but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with. EVs solve only one of several major issues with ICE vehicles. they still shed tire/brake particles, take up tons of space, encourage sprawling development, and are just as hazardous to pedestrians.
I can't help but think this massive investment of time and resources might be better spent on public transit that is actually pleasant to use. pax will typically optimize for travel time over all else. if the fastest option is public transit more often than not, personal vehicles will become a niche that doesn't matter much from an emissions perspective.
btw, I am an auto enthusiast. I love driving and I love cars. but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all. imo we would all be better off if cars were enjoyed intentionally by a small minority of enthusiasts. why spend so much to fix something most people don't like to begin with?
https://www.continental.com/en/press/studies-publications/te...
> The drum brake offers even further attractions, the environmental particulate emissions are vastly reduced when compared to the traditional disc brake system technology, that will bring upcoming decisive decisions to comply with increasingly stricter environmental requirements. While combustion engines have had to comply with increasingly stringent emission limits in recent years, the focus has now widened to include foundation brakes. The fine brake dust generated from the brake system can have far-reaching adverse effects on human health, depending on the size of the particles emitted. Experts expect stricter legal requirements from the EU Commission by 2025 at the latest. Drum brake technology takes advantage of the enclosed housing system, allowing the brake dust particulates to be accumulated within the enclosed system that can be collected and disposed in a controlled manner that protects the environment.
You need to go back more than that. In the 80s nearly every car had rear drum brakes, that phased out in the early 90s or so. Only the very cheapest cars had drums past that timeframe.
> They lasted pretty much the lifetime of the car.
Having owned a few drum braked cars (including all four wheel drums), not really. You still need to change them as they wear out, it's just a lot more work than disk brake pads which can be swapped out in a few minutes.
The rear brakes do a lot less work than the fronts, particularly on smaller lightweight cars (the kind that still had rear drums in the 90s) so in that sense yes, those rear drums lasted a good while (but certainly not the life of the car).
If you put front drum brakes on a fast & heavy car, you'll be wearing them out pretty quick.
They are more efficient (read: safety) and much easier to maintain.
Rear brakes are almost redundant on entry level cars except for the parking brake. You can just disconnect them and not notice any significant change in handling.
Last time I had to touch drum brakes was in 1991 and I'm very (very very) happy about that. Drum brakes are a maintenance nightmare I never again want to experience. I'd rather adjust carburator jets all night before working on drum brakes again.
How does the accumulated brake dust not affect braking performance? And can it tolerate getting wet inside, or is it somehow sealed well enough to go through puddles without getting wet?
I suppose one could build an all-wheel-drive EV that only uses mechanical brakes during emergency maneuvers.
As the link states, they also increase efficiency, and that allows for smaller batteries, less weight. They're also looking into lighter weight aluminium disc brakes because EVs use them less, and it prevents issues with low usage disc brakes rusting.
This is because of regenerative braking not using the brake pads, using the motor instead.
Maybe dust in the drum isn’t a problem? Or maybe it’s designed so the dust accumulates somewhere other than on the friction surface inside the drum?
However, the EV eats tires like a full-size pickup truck with somewhere to be.
Out of curiosity, why is that?
Edit: I Google’d:
“ Electric vehicles boast instant torque, meaning they accelerate the second you put the pedal to the metal. However, the high instant torque of electric vehicles can also increase wear and tear. In addition to good grip, the rubber compound used for EV tyres also needs low rolling resistance.”
And
“ Teslas are heavier than most other cars because of their battery packs, which can add hundreds of pounds to the vehicle's overall weight. This extra weight puts additional strain on the tires and leads to increased friction between the tires and the road surface, which causes them to wear out faster.”
It maybe a false memory effect but I vague remember this notion about trolleybuses.
p.s. Seeing how many people already killed themselves with Plaid - I think gov should require advanced driving licence for super quick and super fast cars.
As for the Plaid, from what I’ve read the yoke and the high-speed handling are frankly dangerous. If somebody gave me one, I’d sell it and buy something where the drivetrain, the handling, and the aerodynamics are better matched.
It seems like this factor could be easily solved with torque output adjustments, but it won’t be unless it’s regulated.
The unwashed masses now expect every BEV to be performant without knowing the maintenance costs of actual ICE performance cars.
Manufacturers feed into this, as dealers love to have repeat customers for an otherwise low-maintenance car.
50k is nothing, ICE cars often go longer than that without new brake pads. Had my ICE sedan for five years with no sign of brake squeaks yet. Never thought about brakes when I lived on a huge hill either.
You should never ride the brakes for minutes at a time! Even if didn't care about wear, the main problem is they will overheat and become less and less effective so if you suddenly need to brake harder during that downhill, you may have little to no braking power.
Always use engine braking if faced with a long steep downhill. Use the brakes occasionally to modulate speed but never ride them continuously for a prolonged time.
We can excuse the brake riding in the automatic, but why not just downshift the manual?
This. Drum brakes are an inordinate pain to maintain and adjust.
I can change pads in disk brakes on all four wheels in less time that it took me merely to remove the drum from a single wheel in older cars.
While many people don't enjoy driving, many people do prefer cars as a mode of transit. Don't assume that people "don't like cars", whether or not they like driving as an activity. People overwhelmingly prefer cars.
> if the fastest option is public transit more often than not
That's a very high bar to reach. And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
People "prefer cars" because people prefer detached houses and low-density living. Not all of them, but plenty enough. For them, an EV is the only electric option.
In cities, of course, public transit should predominate, and should be developed and improved, while car presence should become lower and lower.
it's fine if people use ICE vehicles now and then to visit family, go to a specialty store, etc. it's the daily and weekly trips that need to be fixed.
and the breakeven point does not need to be quite so dense as London. for example, the DC area has a lot of sprawly (at least by east coast standards) suburbs. the DC metro has some room for improvement, but it is still much better than a car for getting into and out of the city during peak hours. though I'll admit I sometimes splurge for an Uber. cars are much more competitive when you don't need to park them.
Obviously it wouldn't scale that well for everybody but I wouldn't be surprised to see, if self driving cars master Manhattan, some more well-off people who aren't currently at "private driver" level of rich to move to self-driving cabs or such to avoid crowding and go point-to-point.
The big advantage of the trains was in leaving Manhattan and going to Long Island, though, compared to the car-bottleneck-hell of the bridges and tunnels.
You're basically rejecting the premise as your counterargument. Yes, in the currently built world where public transit is generally worse, people would rather take a car. What about the scenario where public transit is actually decent? You don't really address this, you just state a bunch of gripes with transit-as-is not transit-as-conjectured.
>And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
Pretty much every major Metro in the world does exactly that. NY, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, HK. When trains run at 5 min frequencies or better, and the network is at least federated between hubs, you get effectively arbitrary point to point transport which is always there when you need it, you don't need to find or pay for parking, it will never be broken into or have unexpected maintenance costs, and you can focus on anything you want because you don't have to pay attention to the road. Factoring in the cost of a new car over how many years you will own it, as well as insurance and other expenses, you're paying more per day than you would on the train before you even left the driveway! The rationale of car ownership stops making sense in cities like these, and consequently, people aren't preferring cars.
The commonality of commuting by car in North America doesn't arise out of natural preferences, its a built preference. Built by a system that reinforces itself.
I've been to Paris and London and used their Metros and had no car. They're nice, but there's still a lot of walking between where you are and the metro station. If you're on the system late at night, there's a lot of waiting. If you're on the system during rush hour, there's a lot of people in a tiny space. If you can use it on the shoulders of peak, it's wonderful. Then again, roads are pretty good on the shoulders of peak too (parking in a busy area is almost never great, but there's an easy solution: avoid dense cities, which I'd prefer anyway, dense cities have a lot of people, and I don't like people in groups)
You may not have to pay money for unexpected maintenance, but you may be stuck somewhere when a train breaks down or has a collision; hopefully at a station and not on the particular train. Yeah, this happens with personal vehicles, but when my car won't start, it doesn't have a big impact on taxi capacity; when the train is stuck, everybody wants a taxi and it's hard to get one.
The big problem is there's no sense of agency. I can maintain my car, but I can't maintain the metro. I can fuel my car, but I can't prevent metro workers from striking. I can pretend I'll avoid collisions when driving, but I can't drive the train (and the train can't stop in time if anything unexpected is on the tracks).
Americans like a sense of agency, even if it means a worse result. Give me liberty or give me death and all that.
The weirdest thing about moving to car-centric Silicon Valley are the after work drinks. These are often in the office (since they are located at motorway junctions away from anything else) and then you stand there carefully nursing your one drink since you all have to drive home.
In London you'd just go to a pub for a few beers after work with your colleagues, or meet up with other friends after work because you all worked in the city centre anyway so it was easy.
It seemed impossible to get to my hotel from the Eurostar train in a reasonable time with the tube when I came in on an after work train. Ended up with an unlicensed cab with a driver who spoke with a very deep cockney accent and dropped us off on the wrong side of the street where there was a fence to prevent pedestrian crossings. It was an adventure. I never ended up on the tube, because it was simpler to just walk to the office.
It does require local knowledge to expect this, I'll grant.
A) This problem does exist in cars. Highways crawl to a standstill when there's an accident.
B) there's no such thing as "train collisions". Its not like cars. They don't get into "accidents". It would be unacceptable for public safety if they did. There are other error modes which cause delays, but its not the same thing as tacitly accepting the deadly consequences of the flow of vehicles being loosely regulated and fully decentralized.
C) I think you're severely undervaluing just how much of a "you problem" it is when your car breaks down vs just how fleeting a problem it is when a train is delayed. The inherent statistical risk of the universe is averaged over everyone. You won't ever be randomly on the hook for 3 digit sums of money at random intervals.
The agency argument really underplays the great freedom of not owning a car. Not owning a car means not being tied to where you are. I can get on a plane and move anywhere on a whim. There's nothing to sell off. I can chase any opportunity I want. I'd rather have two wings than 4 wheels. Hows that for personal agency!
From experience with Caltrain, they do. Lack of grade crossings on an underground or elevated train won't prevent 'tresspasser incidents', although no grade crossings and good train control will prevent a lot of things. Sure, it's a me problem when my car breaks down, but it's also a me problem when the train breaks down. Either way, I can't get where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time without an alternative, and when everbody else is looking isn't a great time to be looking myself.
> Not owning a car means not being tied to where you are. I can get on a plane and move anywhere on a whim. There's nothing to sell off.
Cars are pretty easy to sell. Or you can park it at the airport and never pick it up, if you've got nothing else to sell before moving. Of course, getting to the airport may not be easy on transit either (sometimes it is great, sometimes it's an easy transfer or two, sometimes the schedules are aligned in just the wrong way).
I also can't understand why such a tiny country with limited real estate and an urban heat problem allocates so much space (relatively speaking) to roads and carparks.
The reason why people own cars is for flexibility and to have some more control over their lives. Which is also a status symbol. It’s also really, really helpful with kids.
Is it still doable with public transit? Yes. And Singapore is easily one of the more pleasant and doable on that front. But it’s also a lot of dealing with crowds, taking time walking (while carrying things) or just not going, having to fit within society, and often having unpleasantness shoved in your face (well, as much as Singapore has anyway, which isn’t a lot) from society as part of the normal routine.
Unlike Paris, SF, NYC, at least you won’t have too many buskers and scam artists messing with you, which is nice.
If you get in a car, due to all the costs and taxes, the experience is generally a more quiet and pleasant one, and you can go anywhere on the island with (less) worry about what loud/raucous/unpleasant mess you might be stuck being near. And if you do get stuck somewhere, as long as you have AC, you can roll up the windows and mostly ignore any shitshow going on. Which is nice.
Compared to NYC, Paris, SF, Seattle on my list of ‘ugh’ places with public transit), it’s not on the bad list at all.
When I lived there, it was about as good as Switzerland or Tokyo with how well it was run (you’re welcome PAP), but obviously a different cultural feel.
Unlike Switzerland, you do have the more Chinese influenced ‘everyone’s business is my business’, especially from the Ajimas.
And if you’re a Gwailo, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb everywhere - and everyone DOES notice - which has pros and cons.
Also, no worries about folks bringing Durian onboard in Zurich for instance.
I didn’t even try Indian public transit, but that’s my loss I guess. It was sketchy enough just using cabs.
Driving in India is an invitation to get scammed and/or ruined on its own, so
I can’t imagine wading through the crowds. That said, the scams tend to be less in your face than in the western societies, and the scammers more subtle and far less violent. Which is nice, I guess?
Germany, Spain, and UK have good public transit, and middle of the pack for pleasantness.
The Danes run decent public transit in the big cities, but the lack of density meant you could easily be stuck somewhere (and have a very long, very cold walk) if you didn’t know the local holiday schedule. And they didn’t do much signage to tell you.
If done well, Public Transit can be very effective and definitely reduces cost and load with having a vehicle.
But it’s not a place for quiet contemplation (except perhaps in Switzerland, but even then it depends on the day), and it means you’re always dependent on the society you’re in and have to know how it works (and when) to get anywhere.
Which can be limiting in a way Americans outside the cities are used to not being limited.
Also, there is a reason New Yorkers are known for being in your face assholes. You would too - or be crushed - if you had to deal with the people in their daily life that they do.
> What about the scenario where public transit is actually decent?
I would love to have that world. My comment was making it clear that it's reasonable to not choose public transit while we don't have that world, and that it's reasonable to have high expectations on public transit rather than being willing to make do.
Yes, in a world in which we have public transit that is not any slower to use than cars are today, requires no additional walking, requires no additional hassle, and is clean and comfortable, many people will stop preferring cars.
I agree with you, and I also know we are running out of time to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. I’m resigned at this point to doing whatever is likeliest to get the job done in time. And either way, the busses, trains and ferries all need to be electrified too, and any grid improvements, advancements in battery tech etc. will also help those efforts.
Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it.
I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow basic rules of the road.
I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver making a left hand turn during an advance.
Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.
Rideshare has some benefits in reducing some of the capital investment and some in allowing some charging infrastructure to be centralized (reducing distribution system). It might also be able to squeeze a little bit of mid-day charging in. But it doesn't really change most of the picture for the grid.
So commute every workday by bike/bus/train but use a car share to get to somewhere out of town once a month.
A whole lot of transit is a chicken and egg problem where people buy cars because the transit options aren't good enough, and so have incentives to use it, and so rider numbers remain too low to justify increasing them and/or it deters people who strongly prefers to use public transit from even moving there.
You need to treat it as a public good not just for those who use it, but for those who might want to use it and even those who don't but end up benefiting from less congestion and the environmental benefits, and be willing to subsidise it more aggressively, and rideshare options, with or without self driving, could help drive down the cost of operating many "bus routes" that'd be particularly expensive to operate with mostly empty full scale buses.
Rural areas have been early adopters of this kind of on demand public transport due to low density but it can be applied further.
The car and minibuses simply go when they are full or once they have waited a fixed amount of time and they have at least on passenger. It works pretty well and a company called CityMapper tried to do something similar in London. They looked at the transport data and found routes that people wanted to take, but we're underserved by public transport (eg. Shoreditch to Islington on a Friday night). They would then hire privately operated black taxis to run the route for a fixed fare with a fixed waiting time, and they took the risk on empty seats.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/citymapper-ties-with-gett-...
But the real social benefit is when you find real dead spots, where people likely aren't searching on CityMapper that often because they are familiar with (live, work) in the area, and know they're in a bad spot for buses and have few alternatives, and so the potential demand goes un-spotted.
E.g. most of the buses near me goes in an approximately radial pattern out from 3-4 of the local train stations for quite a while before they start turning in various directions. That leaves some areas where you're better of taking a car or a long walk to the nearest station because you're halfway between two bus routes and almost equidistant from the station, and many routes requires going in to the nearest station and out along a different radial.
A handful of routes cutting across those radials, and ideally connecting two stations, but in an arc, would make opting for public transport far more viable for a lot of people living in the area. An experimental route like Citymappers would get some people to use it opportunistically But the real payoff comes when you offer a commitment to keep running that route for long enough that people start relying on it: Maybe they opt against buying that second car (or first), or move there on the basis of good transport links. That takes a willingness to commit to an elevated level of subsidy for something like a decade or more to really get the payoff.
And that's also why cutting the cost of introducing a new route could make such a huge difference.
In terms of finding areas, instead of just looking at "hot routes", if trying to do this with data from something like Citymapper, I'd also try to correlate a population density map with below average number of searches for that density, and then look at what those people are searching for when they still do (and here we also have the tragedy of siloed data: data from e.g. Uber would be far more likely to reveal underserved routes, because they capture a whole lot of searches from people who already know they're poorly served by public transport for specific routes; e.g. I could get to my sons school by bus, but I know it'd be very slow, so if I need to go to a parents evening etc. I'll take Uber; but getting data out of Uber for this would likely be hard, unless perhaps you'd manage to offer them an exclusive or preferential deal on being the provider of "backup cars" to fulfill waiting time guarantees)
It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Getting people to walk would be the biggest impact.
Already acknowledged, but it doesn't improve the picture for the grid.
> huge parking areas allowing for more dense development and thus shorter overall drive distance.
Ceteris paribus. If we move to EV rideshare, eventually houses might become closer together. But that will be a much slower effect and you'd have to deal with energy usage based on current building distances.
> It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Already mentioned.
Being able to walk everywhere you need to go is a massive luxury. Especially without any public transportation? Sounds really nice.
It's just not feasible for most people and it won't be any time soon.
I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west, southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been able to walk everywhere my entire life.
I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce every few days.
People are just lazy.
And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy.
OK.
If you want to work 15km from your home and can't bike/public transport to work and don't have the ~2 hours to walk (which I am not suggesting would be common) then you could do whatever makes sense to you. I have been finding work from home positions since 2015 without issue.
The comment about the grocery store is different than what you think. The problem is that people complain about carbon while doing nothing to solve it. In my scenario it is a 15min walk to the store. I carry two reusable bags and sometimes a backpack for bulkier items. The area is on the outskirts and the sidewalk is limited to one side of the road. Having walked to the grocery store some 500 times in the last ~2 years, I have met an astonishingly low amount of people doing the same. My neighborhood has two public schools and a highschool, to give you an idea of size.
These same people drive to the centralized park and convenience stores. It is a nice area with 80% NDP voters.
I collect groceries for 4 people and make all my meals from ~scratch (very limited canned food). We don't use the cities garbage services, everything is recyclable or compostable.
I'm not really suggesting anyone should walk everywhere, just that driving everywhere isnt helping the problem they claim to care about.
Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.
That, and the introduction of the car has allowed people to live far from places of work, food markets, stores, schools, churches, etc. There isn't as much pressure to build closely to minimize distance which is why postwar developments looks like sprawl instead of the compact cities that dominated historically. It becomes necessary to drive everywhere.
> People are just lazy.
Eliminating parking space would change the incentives. If you know parking will be a huge pain, it offsets a good chunk of the convenience. (It might be painful at first, but our current practices are financially unsustainable. Sometimes you have to break crooked bones so that they can be straightened out.)
Well… they were laid out according to the "sound" urban planning principles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their soundness is currently being re-evaluated since the previously-unknown/ignored externalities are now being taken into account.
There are areas that promote walking and other forms of transit and there are those that don't.
I am in a city that contains a voter base that is 80%(NDP - A Canadian political party that is left of the Trudeau Liberals). We have bike paths all over and many areas of the city can be reached through a gorgeous city wide bike path paved throughout gorgeous scenery. Together with dedicated bike lanes with spacers from traffic. Those paths are used mostly for excerise and the paths on the road are used by an alarmingly small sum of people.
Its definitely laziness for some people but not all.
I also read every privacy policy for services I use. I'm weird. I'm also lazy.
In addition, plenty of climates in the US don't allow for walking, no matter how the city is laid out. You aren't walking anywhere remotely distant in Las Vegas or Phoenix or other parts of the Southwest in the summer, when temperatures routinely soar over 110 degrees (with blazing sun), unless you want someone to find your shriveled husk of a corpse on the side of the road. Similarly, you aren't walking anywhere in huge portions of the North/central/northeastern parts of the US in the winter, when temperatures plummet below zero and blizzards and ice storms occur frequently. Even in areas where the weather and the city layout is amenable to walking, there are tens of millions of elderly, disabled and/or morbidly obese Americans that lack the capacity to walk any significant distance at all.
Do you commute to work by walking? How long does that take you each day? How about the grocery store? How many people do you have to do grocery shopping for? What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.
No, people aren't just lazy. Most people don't have the time or money to live that lifestyle.
not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile logistics can get.
ubereats/GrubHub is a notable exception, since people expect much stronger latency guarantees for this use case.
It's definitely more efficient than driving yourself, but it's also hiring out your driving to someone else, which counts against someone being able to "walk everywhere" because it requires you to assume that the person can make up any shortcomings in their location with mail order. Point is, you can't realistically walk everywhere in most places.
We do not order delivery.
I do not commute currently, but I have walked for 75minutes one way(2.5hours total for 12.5hours a week) for about a year at a previous position with a poor bike route.
We do order stuff from Amazon. Which covers things that are hard to find close by.
There's no way that everyone is lazy in my area. They could definitely stop 3minute drives to the park though.
Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because I like to walk and have always lived places with good public transit.
So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area, I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it often worked.
But I also frequently found direct routes to places I needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park, I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route along El Camino Real would've been short enough to walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.
Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written off as too inconvenient for me.
As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I lived in the area, I'd probably quickly have given up and resorted to learning to drive.
And frankly, that's one of the more pedestrian friendly areas I've visited in the US outside the highest density urban cores.
There are definitely things that could be done in that situation to limit the need for driving. I have no real way to know if the people living outside of cities do such.
EVs are a useful step in that direction though. Something like the Rivian skateboard platform lends itself very well to containerized passenger transport, since the passenger body can just be loaded straight onto the chassis. Plus this model generally has shorter, fewer, and more predictable vehicle miles, which makes EV charging easier.
You could commute Merced -> Google in about 50 minutes with this system, less than the shuttle to SF currently takes. It'd be 2 stops on CA HSR (Merced -> Gilroy -> SJC, 30 minutes), then 1 stop on a Caltrain baby bullet (SJC -> MTV, 15 minutes), then a self-driving car for the 2 miles from MTV Caltrain to Google (5 minutes). Best of all, you wouldn't need to interrupt what you're doing - you could take a nap, or code, or read a book, or watch a TV show and not need to put it away every time you switch transportation modes. Think of what that'd do to housing prices, if the commutable distance from the Bay Area extended out to the Central Valley.
Also, computer-controlling all the individual vehicles allows the possibility of moving transfers. Imagine if HSR didn't need to come to a stop for passengers to embark and disembark. The self-driving car could instead accelerate up to ~100mph and the train would decelerate to that, and then pods would move over as their chassis lined up. One of the biggest issues with rail transportation is that you lose much of the travel time to stops, acceleration, and deceleration; get rid of that your trains can go much faster.
There's a lot of benefit to using self-driving cars/scooters only for the last-mile and using bulk transport like trains or planes for the majority of the trip, too. It's fewer vehicle miles overall and a shorter trip radius for the EV, which cuts down on overall energy use and makes recharging simpler.
OK, create an incredibly complex transportation system that adds a ton of mechanical failure points—so buddy can read his book uninterrupted, take a nap, or watch a TV show? And what's the net gain for humanity here? If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their work-life balance is problematic.
Who's going to pay for this system? If they pass the costs onto the consumer, the average schmoe isn't going to be able to afford to travel with what maintaining a system of this complexity would cost.
What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the car running alongside the train?
Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to be in the office, let alone all the time. The solutions are travelling less, not increasing the complexity of the transport infrastructure and consuming more juice just because someone doesn't want to stop what they're doing for a minute or two.
People say WFH is apparently bad for productivity—so what's coding from a train? Productivity is measured in value generated and quality of that output, not time invested.
As for cars and trains matching speeds to facilitate transfer of a pod, what's that going to do to the price of real estate so transport can do that all over the place?
The office is dead. Long live the office.
Yes, that's precisely the point - to get back the hours spent commuting so you don't have to think about them and can do other more productive or enjoyable things with that time. If you spend 8 hours working at $50/hour and then 2 hours commuting, that's $100/day or roughly $2000/month in saved time. Most people would consider that worthwhile.
> If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their work-life balance is problematic.
No shit, but cutting time wasted in commuting is generally an easier sell than cutting time spend actually working or engaged in leisure activities.
> What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the car running alongside the train?
The same way we've made air travel so safe that you don't need to think about it, despite the tens of thousands of parts in a modern jetliner. Engineer the hell out of it, and build in multiple redundancies and failsafes.
> Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to be in the office, let alone all the time.
If remote work actually worked, we should do that instead.
Not everyone is a software engineer or knowledge worker, and it's likely that the fraction of people who are is going to go down in the future.
Having to be at the airport 2 hours in advance is solely due to the security theater we all participate in. Back in the 90s you could indeed show up 15-30mins before takeoff. Magic pods aren't going to solve it: you'll just sit for two hours in your pod instead.
Trains in Britain used to detach some cars while driving at high speed, so-called "slip coaches". Turns out it is needlessly complicated while providing negligible real benefit. High-speed rail already operated in a hub-and-spoke structure, and one 5-minute stop every hour 100 miles or so is barely noticeable.
They shed a whole lot less brake particles due to regenerative braking.
Even if that’s only, say, 10% of the population in less dense areas, it could still make a significant impact on traffic and emissions as well giving an economic boost to downtown areas, since there’s now a reason for people to live near them.
You can take public transport pretty much anywhere you want to go. It’s clean, safe, and generally reasonably priced.
The downside is that houses are smaller and more closely packed. By American standards, the kitchens and bedrooms are cramped.
But dystopia? Hardly.
Public transit can relieve / reduce the need for car traffic a whole lot of places too low density to completely remove the need for cars.
Norway has an overall population density of 38/mi^2 (15/km^2) and a map with that distribution - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_population_de...
Montana has a population density of 6.86/mi^2 (2.65/km^2) - and an interactive map of it: https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Montana/Population
Japan has a population density of 900/mi^2 or 326/km^2
There are large portions of the US that are larger than European countries and have very low population densities in comparison.
Yes, it's not a solution for everywhere. It's not a solution for everywhere in Norway either. But the point was not that. The point was that contrary to the comment I replied to, it is perfectly viable to serve areas that are quite low density. When you consider the low density areas in Norway that are served by trains, the proportion of the US population that lives in lower density regions is tiny.
A lot of the United States is that low density area with a drive of an hour or two to the next municipality with a population of 5000 or more.
It isn't going to be practical to run a rail out to most of those places with anything resembling a regular schedule.
The difference is that in Norway the distance between an area with sparse population and a city with a few thousand people is much smaller. It can make sense to run trains to all the cities in Norway that have a population of more than 5000 people - that gets you 100 cities (looking at it, a lot of them are impractical in terms of "you will need to take a ferry or fly"), but we've still got 100 cities there.
The 100th largest municipality in Norway with a population of 5000 would be the 20th largest city in Montana. The 100th largest municipality in Montana has a population of 237.
The population portion may be accurate... and that can be solved by fixing New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
Once you go beyond those metro areas trying to provide regular public transportation of any sort becomes impractical. If one sticks to the eastern seaboard, ok - it might be doable. Trying to do regular and reliable public transportation to the small towns comparable to the sizes served in Norway becomes difficult west of the Appalachian mountains.
The point was exclusively that you don't need high density to be able to serve an area with rail. You need a route that sufficient number of people will take, sure. But you'll often find stations nearly in the middle of nowhere, because adding a minimal stop on a regional route even when the density is really low is a means of making even marginal routes between small towns viable.
And that is the only argument I've made: That stations in low density areas can also be viable (incidentally proven by the fact that Montana has train stations, ironically along a route that is ridiculously low density mainly serving places outside the state). Not that every little rural place has a viable route.
> The 100th largest municipality in Norway with a population of 5000 would be the 20th largest city in Montana. The 100th largest municipality in Montana has a population of 237.
So don't even consider covering anywhere but the 2-5 most viable bits of Montana (e.g. Billings to Missoula via Bozeman and Helena or Butte, following the existing roads; EDIT: Incidentally there are already rail lines used for freight on this route and connecting to Spokane, WA, and to both Wyoming and North Dakota), or just ignore all of Montana.
(EDIT2: Project to bring Amtrak back to Southern Montana [1])
You can ignore all of Montana entirely and still vastly improve US public transport, because covering every rural place is not something I've ever (here or in any thread anywhere) argued for.
Again, the only thing I've argued for is that stations in low density areas can be viable. None of you're arguments have addressed that.
> Trying to do regular and reliable public transportation to the small towns comparable to the sizes served in Norway becomes difficult west of the Appalachian mountains.
So don't do that. Not argued for it at any point.
[1] https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2022/11/rural-cor... "He said restoring an old Amtrak route would also link the state’s major urban centers – Billings, Bozeman, Helena and Missoula – while giving more options to rural communities." ... "BNSF, the freight railroad that owns the tracks over which the new service would pass, is on the rail authority’s board. "
Start solving this for the places with 10+ million people and change rural areas last, if needed (most likely you won't need to change anything).
And by that measure, we're mostly there. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia - we're good.
The next step would be to get reliable public transportation to the small towns in the Sierras of California.
My choice of Montana was for the size and the population density.
The issue sit hat the distance from {small town} in Montana to nearby city is much greater than in Norway.
If we're only going to do the eastern seaboard, ok. If rural areas are going to be ignored... ok... but there is a lot of rural area in the United States.
The idea of a train station (paved area next to the track) next to every small town in Montana with regular service to the nearby city (like Japan and Norway have) is impractical in Montana.
It is sometimes challenging to understand the sparseness of the Great Plains of the United States without having traveled through there.
Public transport outside of the large cities... the 10th largest city in Montana is Anaconda with a population of 9,000. There are 60 cities in Norway with more population than that. The 100th largest city in Norway has a population of 5000... if it was in Montana, it would be the 20th largest city.
Yes, let's start solving this in the largest cities and that will get most of the population... better public transportation and better electrical infrastructure. However, the approach of "just need more train stations" (yes, a simplified straw man) isn't going to work in most of the US when looking at it by area.
Focus on the 80%.
Also, in-settlement transport is the US problem. It's probably fine if a lot of inter-settlement transport remains by car, except for connections between cities of say, more than 200k that are closer than 300km from each other.
For example you see a great number of people living along major rivers even through low density states.
I don't think it'd be as hard as you suggest. Even grid power (let alone off-grid power) is far more accessible to even the ruralest of ruralites than a gas station. Another decades' worth of improvements on vehicle range/horsepower/affordability and off-grid power generation/storage/affordability would be more than enough to convince folks that EVs are a sufficiently-practical choice.
Isn’t that what it means to set a goal to complete some task? Of course it means that you also aspire to accomplish all the dependencies by that date.
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…":
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
Perhaps we should consider being more aspirational than practical.
> but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with.
I'm all for putting more effort into moving towards less car-centric and more human-centric developments, but until there's (more) progress on that front, we need to make parallel progress on reducing carbon in our current system:
As a sanity check. Cars last ~25 years on average. So 100% new EV’s represent roughly a 4% changeover per year. Average load per EV works out to roughly 450 watts, because they use a lot of power when their on but most people aren’t driving that long per day.
Actual use depends on various factors like charging efficiency etc but roughly 15,000 miles at 4 kWh / mile is only 3,750 kWh per year + charging inefficiency call it 4,000 kWh [per EV] * 282 million [cars] * 0.04 [% new cars per year] = 45 TWh per year vs ~4,000 TWh of total US electricity demand. (Edit: fixed units.)
By comparison demand increased by roughly 100TWh/year from 1985 to 1990. Demand only really leveled out between 2010 and now. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...
I had a Honda Civic hybrid that had its battery pack die back in 2009. It was going to be a $3000 repair with a 2 week "its in the shop" while waiting for the battery (it wasn't something they stocked).
I bought a new car (an Insight) because I needed a car (it was on a road trip). The value of the Civic as a trade in would be near zero - the value of the trade in was similar to the cost of the repair.
This can be seen even today with my Insight if I was to try to trade it in or repair it - my 2010 Insight has a trade in value of $2620 - $3707 (and it is in fine working condition).
If this was about a car that had a value of $3000 when working that needed a repair of $3000 to get it back into that range of working - that's the insurance definition of totaled.
A battery pack for the Honda is Insight is $2049 : https://bumblebeebatteries.com/products/hybrid-batteries/hon...
If the battery fails on my Insight, I'll be getting that repair rather than getting a new car because it's still cheaper than a new car. But if it was a "dealing with insurance" then it is by definition totaled.
I still pick the train because I can read stuff for 20 mins uninterrupted. I don't have to get worked up about traffic, someone merging without indicating, etc.
But the same connection is scheduled every 10 minutes, so I don't need to plan around it.
On my last job with a 15 minute car commute vs 30-50 minutes by bus (the bus was often not on schedule), I always picked the car. Especially because I can't read in the bus anyway from the way it moves.
I might have picked the bus if it didn't only come every 15 minutes and sometimes be delayed by 20. Especially because connections then become less time intensive.
Public transit works well when you don't need to check the schedule and can just go at any time, certain that your train will come in the next 3-5 minutes, and any connection does the same.
Also, power generation - if everyone wants to charge at night, we need to completely change the concept and stop the move to solar energy in favor of nuclear.
Also I think that workplace charging is the future of EVs. With the peak of the duck curve at mid-day, the obvious way to match that up to battery demand is to provide incentives for ubiquitous EV chargers in office parking lots, as well as charging the consumer for electricity consumed by their car.
Wind is now opposed by people here because it ruins the landscape. Funny but it's what it is. And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
Curiously, how many cars need charging(at night even) in this area? Maybe I missed the intent behind your comment.
But it doesn't sound like there is much daily driving.
Perhaps "...hands wet on the wheel..." like in the Golden Earring song often? )))
Many households have multiple cars - one or two for the parents, then maybe one for the eldest child that still lives with the parents. Each car is used daily or almost daily.
There definitely is less daily driving per vehicle - but there's much more vehicles per square kilometer.
IMHO the usage patterns and the population density make this a much harder problem here than in the US.
The average population density of California is 250 per square mile, for Germany it's 620. Considerably less than one order of magnitude in difference.
> For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve anything about car charging.
If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
> And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
There most certainly is. People overestimate the required space to a ridiculous degree.
Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should compare the average of a city like Berlin or Munich or Warsaw or Amsterdam to cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco, not Germany to California.
People here live in very dense cities with empty space in between, you don't have that in US cities which are mostly long stretched of single-family households. We don't have single-family households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-rich and the few people living in the villages around the cities.
> If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue is - The grid isn't able to provide that much power. It's already nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.
This is probably why California continues to warn that rolling blackouts may become a thing. They raised that specter last year, and they're preparing to do it again this year.
Total system capacity is not improving at a rate commensurate with the forced adoption of EVs in the state.
Which may be fine on it's own, but if you're planning on bringing a bunch of new demand on to the grid, you're headed towards an uncomfortable corner.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-electr...
This flexibility has to be managed, and there are many companies working on this. For example: https://ev.energy/
You better believe, however, that the distribution networks are planning around this. I was in a meeting with someone from the National Grid (UK central grid authority) who is responsible for planning for the transition. Basically, all new housing developments are being provisioned assuming heat pumps and EV chargers. Existing areas are being monitored and upgraded as they near the grid limits. Plans go out years in advance. It is a lot of work, but I am confident that it is being well managed. I cannot say that everywhere is as well managed, but I think it is safe to assume that many of these people and organisations do, in fact, know what they are doing. It sounded like the biggest problem in the UK was NIMBYs fighting against the new distribution networks needed to land the power from the offshore wind farms which are rapidly replacing the old fossil fuel generators.
The power distribution company is competent, I have full confidence in that. Yes, they have plans and know what they're doing and what's coming - but they need money to do it, and they're not going to get it anytime soon.
At least this country is very pro-nuclear.
The most likely solution is house battery backups attached to a virtual grid.
https://www.sibelga.be/en/about-sibelga/projects-challenges/...
The rest of Europe has 230V, 3 phases + neutral, with 400V between phases.
They even stopped allowing people to connect their solar arrays without large batteries because the grid is that overloaded.
(of course they're doing work on it - but definitely not the sort of work required to allow everyone to charge their 1-3 cars per household).
if we think that's somehow relevant here.
But everybody can't high speed charge on their residential service 250 miles every day while their air conditioning is running.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware...
https://newrepublic.com/article/161498/huntersville-north-ca...
the p50 for daily commute distance in America is ~41 miles; if cars only had a 200 mile range. they'd still last ~4+ days; and that's not accounting for the possibility of "topping" off at commercial electric properties (places or employment/entertainment, transportation hub, gas stations installing chargers)
Frankly they are complimentary. If you have the service to run AC, you already have the service for an EV.
Fortunately, most people drive substantially less than 91K miles per year, so everyone charging 250 miles every day is not anywhere close to the actual requirement.
The gasoline delivery pipeline is a risk to national security and the health of citizens; it has experienced a number of issues over the last 5 years.
95% of fear-mongers are concerned about the 5% use case, while ignoring that humans sleep, eat, or need to stretch legs in less miles.
Edit to add: I have about 1.2kW of storage that can be charged by solar in a few hours that takes up about the space of a 5 gallon NATO jerry can. It can be charged thousands of time for the initial price paid. That’s with 2020 tech. Certainly density and efficiency will improve as market pressures increase.
In the not so distant past there were plans for neighborhood scale nuclear reactors. That would go a long way towards distribution, redundancy, and scale issues.
I'm confused, what problem do you think they are fixing ? Because they cannot fix an inherently practical problem.
In most countries on this planet, you have three "problems" when it comes to EV demand, and none of them can be fixed by "100s of billions in capital" by private industry.
Thee are :
1) There is (usually) only one national grid
2) There are only a finite number of power stations
3) Most people live in cities and in apartments / dense-housing
1) Expanding the grid is effectively a non-starter, the cost would be measured in trillions, not billions.
2) Building new power stations takes decades, not years. And right now there are not enough of them.
3) As I said, there's nothing you can do about point (3), i.e. it's simply not remotely viable that everybody can magically have solar panels and battery storage at home. Most people don't have the space. And expecting everyone to retro-fit is, realistically, a non-starter.
Well, yes, renewables are cool and quick(er) to build than power stations, but they are not the panacea.
Grid-level bulk solar is cool, but all those panels take vast amounts of space that most countries don't have to spare. Solar is also cool, until it gets dark at night.
Grid-level wind is cool, but then on hot summer days there's not much wind. So you end up relying back on the old-school power generation (nuclear, coal, gas etc.).
Hydro is cool, but for obvious reasons not available everywhere. And nobody's going to be rushing out building large numbers of new dams any time soon.
Bulk-storage in batteries at grid level is not feasible to deal with all millions of EVs coming on stream. You would need millions of batteries, which as we know, batteries don't last forever....
So ultimately whether you love em or hate em, you still need old-school power generation.
Which brings us neatly back to my point (2) ... Building new power stations takes decades, not years. And right now there are not enough of them.
Hence 2030 is a pipe dream.
Also, maybe we shouldn’t expect one kind of transportation to dominate like happened for cars? There can be different solutions for different use cases. Driverless taxis, electric bikes, and public transportation all work sometimes, and they can be usefully combined.
Only if you give in to the strawman that it's either fossil fuel or EV, when in fact our top priority should be retiring most private cars anyway.
Independently from the engine type, developing our infrastucture and cities around car usage is unsustainable.
Maybe PG&E, or whatever they have in Texas sucks, but as a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't assume that grid operators are stupid.
Also European here. The problem for EV charging is gonna be the last mile, not the grid.
In my city, most of the residential streets where people live (in flats) are full of parked cars on both sides of the street. How will all those cars charge once they switch to EV? Will the already narrow sidewalks be full of charging stations next to each parking spot, and will pedestrians constantly be tripping over the charging cables? How will this work?
Currently all EV owners here are well off people who own their houses in the suburbs or in rural areas, and can install their own chargers at home for their EVs, but how will the people living in flats who have to park on the street charge their cars?
Ideally, we'd get rid of private cars in the city completely and replace them with better public transport and cycling infrastructure but looking at the real life facts, there's no political will to push car owners out of car ownership, and car owners are by far a majority of the voting population, even among the low earners.
Also, regarding the last mile charging infrastructure stations, another one of their weaknesses compared to filling up with gas at a gas station, is that they suck, the payment models sucks, and the UX sucks and they often have faults or are broken making them unusable. MKBHD did a video on this which proves this point and is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA2qJKU8t2k
In my neighbourhood (London) there are now some charging ports coming out of lamp posts, and some coming out of the floor. There is a short cable required to connect the car to the charging port, but it's not too bad a trip hazard as it's only between the car and pavement.
EDIT: looks like this https://imgur.com/a/H9aqMCo
Lamp posts don't really exist in my city. All city street lights are hung from overhead cables wired between the residential buildings on the sides of the street/sidewalk.
Like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0814083,15.4423363,3a,75y,24...
Another way to think about it is where does your car spend its time, 24 hours a day? Is there any time where you car is somewhere for an hour or more, sitting idle? That's where chargers should be.
- at work (need parking anyway)
- charge station with fast charge (not that different than gas stations, but slower)
My city has no lamp posts since sidewalks are too narrow. Lights are hung from overhead cabels between buildings.
>- at work (need parking anyway)
I don't drive my car to work anymore (thank god) but good luck forcing employers to spend money on installing enough charging stations for everyone. Some employers don't even have enough parking spaces for all employees so it's a game of music chairs already.
>- charge station with fast charge (not that different than gas stations, but slower)
Fast chargers are not ubiquitous yet, nor are EVs with it, especially affordable ones. And even EV fast charging is still much slower than filling a tank of gas in a cheap car.
It’s way easier and safer to charge an EV than to fill a gas car (electricity is everywhere), so you can expect the solutions to come progressively (with some bumps along the way of course)
It’s a good thing, EV will become a big part of the battery we need for a renewable grid, absorbing the excess electricity in period of overproduction.
In Tokyo it’s illegal to own a car unless you have a deviated car space near your apartment. Within 1km (if I’m not mistaken).
You must prove you have a space to rent (they will come an inspect it) before you can register.
Maybe a model like that should be introduced ?
No one owns a car in Tokyo and taxis and bikes are happy, it’s an incredible city to visit.
In my opinion, if people care about the environment, it needs to be bikes, and delivery / utility vehicles only. Everyone else should be on public transit.
Are you aware how shitty the grid in most residential areas actually is?
“The market will take care of that problem” seems to only benefit a small group of people and we’re not seeing the requisite proof that any future development will do any better