A lot of the Seattle area only has street parking on residential streets. I'm curious how these folks are ever going to go full EV.
Likewise, high-speed charging from Tesla Superchargers, Electrify America, and certainly others by 2030 can give an 80% charge in around half an hour. Again, it certainly isn't perfect, but it feels like I could work with it.
However, the big thing is that we're going to need to see a change in our cities that will kinda render a lot of this moot. Street parking, parking in general, and car ownership/use in cities is going to have to decline. Our cities are drowning under parking infrastructure. Everyone is afraid of new housing because new housing brings competition for parking spaces and increased traffic. If we're going to actually make cities a sustainable place to live, it's going to need to mean a lot fewer cars.
Housing prices in cities like Seattle, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, NYC, Boston, and DC are already sky-high. I know that a lot of techies can afford to live there, but raising a family becomes expensive when 1,200 square feet starts above a million. If we add new housing, we realistically can't add a lot of new parking to accommodate an influx of people with cars. Even if we mandate parking minimums for new housing (which is bad), that still means less parking available per car at everywhere you're driving to; it still means increased traffic that the roads can't accommodate (and there isn't space to just expand the roads).
Plus, as cities try to reduce traffic deaths and accommodate more road users, even fewer cars can be accommodated. A lot of cities are reducing the speed limit to 25 MPH, introducing protected bike lanes, adding traffic calming devices, removing parking spaces that would block drivers from seeing pedestrians, etc. Cities are taking back some car infrastructure and returning it to use for people. Likewise, businesses that are now sitting on incredibly valuable land that is being under-used as parking are likely going to pressure local governments to let them turn those parking lots into better uses of that land.
I remember the white-flight and the jobs that followed out into the suburbs. For those that remained in a city, they might have to commute out of the city to Redmond for their job and so parking was essential. Today, Amazon and others are setting up shop in Seattle.
For hiking, maybe it's reasonable to just rent a car for the day/weekend. I know that makes it seems like you're having to pay for the trip, but you were always having to pay. Cars will generally be $500/mo all-in on the cheap side of things, never mind an Audi or Volvo.
Ultimately, dealing with global warming and other challenges will require a certain amount of change in the way we set things up and live our lives. I think this is the reality that people often don't want to acknowledge - that what currently exists can't really continue existing for the kind of world we want and need to be. Electric cars lower emissions a good bit, but there's still a lot of emissions in manufacturing, a lot of particulate matter from tires and brakes, a lot of emissions from road-building and repair, a huge amount of emissions from concrete for parking garages, a large death toll from traffic fatalities, emissions from the fact that many trees that won't exist to accommodate car infrastructure, emissions from air conditioning as more car infrastructure means making cities greater heat islands... Plus, how do we accommodate the growth of our cities?
I think the answer to your question is that we're likely going to have to make changes to our cities and how we live in them rather than figuring out how street-parkers go full EV.
Agreed, but people work more like this:
1. I already paid for my car, so I use it kind of for free, except gas.
2. I have to rent a car for $50 a day to go hiking, mmm, that's an extra $50. Maybe I'll do something closer to home in the range of my EV.
Also don't underestimate the convenience of leaving from home at any time in the day or the night and returning there vs driving to get the rental car, go through the paperworks, and again when returning it. It can easily add a couple of hours of friction.
And I would miss out on a lot of outdoor sports if it wasn't a "sunk cost".
I do think hybrids are kind of the ideal trade off until we have much much better infrastructure and battery technology.
1) You can go electric to work/shopping/city, and only switch to gasoline when you go out of town. 2) you don't need to spend 10k for a new battery when it's gone bad. 3) you don't need to be scared about finding a place to charge.
Why not just buy a smaller more efficient car without the battery in the first place? You would save more than 10k...
There are some car clubs in the city I live in. You sign up in advance, give them your details/card, and use an app to book the car. They're scattered all over the city, and you book it by the hour and pay for mileage. You get a fuel card, and are asked not to leave it back empty. If you pick one up empty, fill it up, and tell the app and they'll nag the previous person about it (but I only had to do this once in the 2 years I used it). It's great!
When I signed up at first it was great, there were 5 cars within 1/2 a mile of me. 2 years later, there were still 5 cars within 1/2 a mile of me, but the number of people using the service had increased so there was no availability on a weekend.
On my current street there's ~100 cars parked on it, and at least 10 of them haven't moved in the last week (my own included). If we replaced (even) half of those cars with for-hire cars, it would be a perfectly usable system for me.
> 1. I already paid for my car, so I use it kind of for free, except gas.
If you're not using your car for work, then this doesn't apply really. Even assuming you own it outright, maintenance/checks/cleaning/washing my current car are in the region of 30-40 bucks a month.
Yes, this. If cities are going to donate half of our road space to car storage, it should be to cars usable by everyone, not private ones.
End free parking and build more car share schemes.
Well you could make parking metered. And residents could pay an additional tax to receive a permit to park without restriction. Then you are no longer donating half of your road space and I won’t be forced to share my car
> I won't be forced to share my car This is a selfish way of looking at it, and exactly why these schemes aren't growing. I'm more than happy to share my vehicle with others, but the companies managing these schemes need to actually make sure they keep up with the demand.
This isn't free parking, it's heavily subsidised (residents permits for my area are £100-£300 p/a depending on car emissions). If you go maybe half a mile farther out of the city it is free, but there's even less of these car share scheme spaces available.
It is funny how people in the US expect exactly nothing from their government/city. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there?
Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there?
I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool progressive: no, no one here thinks that the mayor of Seattle would be able to do this.
We have a mayoral election coming up in November. There's an outside chance that things might change for the better, but I'm not really holding my breath.
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[1] Excepting McGinn, who I thought got a really raw deal.
This is the sort of infrastructure work that a Green New Deal should support. But that's a political poison pill, as supporting energy sector jobs is "patriotic" if it's carbon based and "communism" otherwise.
You could have an extra fee on top of vehicle stickers for EVs…and even as I type that, I can imagine the pitched screaming, from both sides of the aisle. “Why are you suppressing clean vehicles?!” “More big city taxes?!”
On day 1 of the new US administration, the Keystone XL project was killed. If it's a poison pill it must taste pretty good.
Public transportation is great and I love using it when it makes sense, but in many cities it does not compete with the convenience and security of having a reliable personal vehicle.
The only place I felt public transportation was good enough to go without my own car was NYC - but I lived on a great train line that ran every few minutes reliably. I also didn't have any dependents that I was responsible for. Many people who lived nearby used the train but still had their own cars as a backup.
Even with how convenient it was for shuttling myself around, using it when needing to carry anything like groceries becomes difficult, and made me wish I had a car. Especially during rush hour where sitting is almost impossible.
I'm all for improving public transportation, but I do not see it being a replacement for personal vehicles in every way.
The wealthier people are, the more latency sensitive they become.
We expect them to propose charging infrastructure, think they have a consensus, and then get sued by someone for some stupid reason, and then 10-15 years later break ground on something 1/3 of what people need.
California is much worse than the east-coast in this regard, but there's a 12 lane freeway bridge in the DC area that is a draw-bridge because the original plan of a suspension bridge was fought by people who complained that it would be an eyesore.
To me it’s a no-brainer to have such a regulation, but how do other people/cities/country cope without it? You apply for parking permission for “1234 Hacker Rd. space 3A” or do you just find an open spot and consider it yours, like you do for a chair in a cafe?
I've lived in Texas a long time and parking space in residential areas was never a problem. Nearly every apartment complex comes with a giant parking lot and private houses either have a garage/driveway or the street is isolated enough to where on street parking isn't an issue, but it's practically impossible or at least extremely inconvenient to live in Texas without a car.
There are a few places where parking is tight, like for instance at a university living space,so you either have to pay for a space somewhere or get a house/apt with dedicated parking (a lot of students don't really need cars though) or take the chance that you will have to play the street parking lottery.
So prevalent in Texas that a now-popular building architype in North American real estate is known as the 'Texas Donut', whereby a midrise apartment building 'wraps' around a parking structure in the middle of the plot.
It makes a lot of sense. The parking is close to where you live, but out of sight for everybody except residents. It makes for a nice-looking neighborhood. And you get to park indoors, out of the weather.
Approaches I have encountered are:
* Meter-only parking - reserved exclusively for short-term use, usually in highly commercialized areas; long-term use by residents generally prohibited
* Unrestricted street parking - Any car with a valid registration may park in any space not otherwise designated as off-limits (e.g. loading zones, metered zones, specially designated zones for those with mobility impairments). May require periodic relocation to facilitate street sweeping, snow plowing, or other activities sanctioned by the municipality (e.g. clearing space for loading/unloading moving trucks or construction equipment).
* Zoned street parking - Parking in the zone follows the same general pattern of 'unrestricted' above, except vehicles need a specially-issued identifier (usually a sticker) from the municipality to park in the zone.
* Reserved street parking - In conventional circumstances, usually limited to parking spaces for those with mobility impairments, or some special circumstance (e.g. a city might lease spots to a car-sharing service to improve transport access for residents). Sometimes found in cases where there are parking spaces directly off the street (e.g. "pull-in angle parking") in less heavily trafficked areas/neighborhoods.
In my city street parking is free but time restricted. Downtown streets have 2 or 4 hour parking limits, and street parking is not allowed between 2AM and 5AM. I like not having to worry about meters but it's always a pain to wake up in the middle of the night and remember I forgot to put my car in the driveway.
On a more humorous note my first mental image had a cyberpunk vibe: someone walking around the city with an unregulated nuke generator (stolen recycled waste or maybe a stolen weapon) selling electricity by the watt from a repurposed hot dog cart. Or maybe WattWallahs if it turns into a semi informal business.
I believe EVs will come into their own as battery technology improves to the point that charging is no longer a multi hour affair. Whether that's the Bill Gates battery, super capacitors, hot swap battery clubs or some combination thereof remains to be seen.
But you don’t need fast charging on public streets, you charge while parked.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/electric-car-w...
This is an absolutely critical point. We can dream up all the beautiful systems we want, but as long as they have some reliance on a high-trust society, they will fail in America. America is a state in decline; the high point of trust was decades ago, and now most Americans live in a situation where they can't leave anything unlocked lest it be stolen.
A lot of pie-in-the-sky sharing service ideas fall flat when we realize that people abuse shared property as much as they can. People like to suggest a future where electric, self-driving cars will be summoned on demand and show up at our doors, obviating the need to own your own vehicle; but the insides of these vehicles will be filthy, and the utility of having emergency stuff carried along with you (from a change of clothes on upward) will be lost. We can imagine banning people from such a service, but we can also imagine someone enacting a law banning banning....
Can you provide a source for that? All of the sources I see show that we're just above 1960s levels of property crime and trending downward.
The closest gas station to me, on foot, has converted its mechanics bays to a great taco shop, its "office" to a liquor store with a great selection of spirits, and it has a full-size car wash operation wrapped around it.
So it seems like the most likely conversion would be that the gas station would swap gas pumps for chargers, in phases. Of course the best layout for chargers where charging takes the time it currently does is not the same as the best layout for fuel pumps, so it will be interesting to see how the transition goes.
So at present all the gas stations that I know of that seem viable are embedded in businesses that take up even more space, and the retail fuel business is just a part of it.
The only viable path forward for EVs is to reduce recharge time or make it invisible (do it outside rush hour). Until then I see no way for them to displace hybrids as primary family cars.
I feel like this is something that everyone has been saying for decades and I don't really know what it means in practice. There are countless businesses that are successful soaking up excess time that people happily participate in. The mobile gaming business for example is an industry worth tens of billions of dollars that simply didn't exist a couple decades ago.
>The only viable path forward for EVs is to reduce recharge time or make it invisible (do it outside rush hour). Until then I see no way for them to displace hybrids as primary family cars.
Hybrid market share has likely already peaked and they never became the primary family car for Americans. Hybrid's share of new cars only ever topped 3% once and that was in 2013. Plus charge time has already been decreasing for EVs and Teslas have gotten to the point that an average American would probably only need to charge for 10-20 minutes once a week at one of their highest powered Superchargers. That really isn't the inconvenience that some people are making it out to be if there are other business at these charging locations that can keep people occupied.
Gas stations currently make very little to almost nothing actually selling gas (something like 5-25 cents a gallon last I had heard). Almost all of their income is from also acting as a convenience store for snacks and drinks. They need people in and out as quick as possible, not loitering around for half an hour.
Basically, if charging time dropped to the 5 minute range, sure. I would hate to have to use one, though, given how busy gas stations already are during the day around here.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/19/electric...
As is noted elsewhere in the thread, it isn't simply a battery problem.
Being able to supply the “Ooomph” to fast charge 6 or 10 cars with a 5 minute vehicle turn around ( a la Tesla’s fast chargers) but also triple stacked with cars (hydraulic ramps, customer disembarks and uses the time to pay or shop). Chuck in the ‘free' storage space for your ballasting batteries and I can see a great market for buying up old gas stations located in inner city areas - especially those that are currently car washes, vacant lots etc.
We'd need some pretty serious upgrades to our electrical transmission infrastructure to get L2 charging speeds from "every lamppost" as some would propose.
Within a parking garage is there a method of metering/constraining individual charging nodes so that the overall consumption does not exceed the amps available to the garage?
Say for example, all my neighborhood household electric meters have some zigbee coms that allow the electric co to snoop on individual usage closer to realtime. Do EVs not have a method for the charger to understand the EV's % of full charge?
But when we start talking about "every parking spot" scale, then two constraints come to mind: (1) the charging rate is too low to be effective (L1 charging over "regular" 110V wall outlets gets you only a few miles of charge an hour), and (2) if you have too much current going through some common section of cable, it will blow a circuit breaker, or worse, overheat and cause an electrical fire (same as if you plug too many things into an extension cord at home or work).
Edit: I think the current state of the art for sharing is "push notification to tell the driver to move their car" because there is a non-trivial capital outlay for chargers even if you have enough electricity. So any scheme that involves all the cars being plugged in and some intelligent switching of who should go first still requires considerable capital costs, even before you get to upgrading the big transmission wires.
in the case of a general purpose parking garage, this is less okay. I don't want to park in a garage for an hour to shop and not know whether my car will be at 30% or 80% charge when I get back. this is barely better than not having charging infrastructure at all.
I acknowledge that EV transport has a chicken/egg problem of standing up a support infrastructure as adoption grows and that there are collective interests in decreasing point of service emissions and shifting energy generation away from sources with harmful emissions. However, the problem can be viewed from perspectives outside the personal car paradigm. Why would a rationally goal-oriented city or similar organization spend money/effort on supporting the personal ownership model instead of improving transportation for all people? For example, the same decrease in emissions might be achieved by improved bus/tram service, or public/private partnership to provide EV charging for car sharing services.
What are the cities that have provided street-side charging, what were their goals and by what criteria did they decide to do street-side charging instead of choosing other methods to achieve their goals?
*vehicle cars
In response to GP, I definitely expect the US government to take a lead on building charging infrastructure (especially with a federal administration that doesn't actively dismiss climate change). A failure to demonstrate competence building green infrastructure in the next few years will quite possibly lead me to seek greener pastures elsewhere (EU). Thankfully San Francisco included charging infrastructure and street-side charging in its 2019 EV roadmap [1].
That said, public transit is by far the better green tech. But since private vehicles won't be going away overnight, might as well transition them to something cleaner.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/electric...
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
Last week some company announced (in some sense) non-graphite anodes that will (theoretically) make 5 minute recharges of a car battery system possible. Given the amount of energy stored in the system, this is a LOT of juice to have flowing down a wire.
Now imagine that it's about that time of day when a bunch of cars get parked curbside, and plug in to the "new" charging infrastructure. I don't know the numbers, I think we're talking about insane current levels, meaning insane wire sizes being buried in the street.
Anyone know anything about this?
Even if this tech becomes widespread in cars I highly doubt the infrastructure will ever be in place for it be something that the average person can use on a regular basis.
It seems likely that when EVs become the norm people will mostly use slower charging while parked and pay extra for fast charging on long distance trips only. But widespread adoption will still probably require some fairly significant upgrades of power generation infrastructure.
You can't deliver that kind of power to a charging station easily based on the electrical infrastructure we currently have.
At least this my understanding.
More to the point: to meet a climate change goal, why continue to subsidize the overprovisioning of transportation capability in the form of largely unused, quickly depreciating equipment with low watt to work efficiency? Is doing the same thing as before really going to move the needle to the goal? If asserted true, what proof or precedent is there?
They don’t need to take over right of ways. The DOT (or whoever) could help by aiding standardization of chargers and payments, creating a program to fund design of street-side chargers, provide incentives (in the form of taxes perhaps) for cities to meet EV infra quotas.
> why continue to subsidize the overprovisioning of transportation capability in the form of largely unused, quickly depreciating equipment with low watt to work efficiency?
Oh trust me, I really feel this. Maybe you’re right that any incrementalism in reducing carbon emissions is wrong, and we should go all in on the optimal solution, ie ban cars and redesign cities. But even if the govt did radically depart from the past 50 years of stalled infrastructure, and went all in, it would still take a long time until an alternative to the personal vehicle is practical to all urban/suburban dwellers. Long enough for a switch to EVs to be unjustifiable from a climate perspective, probably (I would very much like numbers)
But yes, I am just as tired of the mantra of lesser of two evils. But maybe that’s just how democracy is destined to unfold.
Don't forget EVs are beneficial for everyone in terms of less pollution, so cities should be encouraging residents to purchase EVs over ICE with small incentives (in my city you don't need to pay for street parking).
(Not a meme. This is down the street from me.)
This is a slightly decrepit stretch of the east side of the city, so, don’t assume “trust” when you can assume “too high to think this through”.
I've accepted I won't be going electric until I buy a house. There is no way my complex will install chargers, until it's required somehow. No garages here. House prices are hovering around $500,000 in my area. With a traditional mortgage, 20% down is a lot to save up (100K).
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This has made electric cars a unique form of social signaling: It basically states "I'm a homeowner!" (or can afford house rental, which is also very expensive... or went with an FHA loan/can afford that mortgage payment)
There are some apartments that have charging ports, but they're very high-end, with rents comparable to a single-family detached house anyways. They're also very rare in my area. Sure you can charge at whatever ports are available (not many here), but (IMO) it just doesn't make much sense to go electric and not have the ability to charge your car at home.
Although, certainly if you rack up hundreds of miles every day it won’t work that well.
That said, isn’t part of the allure of apartments being close to your destinations? Walking to the park, a 1-mile trip to the grocery, etc.
It can be, but there is another reason to chose living in an apartment: It's cheap. I live here because it's inexpensive (< $1000/mo) and I can save that large down payment quicker.
My apartment is not convenient: 45 minutes from my work, 15 minutes from an affordable grocery store. But there is a very nice park within walking distance.
> You could look at home chargers around you and strike up a friendship.
This is true, I could. But that's a lot less convenient than buying another hybrid when the time comes. Gasoline is 5 minutes away, refueling is fast, and I only need to do it every other week.
Used to even be the case in Amsterdam that you didn't have to pay for parking if you were paying for charging. But they quickly changed that because charging isn't nearly as profitable as the parking fees.
I checked where chargers are located in my area, and it's mostly gas stations and some shop chargers in the more posh suburb a few miles away. None of my local grocery stores have chargers. The posh stores are too expensive for me to shop at continually - I can't/won't afford to shop at whole foods for my normal food... but they have chargers.
Even if they were provided, I (and most others here) don't park on the street - but in the lot attached to my apartment (built in the late 80's). I'm also lucky I don't pay for parking (or rather it's part of my inexpensive rent).
I'm quite curious, most of my co-workers (and me) drive Teslas and there has yet been any drive train issues in any of ours. Two of them have gone over 500.000 km. But what I see is pure anecdotal.
All I can find is statistics on general repairs not drive train specifically and even here tesla is quite high but not on par with Toyota. Audi seems to be one of the worst actually.
I'm not going to out who said what, and note that was 8..? years ago and everyone has undoubtedly improved since then. That said, it was interesting to see near-universal acceptance of its excellence (of course some joked that theirs were actually fun to drive, which was a fair observation). As an amusing aside, at one working group dinner I had to explain to a couple of let's just say European engineers what "Vegan" meant on the menu. Hilarity ensued.
Once a battery has sufficient capacity for the intended use, it’s charging time that counts.
For example, the battery capacity on my Apple watch is more than adequate. I’d like to see the charging time cut in half. Then it would charge enough while I’m shaving each morning.
How is 30 minutes too long? If you plan your charging around the time you go to run errands, 30 minutes is probably adequate. This is especially true in pandemic times where a trip to get groceries is may be preceded by a 5-10 minute wait in line.
It takes five minutes to fill at a gas pump. Then you move on, and the next person fills up.
Until there’s a charge station at every parking spot, it’s not going to work. You have to stay close to the car while it’s charging. Works for the 7-11, but not for regular shopping.
What? No. I plug in my car. The charger locks so no one can disturb it. I do my shopping, and I come back, unplug, and move on.
Not everyone needs to charge all the time, so there doesn’t need to be one charger for every parking spot.
Many people seem to think about EV charging as analogous to refueling an ICE vehicle. They differ in the sense that EV charging today requires planning. Tesla’s navigation system makes this convenient for SuperChargers by showing the number of available spots at each charger. I use the PlugShare app to look at non-Tesla chargers when I want a little more charge but don’t need the speed of a SuperCharger/want to pay the premium.
I’ve owned a Model 3 for seven months now. I’ve only encountered one SuperCharger in 11K miles of travel (including a round trip from the Bay Area to Dallas, TX) that was completely busy. I drove to another one that was a little under 10 minutes away.
It’s also worth nothing that many folks charge at home. My apartment building has two chargers shared by about 12 EV drivers. Other apartment buildings have more chargers. Not everyone needs public chargers the same way nearly everyone needs a fuel station.
My impression is that many of the superchargers are in locations that are fine for travel, but not very convenient for shopping.
If I pull up to a charger and it’s busy, with the owner absent, how am I supposed to know the status of the recharge? Is there something equivalent to a running gas pump that I can look at to estimate when the owner will return? Or, is the best move to simply move on, if there’s no empty plug?
How do 12 EV manage to share 2 charge ports at an apartment? How do you know when it’s your “turn“? How long does your car stay plugged in, once you get the slot? Isn’t there conflict caused by impolite owners?
This isn't true everywhere. In the Bay Area, I've used a few in shopping centers. Same for the few I used in Dallas. While traveling from the Bay to Dallas, most Superchargers were at gas stations which, as you say, are more convenient for travelers. It all depends on the density, which you can see at https://www.tesla.com/supercharger.
> If I pull up to a charger and it’s busy, with the owner absent, how am I supposed to know the status of the recharge? Is there something equivalent to a running gas pump that I can look at to estimate when the owner will return? Or, is the best move to simply move on, if there’s no empty plug?
Move to an open charger. I've been at locations with charger quantities ranging from 4 to 40. The car's navigation system will indicate the number of open chargers, and you can select appropriately.
> How do 12 EV manage to share 2 charge ports at an apartment? How do you know when it’s your “turn“? How long does your car stay plugged in, once you get the slot? Isn’t there conflict caused by impolite owners?
Ideally the charger status is available in an app (e.g., ChargePoint). I don't think mine is because the garage is private, but I have used chargers that are publicly-accessible at other apartment buildings because they were in the app.
I drive up to the level where the chargers are, and charge if I can. If I can't, I try again later. I charge when I'm near 30-40% until I get to 80%. Charge time, which depends on the power output of the charger, is usually 4 hours for the ~6.4kW chargers in my building. I have yet to have an issue with folks parking in the spot, but not charging or otherwise being impolite.
Good for you, but not really relevant to the discussion of what to do for people that can't really charge at home now.