Smart spaces will fine petrol car owners illegally parking in electric bays
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
> Sensors installed in electric bays can be used to detect the presence of a vehicle and whether it is being used to recharge the car battery.
The few times I've tried to charge an EV at a public non-tesla charging point, it has been a real hassle. The multitude of protocols mean that sometimes it just doesn't work. I'd be very not happy if that meant I would then have to find another spot.
Perhaps there is a market for a defeat device, a plug that simulates an electric car, like those HDMI/VGA simulators used to trick motherboards into thinking they are attached to a screen. It probably wouldn't need much of a resistor to simulate minimal charging rates.
Don't park next to a gas pump if you're not putting gas in the car, even if it has an internal combustion engine.
In any case, the rule I follow is to move the car where it doesn't block a scarce resource.
Econ 101: Incentives matter
I do wonder how much electricity is used by these complex charging systems when they are not in use. How much does that charging point draw from the grid just to keep all its wifi/cell/internet systems running 24/7?
Yes, 20amp 120V outlets are great for long term parking, like airports. Those can be unmetered. Anything else would be a level 3 fast charger like a supercharger, where you have to pay to cover the demand charges of 120kw-250kw current delivery in a short period of time (15-30 minutes). Remember, most people will charge overnight at home.
The electricity is the cheapest component, as you mention. You’re really just paying for the delivery infra. Regarding the idle electrical costs of signaling systems for charging stations, it’s minimal.
It's no difference from using the only or last pump at the gas station and go spend 15 minutes browsing magazines, you are being an ass.
One of the challenges with the crude political attempts to force EV usage (carrot/subsidies, Stick/fines) is the lack of coherent planning behind it. What happens when/if there are huge numbers of EV's?
It's a similar issue with public transport. My sister, a keen cyclist in London, now has two knee replacements and can't really cycle anymore. Public transport is a huge challenge (stairs etc) and driving in London is made ever harder with more and more bicycle lanes, concrete blocks dumped on roads and massive charges for attempting to use her car.
None of this is thought through. I'd really like to see some sort of vision democratically presented for comment by citizens before these autocratic decrees and changes are introduced, we seem to have more and more ill considered plans that are not joined up imposed on us, making life harder and harder...
At least in the Netherlands, there are basically mini golf carts that are legally bikes for disabled people. https://youtu.be/B9ly7JjqEb0
Gas stations occupy an interesting place in American life: some stations - often those in urban areas - are designed for “get in, grab a pack of peanuts, get out” transactions, but others in rural areas serve as a local gathering area. Pre-Covid (and, let’s be honest, even post-Covid) the gas stations near me are full of people sitting at tables eating hot food and passing time.
What is amusing is that the same gas stations that encourage to have people sit and stay a while tend to be located in areas where EVs are extremely uncommon.
As long as the percentage of spaces roughly corresponds to the percentage of electric vehicles, it shouldn't be real disruptive.
If we fast forward to a world where the majority of vehicles are electric, this would mean vast parking areas with a smart grid underneath that meters charges to users. (Once ICE has been vanquished vast tax revenue will be gone, someone has to pay for the power, it will be you).
In an urban environment presumably every lighting pole will have a charging point since they are on the last century grid.
Typically there are approximately 10- 15 cars between posts. For lucky people with a driveway they can install a charger, for everyone else this is a very intractable problem.
In rural areas 'all over the place' could mean anything. Some people drive 200 miles a day just to get to their place of work and back in a heavy duty vehicle, where would they find these 'places'...
The majority of charging will be at residences. People in rural areas will be able to install them no problem.
The new light poles in my area all have solar panels. The solar+battery kit is cheaper than the cost to run the underground wires. The real jokes is that with the days so short, and the nights so cold, some poles are running out of power just before dawn. There have been experiments with running intersections (traffic lights etc) on solar as that can really reduce installation costs at remote locations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout#Mini-roundabouts
The strange thing is that there is a model for this already. I live in a rather cold part of Canada. My apartment block has AC outlets for each parking spot. So too does my work, and all local hotels. These are meant to power block heaters, something that doesn't really exist in the UK, but in recent years some people have been using them to charge their EV/hybrids. The charging rates are very low but the ubiquity of the outlets make them relevant. Having very small/cheap charging points on literally every parking spot might be the better approach than a few dedicated high capacity "charge bays". These outlets are dirt cheap to install. No IP issues, no electronics, no networks. Just an outlet and a circuit breaker.
(These are also all free to use. Administering a payment system for each outlet would cost more than the power.)
I’ve heard of ones that cycle through different chunks of the lot, so half (or a third or 2/3) are powered at a time.
The truth is that modern engines/oils/batteries do very well in the cold. A battery heater is probably of more use than a block heater. But I like having the conventional outlets whenever I have to work on my car. A Tesla fast charging point cannot power my vacuum cleaner.
It's like all the EV charging networks try to replicate gas stations. It's stupid. Nobody wants to take their car to a charging station, pay by the minute, and park their car somewhere else when it's full.
People just want to park their cars wherever, and plug them in when they know they'll stay there for some time, and just pay per kWh, and they definitely don't want to go park their car somewhere else when it's full.
The nice thing about electric is that you could theoretically charge cars pretty much anywhere, outlets would be cheap to install almost anywhere! And cars are parked somewhere 90% of the day anyway. So you don't need fast charging.
I feel like the guys trying to build infrastructure for EVs in most cities are fucking stupid.
You don't need to build 20 fast charging stations. For the same money you could probably install 2000 standard outlets, controlled with a relay and a phone app for payment.
That's something that would actually drive EV adoption.
Right now the only people who buy EVs are people who have a house where they can install an outlet for charging. People who live in appartments are stuck with ICE cars...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/01/removed-lond...
When it was removed the study "calculated that average trip times eastbound increased from 5min 39sec to 8min 14sec, with those westbound rising from 5min 48sec to 6min 27sec."
There was a similar issue with articulated buses. These were removed by their leader, Boris Johnson, at colossal expense. Some drivers in Chelsea are still suffering the after-effects of seeing these vehicles on the road.
I mean, charge stations are basically just 110 or 220 volt AC electrical outlets with a fancy plug. There isn't any fundamental reason they have to be an expensive, scarce resource. The more difficult scarce resource is the underlying electrical infrastructure. But if a commercial site only has so much power available, it seems better to just have a cap on the number of chargers that can be active at once to stay within the amperage limits of the site rather than to artificially constrain the number of charge stations. Then if someone is using a "charging spot" but isn't actually charging, it's not a problem; they aren't blocking anyone else from charging.
That's a long-term solution, though. For now we just don't have enough charging stations in most places to be able to not care if someone is using one when they shouldn't be.
Resistor wouldn't be a huge problem. A heat sink might be - the chargers typically support 5-50kW¹ charging rates. I'm not sure they would consider 100W or so "charging", so you might end up with something bulky.
¹ a guesstimate
And also, the mobility+ app (no affiliation) has dealt fine with multiple brands of charger.
And I note you mention you were specifically ok using debit cards - credit cards are even more problematic than debit cards in Germany. They really don't like accepting them.
And try to use an American Express for anything and you will just get a puzzled look!
Anyone with an Amex knows you need a visa or mastercard to back it up even in the UK or the US
I wouldn’t be surprised if their electric car charging infra was closed on Sunday because it doesn’t fall under the exemptions that gas stations and (some) manual car washes have.
EV parking isn't that premium or common where this would be valuable. Also, this kind of anti-social behavior is a good way to get your car keyed when someone rolls up and needs 10 miles of power to get home and sees a jerk in a non EV in the only charging spot.
Just think about it: Technically it would be no big problem to enforce speed limits widely. The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex, you could mass-produce them and deploy them basically in every street. I'm not aware of any country doing that.
I don't have a statistic on this, but my gut feeling would be most speeding happens in residential areas with low speed limit, and enforcement in many places is basically nonexistent.
The thing with speeding cameras is that they could easily be adjusted to allow for 20% (say at most 20kph) margin (which would be perfectly fine for me even on the German Autobahn), but drivers would learn that fact and adjust perfectly to just 1kph below that limit. This would then enrage puritans that would DEMAND that these MURDERES be PUNISHED. Sadly for some reason traffic law is an area of zero tolerance for some.
So to emphasize my point: Permanent and ubiquitous speed control is the wet dream of many people, but it's a proxy. These people have a problem with cars. And there are many places where that is absolutely justified (dense inner cities for example, or streets in front of schools).
"The results from one of these studies is presented in figure 1, which shows a fatality risk of 1.5% at 20 mph [32km/h] versus 8% at 30 mph [48km/h]." [1] (in typically British fashion, the actual data is in km/h, but this general-public version of the document is presented with miles.)
The difference is even greater at the next gap (30mph→40mph, or 48km/h→64km/h). That was the subject of a road safety video a few years ago: [2]
[1] https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-saf...
To achieve a difference in impact speed of 16kph, you would either have to go much faster, say 60 to 70kph before the accident or not brake at all.
There are of course situations where a driver cannot brake at all, but there the speed limit should be 10kph or less (and then going, say, 12, would again be more or the same).
On a road where 30kph is considered safe, 40kph is only slightly less safe.
Kinetic energy is m*v^2, so yes 20% makes quite a difference.
Also, what's the point of a speed limit of x if 1.2x (or x+19) is tolerated. There is no good reason for a margin.
When Green is ON, & is going to switch off, it will start blinking & then off, & then yellow will start blinking. Its ok to drive through blinking green or yellow if safe. But common training os drive through blinking Green, but if you see blinking Yellow, then stop.
Plus, some of the lights have counter. It shows how many seconds are remaining for the lit color. An experiment led the Bombay Municipality to install Noise Sensors are one busy traffic light with counter. Every time there is a Red Light, & counter is less than 10, normally people start getting impatient & start honking to force the front ones to move. But on this light, if the noise is above certain decibel while Red, the counter resets.
I recall hearing about legal cases which made the city I was in disable and then remove them because they became useless after the rulings.
Speed cameras are not the go-to tech. Nearly every car on the road has a GPS, either organic to the vehicle or inside the driver's phone. If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information.
This was done by a few rental car companies many moons ago (circa 2001). Speeding laws don't know how to account for such data. Should someone speeding continuously over many miles be fined more or less than someone who speeds twice, each time only for a short distance? Traffic laws are premised on the systems by which people are caught (cops, traffic cameras etc). They are not adapted to the perfect knowledge that modern tech can provide.
https://www.drivers.com/article/428/
Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular speed while on public roads. Japanese motorcycles are already limited by industry agreement, iirc 300kph (see the Hyabusa fiasco). Merc/BMW cars are limited to 250kph. Those limit could be lowered via a simple software patch.
So then you get a speeding fine for being a passenger?
Wouldn't people just turn off their phones?
> Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular mas speed while on public roads.
This is useless because most "speeding" would be within the limit for the country, e.g. there are places in the US with a speed limit of 85 MPH, whereas most of the problem is really people driving 70 in a 45.
And trying to enforce the actual speed limit on the specific road would be fragile and dangerous because if your vehicle detects the limit wrong it could force you to drive 30+MPH below the flow of traffic and cause an accident.
Welcome to one of the most basic and most difficult problems for AI-driven vehicles: What is the speed limit? Temporary limits, work zones, school/park zones based on sunlight, weather, children/workers present or not, emergency vehicles beside road or not ... it is complex but also something every driver manages every time they get behind the wheel. While it is possible to drive dangerously slowly, far more people are being killed by driving too quickly than too slowly. The default is generally, if unsure, err on the side of slower.
I've had speeding tickets forgiven in Australia because the sign simply wasn't visible enough due to overgrown trees and a 2 lane off ramp separating the sign from the road it applied to, let alone the sign missing altogether.
I think I read somewhere that it's someone's job to make regular checks that the temporary signs (and covers) are still correct -- they are an important part of the worker safety requirement for the construction crew.
When a speed limit changes, the rule is for the sign to be shown on both sides of the road. There are then repeating signs for the current limit at some regular interval.
The UK is dense enough that having expensive electronic signs on all motorways isn't an unreasonable cost; I understand that's not practical in the USA or Australia.
[1a] https://i2-prod.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/arti...
[1b] https://www.ageas.co.uk/globalassets/solved/30072018_road-sa... (possibly this style is no longer used, I drive very rarely in the UK so I'm not sure.)
Maybe correlate it with central database for sanity. Preferably daily updated git.
> It is unsafe to drive the speed limit if everyone is going 10-15mph over the posted limit.
It's also something that humans are still better at judging than machines, because they have general intelligence. They can tell that a speed limit sign for a service road visible from the highway is not the speed limit for the highway. They can guess what a sign covered in rust or sludge might have said based on the road conditions or the speed of other traffic or personal knowledge of the area.
And when the machine gets it wrong more often, you don't want it to be overriding the human driver by force.
oof... Glad Google doesn't have that info about me.
https://www.econolite.com/products/software/bluetoad/
"Advanced Traffic Management Systems Bluetooth Detection. TrafficCast proven algorithms for filtering and processing data inputs to compute real-time travel times and speeds."
On some level, a device owned and controlled by the consumer and asserting a particular travel speed seems like the wrong place to put that kind of enforcement.
I'm much happier with a flow of traffic enforcement. Ticket those who speed excessively beyond what traffic is generally flowing and let the posted limit be more of a guideline.
I lived in Qatar for 7 years, drove a car. All speed cameras are not visible. Some are marked with sign boards, but many are hidden permanently on a lamp post, or in a palm tree, or in anything. There are even mobile cameras, which an operator puts on a heavy tripod, & goes away, & camera takes photos of offenders & send back to data centre. Cameras are on highways, on streets, on intersections. Every traffic signal has built in camera. Fines go up progressively with each offense & over the limit. Owner of car gets a mobile notification as soon as his car speeds in front of camera. All fines are payable fully at yearly registration. If paid in some x days, there is a discount.On Holy Month of Ramadan also sometimes there is a discount.
The biggest is, there is no need of a man standing behind camera. Two photos taken apart a second or such are the proof. Owner can only contest it if he has gps recordings. Speed limit is speed limit. No +5 or +10.
But then, fine amount stings only if they are enough. For an expat like me, a fine of $200 is a lot. For a local Qatari 20ish year boy, thats nothing. Some of my photography club members had fines in tunes of $2500 a year, & totally normal.
So they have another camera about 20 seconds up the road to catch them reading SMS while driving?
None of that is insurmountable of course, and the easiest fix seems like just having the automated system only ticket you at some threshold above the limit while grandfathering in tighter speedometer tolerances. Aggression from driving the speed limit would probably decrease rapidly as tickets started arriving in the mail.
More than you suggest.
> The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex
But speed cameras are just one piece of enforcement. With those and automatic license plate reading you get a piece of evidence that a car violated the limit at a particular time and place, but even if the law is that a set limit is a hard limit (which is not the case in much of the US, where posted limits are often prima facie but not dispositive limits), that's not all you need for enforcement. You also need legal process to weigh potential counterevidence, to deal with contested identity of actual drivers, etc. This isn't technically complex, but it adds a lot of overhead, which is why even places which legally allow this mechanism deploy it selectively, not comprehensively.
In case you wonder why we had them they were for car engine preheaters. Handy when it is -20C and snowing.
In the medium term, if this becomes a real problem, properties will be devalued and owners can decide whether it’s worth contributing to the cost of installing the infrastructure.
In the long term, most people won’t have private vehicles, so there won’t be any need to store and charge them on public roads.
You see, I don't believe this point at all, and I'm yet to see a convincing argument why it would be true. It would already be cheaper for me to take an Uber to work rather than own my car yet the convenience of having your own personal space that is mine far outweighs the savings. Also anyone who has children and knows the insane amount of stuff that babies require would laugh at the mere idea. Autonomous vehicles can be fanciest robo taxies(and they won't be, if normal taxies are anything to go by) but the hassle of moving stuff from and out of each for a baby each time one arrives(car, not a baby) would drive you mad.
When autonomous vehicles halve the cost of an Uber/Lyft journey, many more people will weigh up the costs/benefits of private vehicle ownership and decide it’s not for them.
Different services will compete based in part on the luxuriousness of the interiors and the frequency at which they are cleaned.
As private vehicle ownership becomes rarer, so to will parking, particularly on-street parking. People will look back and think it odd that we dedicated vast public spaces to the storage of private property.
Finally, as private vehicle owners become a minority group, they will become an easy target for even more punitive taxation and regulations which will see the group shrink even further still.
That's kind of my point - this won't happen, because Uber is already at rock bottom prices. For me to take it to work is about £10. That can't cover anything about the journey and is clearly heavily subsidised by Uber. That cost isn't going down to £5, it's just not going to happen. Just like when people predict that since flash memory prices keep falling down, you will be able to buy a 1TB pendrive for 5 cents. That's not going to happen because you do have the minimum costs of production and transport that aren't going anywhere even if the chips themselves are free.
And if people aren't taking Uber instead of their own cars for these frankly ridiculous prices then I don't see why they would simply because the cars drive themselves.
>>Different services will compete based in part on the luxuriousness of the interiors and the frequency at which they are cleaned.
The same principle should apply to taxis and it just doesn't. I live in a medium size UK city and every company, every brand, has crappy cars. Only price matters, nothing else and Uber Lux is not an option because you're waiting 40-50 minutes for one, that's just not acceptable.
Not really. There are a lot of places to optimize the cost of an Uber competitor. If you have electric self driving cars that pick people up, maintenance and fuel are much less expensive and you aren't paying for a driver. Most of these would only need a 50-100 mile range and could fuel up between passengers.
Full self driving cars is a few years out, but having a service that has defined roads it can travel on is likely possible in the fairly near term. Waymo is already doing this to some extent.
More like 50+ years for something that is actually allowed on most roads commercially, but sure. I just don't think the margins are there. Uber already subsidizes the human cost.
This is a good question, we know that total cost of ownership of the charging network for cars is massively lower than that of petroleum infrastructure. So the problem is not shortage of money, but alighning incentives and investment. I believe this needs to be done through a large-scale national program, where central govermnet provides granta for modernising cities for efficiench: that includes charge points, insulation and enegy efficiency, etc. All those measures result in long-term savings, and we have record low interest rates
Consider thay the gas station is just the tip of the iceberg, it comes with an underground cistern of flamable liquid, trucks for delivery, complex oil refinery, pipelines and tankers. We are talking about literally hundreds of people working to keep a gas station pumping.
You are weighing all that up against one-tine installation cost of sinple cable and sockets? They need basically no ongoing maintenance, and car batteries are perfect for dumping excess power from renewables, and long as they are connected from prolonged periods - something you won't get out of a carging station approach
The problem is that this is where you're wrong. Even if we get regular 3-pin 13amp sockets installed everywhere instead of the proper type-2 connectors, you can't just leave domestic sockets outside and unprotected, because in case of any damage or injury you'd be liable. At the minimum you need some circuit that can detect faults and report to HQ that it needs repairs. Then are you going to provide electricity for free? Because if not you need metering and billing infrastructure for all of these, and that absolutely does require maintenance. Even proper "hardened" type 2 chargers go out of order all the time and have to be maintained. 3-pin sockets everywhere are not the solution.
Tldr: a street with 40 sockets on it will require constant maintenance, and if the idea is to have every single Street everywhere wired with sockets, then this becomes a stupidly expensive endeavour.
Petroleum fuel is more expensive that eqivalent electricity because they have to pay for massive oil refineries, etc. It costs a fortune and you seem to totally ignore. Once you net out these costs, petroleum will not come out on top.
According to the latest version of the electrical regulations, any external socket used for charging a car(and that includes regular domestic 3-pin sockets) has to have earth independant of the supply earth. Meaning that a separate earth stake has to be installed for each socket. I've gotten several quotes to do this recently and they all came back at around £400-500 mark. But even ignoring that, you are completely off the mark when it comes to parts, proper external armoured sockets and cables cost a lot more than "£50-100". That's dumb sockets that don't do anything. Commercial charging points that provide just regular 13amp charging without anything fancy go for multiple thousands of pounds, but you think a £50 socket would do? Have you considered why it might not? If you want to do it on the entire street then multiply that number + add the costs of digging up the street which can be a small fortune(ask OpenReach how much they charge per metre of groundworks, it's not uncommon to get bills for £100k for a 50ft of cable laid in ground).
>> It costs a fortune and you seem to totally ignore.
Uhm, I don't, but I just don't see how that's relevant. I'm also not saying that we should continue using petrol. Just that building this infrastructure in our cities is going to be incredibly expensive, and our councils already struggle so much to provide any support to our streets and roads. But somehow there are people who believe that by 2030 councils will magically pull the money out of their backsides and build it. I just don't believe that will happen.
I am hoping arguing that, on average, charging points should last decades so the running costs should be minimal and the system would save money in the long run, purely when you consider physical resources involved.
To further reduce running costs and put it on commercial footing, we could try a modular approach - Maybe we could have a system where we dig up the street, and install something like a metal frame in the ground covered by a (miniature) manhole, which includes a fixture, electric cabling, etc. It's just a dumb and robust connector, nor electronics.
Then different charging points could be installed there by private companies, or by homeowners, etc at a fee. The idea is to have like a standard connector - any maintenance would (normally) be needed on the charge point only, metering is done by the charge point and upstream at street level. Maybe we can mandate smart metering like we are doing for houses right now.
If people want to charge their electric cars and live in a place where it's difficult to do so, that is their problem.
Most places with super dense housing like you describe are probably in fairly dense urban areas where other forms of transportation are probably better regardless.
And 'other forms of transportation' are not 'better regardless', merely better for some limited purposes.
In general I'm against any system that automatically fines people.
I also think that for safety reasons you cannot just unplug a charging EV car without stopping th charge first (i.e. a child cannot just walk up and knock the plug out etc).
If there is a fault in the charger, then I expect a "smart" parking spot to deal with that.
To be honest, the better approach in my mind is to put the electric charging bays further away from the entrance to the store or whatever. Quite often EV charging spaces are some of the "best" (i.e. closest) spaces available. Selfish pricks who want to park right by the door don't care if it is a disabled space, an EV space, or not even an official parking space at all - they'll just park where they want. Move the EV charging spaces further away from the store and you'll solve 99% of ICE'ings I reckon.
Seems like the right behaviour to discourage, just like littering, etc
Also you absolutely can remove a charger while its going and I've had it happen multiple times on my M3 when charging at a L2. I do get a notification but like.
But yes, spot on just put the chargers where no one wants to park. They keep installing them right at the front of stores and wondering why people ICE them.