they usually need to be anchored to both sides of the street on crosswires, to poles that were engineered for that use. Most of the time attaching trolley lines to existing poles will not be feasible for these reasons and they will need to either go on dedicated supports, be attached to buildings (the engineering and real estate paperwork for this is complex), or have existing poles replaced with ones engineered to support trolley lines as well.
Like the parent comment said, it would be a hybrid able to use battery power when not on the line. With this type of system you could then just run parallel lines instead of criss-crossing lines.
Batteries are fun and all, but they are way harder to deal with vs. anything you described; they're just earlier in the development curve, so the problems seem more solvable.
They’re ugly eyesores.
They only exist in a handful of cities in the USA to begin with.
They limit your driving speed.
They create additional noise.
They can detach fairly easily, impeding traffic. Much bigger issue if this could potentially happen to every vehicle.
With the push for EV I am not sure why we aren't seeing a push for the installation of streetcar power lines, these already exist and are used for busses. If we have a garbage truck that has the battery capacity for say 30 minutes, then it could be on the power line for the majority of the time.
This would limit battery waste as well. There could be some solid engineering reasons for this, but I suspect that coolness is a big factor.