NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
gothamist.com
gothamist.com
A lot of the things being proposed as solutions by posters here are already being tried in the real world. They're not running long-distance routes to the dump, they use a network of transfer stations around the boroughs. They're using DC fast charging. They're exploring other hybrid options.
NYC isn't always great at avoiding its own special breed of "NYC exceptionalism", but in this case it sure looks like they're doing everything reasonably. The electric trucks are seemingly working well for garbage collection. They just can't take the whole fleet electric (yet) for double-duty as snow plows.
This doesn't sound like they are trying to do short routes or fast charging stations. Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows.
The majority of LI batteries can be recharged in 1 hour with enough juice. Even if you say "well, it's a truck, so probably needs more time" current level 3 chargers can kick out 350kW of power. Yet this report talks about putting in 50 and 150kw chargers.
The mac trucks they are referencing have 350kWh battery packs in them.
The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.
Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.
A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy.
There's no reason to have drivers wait for the trucks to fully charge.
And of course the only time you need snow plows is when every available place to put a motor vehicle has just become unsuitable for that purpose.
Seems like a lot of hand waving going on.
Good luck with that.
Tell us you have no idea how much a garbage truck costs without telling us.
Must be nice to have a few million dollars in "spare" trucks lying around. Garbage trucks can run up to $400,000 EACH.
This is how you propose to waste taxpayer money, by replacing perfectly working trucks with EV's where you need to buy "spare" ones as well?
Some things will just never go electric. Like fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, power company trucks, etc. that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation. Dead dinosaurs are the best answer for some problems, just not every car on the road.
Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
> ambulances
Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
> tow trucks
Perhaps the only one that would be bad given the amount of power required to tow a vehicle.
> power company trucks
Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment and they are always working on electrical things.
> that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation.
Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
There are few places where EVs are bad fits. The main ones are airplanes and ships where getting power is hard and the power density needs to be high.
For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
> How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
I can power a couple of radios with far less than a full generator.
When sitting in a truck bay, there’s a shore line providing mains power to keep everything charged — we’re generally talking a 10-16A draw.
That’s easily met with a small generator, as opposed to the insane power draw a full EV battery would require.
Okay, work out the size of a generator needed to power one truck vs the dispatch offices. Now tell us how many generators you need.
This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable when its you with your consumer-grade whatever, and has absolutely no relevance to large scale logistics and planning.
Fuel in ground tanks when the black out starts is...fuel in the ground tanks which is going to stay there because no amount of human labor is getting enough of it out to keep multiple trucks going.
You can have both at once. This is what happens with some trains, frequently happens in mining, and happens in some large industries. It is what occurs with hybrid electric vehicles.
The latest round of electric vehicles are getting 80km (50 miles) off the battery. That sort of thing is find for most of the service vehicle types you listed, and meets the requirements for greening a fleet and having alternative power options.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have.
So … you do have to worry?
> Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
Yeah, so I don’t know much of anything about NYC, but I used to live in Chicago and did some volunteer work that put me in a fire station for a few hours every few months. Fire trucks are busy vehicles. They probably would indeed be excellent EVs, but they get used a lot (even if actual fires are rare). Also, firefighters are used to plugging them in! Modern fire stations maintain good internal air quality by having an exhaust system that connects a hose to the diesel exhaust of the fire truck when it comes into the station and detaches when it leaves.
On the other hand, an extended family member is the fire chief in a small western town. Those fire trucks would be terrible EVs, as they spend days or weeks at a time out in the field dealing with large scale wildfires.
EVs are a great technology for urban settings in moderate weather conditions, like in the big California cities where travel needs can be predicted, e.g. I travel < 40 miles/day and can recharge at home overnight.
Jamming them into applications for which they are not yet viable is a recipe for failure. People will only tolerate so much cost and inconvenience for the sake of climate change, it is important we not waste it on foolishness, because it's of urgent importance that we succeed in addressing it.
- Fire departments cannot afford to have their apparatus out-of-service for hours while they recharge.
- The truck alone weighs around 10,000-15,000 lbs, without water, and they carry anywhere from ~500 gallons of water (attack engines) to upwards of ~2600 gallons (tenders). That’s 14,175lbs to 36,710lbs of truck.
- The engine powers the apparatus itself, its pumps, and often, a huge alternator for its electrical systems, and an inverter supplying 110V for use with fans, portable lighting, etc. It has to do this for hours.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
There is a several order-of-magnitude difference between the power required to service the station, dispatch, etc, as opposed to what’s required to rapidly recharge the kind of massive batteries an EV fire apparatus would require.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Local government maintains diesel generators and a fuel supply to handle this kind of extreme infrastructure failure.
> For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
Fire trucks aren’t semis. They have very different energy demands, usage patterns, risk profiles, and failure modes.
Because they are neither low mileage and the medical equipment behind needs power. You never want your battery to go flat in an ambulance and lose the mobility and life support at the same time. Also, they're used the way EVs hate most. Accelerate and decelerate constantly while trying to plow through traffic in city centers and rush hours.
> fire trucks Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage...
I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?
> power company trucks [are] Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment
I don't know how yours operate but the power company trucks I see carry a whole workshop behind, and some of them carries enough spare parts to build a sizeable transformer from scratch. If we are talking about cranes, their hydraulics will consume enough energy to affect their mileage considerably.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have.
You'd need a couple of 1.2MVA generators to charge these vehicles if you want to do it quickly, with redundancy. And these things are neither small, nor silent or can be deployed anywhere you like. We have a couple of them outside, and boy, they're literally shipping container sized things. This excludes the fuel tanks and other infrastructure they need to be able to generate electricity.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Uh, just pour fuel to the tanks or pump with a manual pump?
This.
My brother is a captain for a fire department. I visited the hall many times with him and found the station design odd. He told me it is built that way because there have been cases of fire trucks being too close to major fires, and the truck catching fire back at the station.
The station has "blast doors" that automatically close if the bay is on fire to protect the rest of the station. (sounds funny right.. fire halls catching fire??)
Not sure they would want a "flammable metals" fire in their bay.
Precautions around keeping a fuel tank from catching fire work the same for batteries. Better, because lithium batteries have an ignition temperature at 2000F and gasoline's is 500F and diesel at 410F.
Also, you can’t ignite fuel without a spark. A cigarette can’t light a tank of fuel, but an overheated battery can catch fire by itself.
Lastly, you can extinguish fuel fires, but you can’t extinguish metal fires.
Lets start at the top shall we?
Diesel doesn't "burn" like gasoline does.
"If you toss a lit match into a puddle of diesel fuel, it'll go out."
You need to atomize it first, or heat it up a lot so it starts to "flash" or it wont "burn".
So, a firetruck with a large diesel tank is fairly safe because it takes a LOT to get it to start burning. At first all the heat is simply absorbed by the diesel slowing warming it up until it reaches its flash point.
Next, your temperatures are beyond MESSED UP.
Ignition temperature for a lithium battery is just 121 C
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07788#:~:text=The%20crit....
The Auto-ignition temperature of pure lithium is just 179°C
https://inchem.org/documents/icsc/icsc/eics0710.htm
https://webwiser.nlm.nih.gov/substance?substanceId=284&ident...
I have no idea where you get 2,000F (1,093C) from but this is so wrong it is embarrassing. This temperature is almost to the point Iron catches fire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature
Batteries are also prone to shorts and spontaneous fires which may explain stories like this : https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/us-news/tesla-model...
There is also the "fun" reaction between Lithium and water, which firefighters often use on fires...
There is no "/s" so it is hard to tell if you are being sarcastic or not. Assuming you are not... EV's make TERRIBLE fire trucks.
How long does it take to fuel a fire truck? How long to recharge one?
You are blissfully unaware of how fire trucks work. Many are also diesel pumps, they arrive at fires and the truck itself is a massive water pump. Tell us, how many hours can a EV drive the water pump for? The diesel version can probably run for several days if needed.
My brother is a firefighter, they are AFRAID of electric vehicle fires because well.. Something about electricity + water?
If i call 911, i expect a fire truck to arrive, not some BS about how they had a power failure and their rechargeable truck isn't working.
PS - Stagnant fuel isn't a real thing. Fire trucks are generally very well maintained, they are expensive, they are essential life saving machines. They don't just sit somewhere forgotten and have their fuel go "bad".
They are driven almost daily because firefighters are expected to know their area and so they drive around to see where hydrants are, look at new subdivisions and sometimes simply to make sure it runs property.
They also have detailed logbooks and are inspected a LOT.
>Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
First.. Fire stations use batteries then generators.
Second, you point out they have generators.. wouldn't that be used to transfer fuel answering your own question?
And yet they will have to, if we want to continue having a civilization...
You can’t be serious?
Probably because they have to use regular dollars to buy one or the other: cost-effectiveness cannot be ignored.
EVs are cost effective (but not immediately so).
As others have pointed out - to get the same quality of service you'd probably need extra trucks stored somewhere in NYC (also expensive) so that there's no downtime in coverage. Are we really supposed to believe they are currently 50% the lifelong cost of ICE vehicles?
Be an EV fanboi all you want. There are practical tasks that must be accomplished, and if one option achieves those tasks while another doesn't then the one that couldn't needs to either meet the competition or drop out.
Technology choice is full of tradeoffs. Now EVs might not be there yet for this use case, but it doesn't have to be a 100% replacement off the rip.
> If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service.
Is just false. The same logic would have prevented cars from displacing horses because cars aren't drop-in replacements for horses either. There are almost always tradeoffs for adopting new technologies, and demanding that EVs be strictly superior to ICE vehicles is absurd.
The "wait till the trucks are better" is perfectly fine choice here.
They also work when something fucked up your electric infrastructure...
Even if you could run Level 3 charging to the station it would still take a couple of hours to charge the huge batteries you need for a fire truck. Level 2 charging would take about 12 hours. Adding a Level 3 charging ability is non-trivial and doesn't make economic sense with low volume usage.
Yes, H2, with instant refuel time.
The road to environmental bliss is not paved with one stone. We need h2 for cerrain things (and have it, with 3 car companies selling excellent cars).
And having h2 doesn't hurt battery powered deployment. We need to encourage research, we need to not get fixated on one solution, and we need to stop trying to force one solution.
Can't you find some way to sling a few more batteries into the back to extend the range?
"The solution is simple - purchase extra fleet just to support a snow-ploughing operation that then sits idle for most of the year, and then hire extra people to drive less efficient routes in the hardest to recruit period of the year!"
Best way to get much broader adoption of EV's in transport is to use them where they will work best, rather than burn peoples fingers with projects that introduce huge operational issues.
Remember, one of the key rules of transport management is "reduce idle fleet", so telling a transport manager to save emissions by having loads of fleet idle is a bit like telling a CIO to reduce energy use by giving their developers smaller monitors and taking the graphics cards out of their computers.
If Americans were to make a slight change in their meat eating habits, I'd imagine the effect would be orders of magnitude greater than all the garbage trucks in the US, let alone just NYC.
There is a popular electric airplane that has exhangeable battery packs. The ability to swap out the batteries would be ideal, though possibly not practical during a blizzard.
I had to re-read this twice to make sure i wasnt misreading something.
The "simple" solution is to redesign the entire system, buy more vehicles, hire more drivers, etc because you are "pro electric" and electric vehicles cant perform the job?
Here's an idea.. Diesel vehicles are built to run 24 hours a day, and this is why they have large fuel tanks and heavy duty engines. Perhaps EV should be built to run 12 hours a day as well?
if the EV cant compete, then don't use it for this use case.
why should they "stop trying to run your trucks 12 hours a day" when they have done this for DECADES?
you make it sound like this 12 hour day is the problem, it is not, it is the EV's failure to keep up that is the issue.
With the push for EV I am not sure why we aren't seeing a push for the installation of streetcar power lines, these already exist and are used for busses. If we have a garbage truck that has the battery capacity for say 30 minutes, then it could be on the power line for the majority of the time.
This would limit battery waste as well. There could be some solid engineering reasons for this, but I suspect that coolness is a big factor.
That said, a wholesale change is what they need.
Edit: oh, you must mean noisy garbage trucks
Other cities have alleyways.
You must recognize the general GOP-led campaign that democratic-run places like NYC and CA are nightmares. It was Trump's theme for the 2020 GOP convention, but was overshadowed by Coronavirus. I think it spreads here too. NYC (and CA) need to take it on and remind people what makes them so fantastic.
I live in NYC, and I'll go on the record stating that NYC's trash collection system is an absolute disaster, because the city has long-refused to use containerized trash collection (the way every other city in the developed world does), and instead tells people to dump trash bags on the sidewalk 3-5 times per week, where they sit for 12 hours at a time before being picked up.
This is not an effective system at all. It exists only because elected officials have not wanted to give up a few free parking spaces every block in order to allow for containerized trash receptacles.
Thankfully, there's a pilot program on one block in midtown Manhattan to "trial" containerized trash collection. It began a few weeks ago, and is scheduled to last one year. Hopefully that will be followed by a wider rollout.
The status quo is sanitary and efficient. All things considered, New York’s garbage problem is on par with its snow problem. Well managed enough to work, but annoying enough around the edges to be fun to bicker about.
If you live in low-density New York, your experience mirrors suburbia; high, and your trash disappears down a building chute. It’s only we who live in the middle density who have to haul garbage to the basement and hear the beeping trucks at night. Even then, it’s clean and works.
Are we talking about the same NYC? Visit Manhattan in mid July/August. Bags of garbage leaking juices and oil out onto the street into a huge greasy spot where the designated collection spot is near the curb. The whole city smells like a toaster oven roasted ballsack.
Then combine that with all the cumulative liters of urine per day from dogs and humans all throughout the city.
<https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...>
Cleaning up after horses (including, often, the horses themselves) is a large part of why and how NYC's municipal waste system evolved to its present state.
You might not haul it to the curb yourself but the building as staff still has to unless you're in a building big enough to have a loading dock that can accommodate a truck to haul away a roll-on container. Most high rises don't even fall into that category. I live in a 20 story building with 157 units and the building staff has to drag the piles of trash out of the compactor room to the sidewalk on collection days.
Every borough except Staten Island is larger than San Francisco [1][2]. Manhattan together with Queens or Brooklyn is bigger than LA, the second-largest city in America. (Staten Island is about the size of Raleigh or Atlanta.)
New York solves problems at a scale no other American city comes close to imagining.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/planning-level/nyc-populat...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
I also noticed your sleight of hand. "Greatest city in the world" includes Tokyo, Paris, Seoul. All far superior to NYC in almost every way, with similar issues of scale.
I love visiting Manhattan and Brooklyn, but frankly have a hard time imagining living there. And I live in SF, which is far from being an ideal city.
Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
I'm forced to consider the likelihood that you are a typically provincial New Yorker with no real perspective on global megacities.
My Uber driver said that to me within the first ride of my landing, and I heard it again and again, from millenials, Gen X, Boomers, basically every type of person I met and from every walk of life, during the many years I lived there.
You guys play this game where you don't say what you mean, and you don't mean what you say, in any context where it's marginally convenient/inconvenient to do so. It's eat or be eaten in NYC. I would hope longtime residents like yourself are just BS'ing the HN community, and not actually delusional about the waters you swim in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...
That's pointing to this spreadsheet hosted by the census:
https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/2020_Census_ua...
But, if we go to this fact table, they give that ~470k number.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/raleighcitynort...
Another politically untenable solution is to do what Taiwan does and force people to put out their garbage in very tight time windows and otherwise store it privately in their houses and businesses, but that is a unproductive use of human time on net.
NY has a lot of row houses, there's no room for a dedicated garbage area. And the alleys are not wide enough for a garbage truck.
Before criticizing a place, at least understand it first.
In NYC, in very dense areas like of Manhattan, I would expect it would make sense to put a container in the bottom of every building, but in rowhouse areas it is reasonable to expect the occupants to walk down to the corner.
The main thing is like so many other aspects of American life we have no domestic examples of best practices. You have to visit foreign cities and pay attention, or invite their experts to come teach your city.
Transport infrastructure in dense areas is "solved" by reducing individual means of transport and increasing shared means of transport. This doesn't align with hyper-individualistic people seeing car transport as their right.
A "fat government" helps building out shared infrastructure, America doesn't have that.
Some people like sharing and cooperating, some people like living under the false impression that they're independent of society.
In certain states there are still laws around water rights that cause unnecessary shortages that could be solved by cooperation, but the laws are there and the big consumers upstream lobby to keep them that way.
Not saying the US isn't great, you've been the economic powerhouse of the world for awhile now, you have accomplished many great things (research topping my list). I just think somewhere you forgot to invest back into shared infrastructure, and that "ours" is better (with exceptions both ways).
There's a bit of my reasoning, which if you wildly disagree with makes us both unreasonable to eachother, whoever is right is up to the future to decide independent of us two.
That's 4-5 stories of ~4 apartments per floor, times however many of those buildings fit in the 900ft/247m length of a block. There's nowhere near enough space on the corner (here's the corner: https://goo.gl/maps/aszPHqrQVGftcqTCA) to collect that much garbage, much less to do it three times a week.
Yes they could build big underground containers. Yes they could reduce the amount of garbage generated. But both are massive projects far beyond "why can't they just".
Obviously. (What else?) Why would that be a massive project?
Also contrary to movies, Manhattan has almost no alley ways either. There's no space for anything. Even when it snows in many areas they have to take the snow and dump it in the East River.
Or, you know, a commercial-sized dumpster.
The trash is already taking up space on the sidewalk. Putting a dumpster to contain it would save space, by keeping it contained.
It is always fun to see people resort to completely illogical arguments to defend the current habits and rat-feeding status quo.
We were talking about the row houses, right?
Most buildings in NYC already have a dedicated garbage area. The issue is that there isn't a dedicated spot for pickup.
That's a solvable problem: put containerized trash receptacles on the street, so the superintendent can put them in the containers, instead of dropping them directly on the sidewalk (which is what they currently do).
Most apartment buildings in NYC don't have garages.
If they tried it people would just leave their garbage on the street. Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.
If you think there's garbage everywhere in NYC, I advise you to never visit most European capitals, and especially not the asian subcontinent. Which is not to shame these places, but more so to say that NYC is doing OK.
Nobody would have to do that. They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb. Unless they live in a multifamily building (which is most of the city), in which case the building superintendent would do that.
> Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.
Because that's the city-sanctioned way for
I mentioned in another post it's mostly row houses, sometimes with the 1st and 2nd floor separate living areas. Not huge apartments - you can't put a dumpster in front of every house.
The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.
This is incorrect. That does not describe the majority of housing units in NYC.
> The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.
I don't know why you're so confidently making this claim, because that's not what's being proposed or being done. There already is a pilot program for containerized trash collection, and - surprise - there's not just one container per block.
It seems to me this sort of trash deposit system would greatly simplify trash collection.
It would be prohibitively expensive, because there's no master record of which pipes/wires/cables/etc. exist in any given location. It's very expensive to dig in Manhattan[0], because you basically have to dig carefully and see what's actually there, rather than having some knowledge of "the gas pipes are in this spot, so we can dig around them". So much of the infrastructure was installed before detailed record-keeping was standard practice.
As far as trash collection in NYC, the main thing that needs to happen is containerized trash collection. Right now, trash bags are just left on the sidewalks 3-5 times per week for 12 or more hours at a time, creating an absolute buffet for rodents.
[0] This actually applies to most of the city, but Manhattan is a combination of the oldest-built and most-densly-built infrastructure, so it's particularly expensive there.
https://www.mbta.com/news/2022-01-27/beginning-march-2022-mb...
Don't get me wrong, I think they are a great solution electrically and for efficiency / sustainability, but require an enormous geographic footprint, central planning and a lot of overhead space which is difficult to find in dense cities.
They've been used in dense cities for generations. How hard can it be?
> require an enormous geographic footprint
What footprint is needed for additional overhead wires?
Electrifying core parts of the route (eg: the most heavily travelled bottlenecks these trucks travel) could fix this issue, enabling charging and heating the battery and cab while still en route or plowing snow.
For garbage trucks you have stop and go movement so EVs eliminate idling. Given the size of the trucks it's probably not a big deal to make sure they have adequate battery capacity.
Plow trucks have a completely different use model where they're run at speed for long periods and one day of plowing could have the same distance traveled as weeks of trash collection. Hybrids would likely be an improvement in efficiency but the same way they do for other trucks - batteries support high demand periods while the generator is fine for the lower sustained loads.
Edit: a drawback of the smaller fleet for snow management is that garbage trucks aren't as well suited for salt/sand/deicer distribution. Nobody designs their garbage trucks to spray. I hope.
Edit2: garbage trucks also have a lot of additional mechanical systems that are probably already electrical, so among other things the ICE versions likely have an oversized alternator to power that.
Eventually there may also be more options with battery swapping - that's a lot more feasible with a fleet within a relatively small geographic region.
The vehicle, when stopped, has other functions to perform. It has hydraulic lifters and compactors that need quite a bit of power to operate. It's a working platform, not a simple garbage transportation mechanism.
Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 times per day.. and during one of those legs the truck is fully loaded with possibly up to as much as 20,000lbs of trash.
Finally, they have to operate in all conditions, in both very low and very high temperatures. The logistics of this aren't as simple as it would be for a standard vehicle.
Massive upfront cost (infrastructure and NY seems to be a bit fraught) and also likely expensive to run, but with high population density it’s got to be better.
However this would then have a fleet of snow trucks that weren’t used 99% of the time, as the rubbish was mostly sorted.
They're trying to map these things out but it will probably take more than a decade. Until that happens you can't even begin to budget for a new city-wide underground infrastructure project. Any project has to be point to point and focused.
Let alone the issue of the rats.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-10/nobody-kn...
Ironically one of the largest vacuum trays system in the world IS in NYC… but it serves Roosevelt Island, not the “mainland”
In much of London, they drive a relatively short distance to offload the waste. Some is handled locally (e.g. composting food and garden waste). The rest is taken the much longer distance by barge or rail.
Barge: https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/news/2019-news/june-2019/thame...
The engines in diesel garbage trucks often run at idle when those hydraulics are working, lifting a 100 kg residential can or a 1-ton dumpster through a few meters of motion is not noticeable to a 350 HP diesel, accelerating 30 tons of truck and trash in the same amount of time is why they're equipped with so much more engine power.
Power in kW = Pressure in bar * Flow in liters per minute / 600
2.5 kW = 150 bar * 10 l/min / 600
or a little more than 3 horsepower. That gives you about 15 tons of force. Maybe the trucks use two cylinders, one on each side, so double it? Plus 10% for pump inefficiencies, and 5% for electric motor inefficiencies (200% for diesel-to-kinetic losses)?
Still negligible compared to accelerating a huge steel box plus dozens of tons of trash to roadway speeds 1000 times a day.
Looking up some existing PTOs and pumps on munciepower.com, it looks like typical refuse systems are provisioned with PTOs and pumps rated for on the order of 10-50 kW, and diesel "prime movers" of 200-400 kW.
EV's are great at delivering high power on demand, for short periods. A selling point of Tesla since the Roadster days was the astounding acceleration. Peak torque at a dead start is a key characteristic of electric motors.
What's far more challenging is range, a problem Tesla has addressed quite capably for passenger vehicles, though which remains largely unmet for cargo and heavy-transport equipment (including snow ploughs).
Interestingly, there was a period where a non-electrical power network was fairly frequently encountered at neighbourhood or city scale: hydraulic power networks. These often operated high-power loads, though typically for short periods or efforts as my first paragraph describes. Hydraulic accumulators lifted weights or water and provided on-demand power for moving lock gates, cargo hoists, and other typically industrial tasks. These were developed in the early 19th century and many remained operational well into the 20th, with the Wikipedia article below listing several operating into the 1970s.
Smaller such networks exist in dentist's offices, auto repair shops, and in many Amish workshops, based on compressed air, and utilising similar principles.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_power_network>
(I'm presuming LeifCarrotson knows much of this, others may not. I didn't myself until a few years ago.)
Swappable batteries at the dump depot? There's a company in Australia doing swappable batteries for trucks (https://thedriven.io/2022/03/25/worlds-largest-electric-truc...)
I may be biased by my experiences. At home the transfer station is about 4 miles away, and at my parents' place that I've been cleaning out it's probably 1.5-2 miles by road - or less than half a mile if I could go up a couple hundred yards of steep forested hillside.
Having driven a Hybrid 'Truck' (really more of a ute[2]) for just under a year, I can say that EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most [3].
[1] - On the whole, this is still better than doing nothing with it and just allowing it to vent, or burning on-site (which, sometimes you do see at local landfills.)
[2] - The Maverick -does- do a decent job IMO of showing what's possible with a small purpose-built hybrid truck or truck-like thing; However manufacturers that make bigger EVs are likely reluctant to build a truly 'minimum viable product', as it will bite into fleet sales of larger EV/Hybrids introduced.
[3] - Recently, we had sustained sub 10F temps. My overall mileage went from 35-42MPG to 25-30MPG.
Not necessarily. The heaviest snow falls just below freezing. Very low temperatures bring light, fluffy stuff — the kind skiers crave, and that a human can lift huge shovels of.
Be interesting if they're able to clean/compress/use methane produced by the dump itself instead of having it flared off - or drive a generator tied into battery charging. It really needs to be burned instead of just being released as-is, might as well get use from it.
Garbage truck fleets are expected to cover every street and every block in their service area which adds up to more of a city than bus services cover since they don’t stop on every block at every house and building. The lines also require maintenance and you also need to train operators to re-establish the connections not if they drop but when they drop. Doesn’t seem worth it to me, at least not for New York.
Caternary lines have always seemed like a good solution but there must be a good reason they aren't more popular.
Also, garbage collection in NYC seems to be a weird mishmash of rules and providers. Again there must be a historical reason but from the outside it has never made sense to me. https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly...
What reason?
However, you don't need availability on every street, just enough to charge the vehicles sufficiently for the smaller streets.
Anyway, I'm guessing it's been considered and I'd love to see the study.
The maneuvering in case of trouble situation is covered by a tiny diesel engine that can move the bus around to the point where it can reconnect to a working segment of the network.
One problem with reducing the coverage is that it is relatively easy to take away the lines but the poles are in large chunks of concrete and not easy to remove at all.
This is a good chance to share a link to the guy with a Prius modified to run on the bus power in San Francisco: https://thebolditalic.com/hacked-prius-running-on-muni-power...
Because it's a complete fabrication -> every ton of conducting wire could replace 100 tons of battery in busses and trucks. It is also over 10 times cheaper per ton, so in material costs it is less than 1/1000th of the cost.
The only issue is that the city needs to pay for the wire, but it does not know how to charge a large array of private companies that might want to use the wires, there is lack of standardisation and metering.
We think "Well gas cars transport their own energy source, so electric cars must too" and that will probably be one of the things future generations laugh at us for (in the same way older generations thought flapping wing costumes could generate heavier-than-air flight).
Hydrocarbons are an extreme outlier in terms of energy density (vs. weight) and the fact that we are trying to replicate that model with other non-outlier materials is crazy.
Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.
The sad part of Elon being so successful is that all he does is see places where we used to do things well (we electrified the whole country very quickly, built an advanced space program in 2-3 decades, etc.), notices we lack the will to keep doing those things (even I understand the overhead wires thing is a moonshot), and comes up with the pragmatic "OK but not really great" solution.
Seriously, if you had said in 1960 "the richest man in 2020 will focus on cars, low-earth-orbit rockets, and tunnel boring machines" people would be extremely bummed by the lack of progress.
One thing I have often wondered is how often they'd need access to electricity if they had a small battery to cover for the times they're not connected.
i.e., do they need to be connected at /all/ points of their journey? Or just often enough that they can get enough of a charge to make it to the next point? e.g. if there was induction charging at stop signs or traffic lights, would that be enough for a majority of trips?
This seems like it should just be a bit of a game of statistical coverage of charging points, time spent at them, speed of charging, and so on.
So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?
I think that is a much more solvable problem than charging and batteries yes.
Do I think it will happen in my lifetime? No. But there's a reason that we don't have battery-powered trains, and it's not like in 2022, cars are that much more "off-road" than trains are "off-track"
https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...
Do you think adding hundreds of KG of batteries to two billion cars is more reasonable?
We produce enough conductors to wire every street in America in a couple years. At the current rate of battery production, replacing all cars in the world will take over 100 years.
It only seems like a daunting problem on roads because we don't already do it.
Further, electric lines exist mostly on shared poles. For safety reasons, shared poles require a buffer space between MV and distribution voltage power lines and communications lines. This means that the typically 600 VDC trolley bus power cannot be added at the level of communications lines (well, can be with some work, but in practice it is expensive and complex) without compromising this safety buffer, requiring deenergization when communications utility work is underway. In many cases they cannot be near communications cables even if communications work is prohibited when the system is energized, because of the risk of inadvertent contact putting 600VDC on coaxial or telephone lines which could create fatal situations. Additional expense is required to mitigate this problem.
Trolley lines also have more complex physical loading requirements than power lines because they must cope with the lateral forces of vehicles, so they usually need to be anchored to both sides of the street on crosswires, to poles that were engineered for that use. Most of the time attaching trolley lines to existing poles will not be feasible for these reasons and they will need to either go on dedicated supports, be attached to buildings (the engineering and real estate paperwork for this is complex), or have existing poles replaced with ones engineered to support trolley lines as well.
Like the parent comment said, it would be a hybrid able to use battery power when not on the line. With this type of system you could then just run parallel lines instead of criss-crossing lines.
Batteries are fun and all, but they are way harder to deal with vs. anything you described; they're just earlier in the development curve, so the problems seem more solvable.
They’re ugly eyesores.
They only exist in a handful of cities in the USA to begin with.
They limit your driving speed.
They create additional noise.
They can detach fairly easily, impeding traffic. Much bigger issue if this could potentially happen to every vehicle.
We are really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. At this moment in time, Plug-in hybrids are the superior technology for nearly every application. I don't understand why they get so overlooked by consumers and manufacturers alike.
I just don't understand it. A car that can drive ~40 miles on pure electric that has an ICE for longer trips would satisfy the needs of everyone. For like 90+% of people, it would mean never using gas for their commute while also eliminating range anxiety.
I'm especially surprised about the lack of plug-in hybrids for semi trucks. I'd think having a little extra electronic torque would help considerably when accelerating. It doesn't need to go 0-60 in 20 seconds while carrying 80K lbs like the Tesla Semi claims, but certainly having extra power could be useful in some scenarios. Heck, just having regen braking would be a game changer when going down hills. No noise from a Jake Brake, and no worries about burning up brake pads.
Plus gas is a very volatile mix that degrades; you must run the ICE regularly to ensure the tank gets cycled.
But they also only stuck it with a 2 gallon tank.
All in all, a mild shortening of the life of your engine and perhaps triggering some maintenance sooner than otherwise.
Realistically, not much. The people saying “bad for you” aren’t wrong but they also fail to mention the effect size. It’s not particularly relevant unless you want to own the same car for a few hundred thousand miles and absolutely minimize maintenance. (Small aircraft for example, you want to care a lot about these things because they’re very expensive, when the engine fails you’ll be thousands of feet above the ground, and a well maintained plane can last decades. Your daily driver probably doesn’t have any of these issues)
There are various preventative things you can do to minimize the effects anyway. It’s one of those internet things where yeah they’re not wrong exactly but they need to relax. Having too much beer and cheeseburgers last night long term probably wasn’t the best decision, but you know what I’ll probably be fine.
Leaking gas in a car for a long time is like eating too much fast food. Ok yeah not the greatest but are you the type of person who cares enough to never eat McDonald’s? Make your decisions according to your disposition and don’t take people telling you you’re wrong too seriously.
I also only have the oil changed every 10K miles which horrifies my friends.
I only change my oil every 10k miles (or really 6-8k most often) but in an engine and with an oil specifically rated for such. Your jiffylube 5w30 (if that’s what you’re doing, if you’ve actually got an oil rated for 10k you’re fine) isn’t going to do great. It’s maybe 50-50 whether bad oil change schedule will be the thing that kills your car.
10K is probably fine with full synthetic oil if you're driving conservatively.
Now, if the engine runs long enough to fully warm up, this isn't the end of the world. Any water will turn to steam and be pushed out through the exhaust. However, if the engine only runs for a short period of time, water can sit inside of it and cause corrosion. Realistically this is only a problem if you repeatedly allow ethanol-containing fuel to sit for a long time, and also repeatedly run an ICE for very short periods of time.
It is a bigger problem for boat motors, because they operate in a wet environment already. It is also a bigger problem for carbureted engines, where fuel sits in the carburetor bowl while the engine is not running. This allows hygroscopic fuels to corrode the inside of the carburetor while the engine sits.
Ignoring ethanol, it is also true that gasoline breaks down over time. However, it typically takes many months before gasoline breaks down enough to worry. There are also additives that help stabilize gasoline for longer storage.
TL;DR in a reasonably modern-ish car, it's probably fine. In small engines like lawn mowers, it is best to either use ethanol-free gasoline or to completely drain the fuel before storing the mower for the winter. In antique cars with carburetors, it is best to use ethanol-free gasoline.
Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough. The first thing to go are the cam shafts.
https://www.aviationpros.com/home/article/10387461/corrosion...
> Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough.
I was always told to take the car for an actual drive (including a highway stretch) to achieve these ends, otherwise the moisture you're expelling accumulates in the exhaust system.
Looking around the neighborhood, I assume the people with the rusted-out mufflers are the ones that just let it idle.
Since I have yet to see any of these various claims having any impact on the maintainability or function of my car, I think I'll stick to my plan of not wasting the gas in my engine for months at a time.
> This more than doubles the complexity, increases weight
I mean, US consumers already put up with this when it came to automatic transmissions. But the cost/maintenance problems were a fair trade-off for convenience.
And in the case of plug-in hybrids, they are VERY convenient. You almost never need to get gas, but you can still go on a road trip without any pre-planning.
Europeans, too. Automatics crossed over 50% in the last couple years.
The volt pretty much already is a case study for the other points. It’s not really that much work.
The later point can be resolved with software that uses the gas on occasion.
hybrid systems are complex but really not much more complex than traditional ICE when you consider that they no longer need starters or alternators, have transmissions with no shifting components, and can use electric A/C compressors to avoid accessory belts entirely.
They also have much longer maintenance intervals because the engine is only running ~2/3rds of the time.
Electric cars are of course simpler but have cost and range issues that are prohibitive for some use cases, not to mention will usually weigh much more than even an equivalent plugin hybrid.
Suffice to say there is a reason that the best taxi vehicle has been the Prius for more than a decade. efficient and rock solid reliable despite increased complexity.
Most importantly though, you can make 10 plugin hybrids with the battery from one BEV. As long as raw materials for batteries are a bottleneck then we should be seriously considering PHEVs as a stopgap if as we can make sure they are getting charged.
My PHEV has a two year maintenance cycle, and the ICE portion is changing the oil, mostly. Yes, at some point you'll need to do a timing chain/belt, and there's incidentals; you'll never need to replace emissions equipment on a BEV, and most of the unscheduled maintenance on my ICE equipped cars has been related to emissions: EGR valves, o2 sensors, EVAP canisters, etc.
The engine control system takes care of running the ICE regularly, it's not something you have to worry about. I'd expect it to push you to fill up the tank about twice a year if you're mostly driving electric. I drive my PHEV mostly gas, and not that often anyway, so I just fill up every 500 miles or so.
If we don't ramp down fossils by regulation, all this EV business is worse than useless anyway (we'll just end up with the emissions from battery production in addition to burning up all the oil we can pump - maybe sold abroad if domestically there's a lot of renewables available, but still burned).
If I had a plug in hybrid, it wouldn’t get plugged in.
Hybrid cars are, effectively, enablers. The not-even temptation to just top it up, in under a minute, at an entirely acceptable cost (given that you could afford a hybrid, you can afford gas) is the best way to prevent people from actually going electric.
Plus, from an industry perspective, hybrids are the perfect excuse for manufacturers to just keep spending on ICE improvements rather than EV improvements: as long as the total package seems to get more mileage every year, no one's paying attention to the fact that the EV parts don't get improved nearly as much as the ICE parts do. And because hybrids cut into EV sales, manufacturers have the perfect excuse to keep working on ICE tech because "the majority of people are still buying cars with an ICE or ICE component".
Hybrids would be great if people were rational. Instead, people are the exact opposite, and hybrids are the perfect "let's not move to full EV" excuse for consumers and manufacturers alike.
For a while I commuted 80 miles a day which would have meant daily charges were more or less necessary. Having to take the car out for a walk every night would have been irritating.
You also don't want most people to be driving EVs, because then it quickly becomes a situation like bikes are with last mile transport: if everyone used them, they wouldn't work so well, but so long as only a few people are using them it works great for you. If everyone brought a bike on the train we'd have to redesign trains to be far longer and lengthen underground stations to match; right now its fine because its only maybe 2-3 people per train car with a bike in my experience, but if that changes the fixes are expensive.
Likewise with EV chargers, if we see mass adoption, we'd have to foot the bill to turn every basically zero cost spit of pavement people park on into dedicated charging infrastructure. I'm assuming a municipal charger will have to be substantially more rugged and able to handle more abuse than your average home charger installation. Estimates on the internet vary for what a l2 charger costs, lets say its $10000 for one fit for a public parking spot. That would put the cost to convert the 6 million parking spots in Los Angeles at $60 billion. Sure that's probably not sound math, but it doesn't seem cheap, especially factoring in ongoing maintenance and replacement.
Also, not everyone will even need L2 everywhere all the time, because many will be able to charge at home or use fast-chargers in emergencies. You don't have to be near-full at all times. You could deploy them at only 1/N spots, say something closer to 1/4 of all the spots, if even that (apartments might need 1/1, but streets and business parking lots/garages would need far less. You don't need them in any short-term street parking areas, as L2 is mostly-useless unless the car is sitting in place for hours).
You also don't necessarily need to have the raw power to run them all simultaneously: you can have local groups powershare (e.g. deploy 8 chargers with a feed-in that supports 4, and the chargers can coordinate to drop their charge rate as more people plug in).
If those wild assumptions are true ($1k, 1/4 of parking spots), LA's bill drops to $1.5B, which seems much more reasonable. The capacity will build up organically over time as EV adoption grows, starting with corporate and apartment parking lots.
I think in this hypothetical all-EV future, there would be other compensating changes to the city as well. Like, all gas stations would go poof, and their tanks, and the fuel delivery trucks, and most of the refineries, and all of the associated impacts on peoples' health from both the fueling and the car exhausts, etc. There's a lot of potential upside to offset any reasonable electrification costs.
Frankly having my own charger at home would make owning a full EV even more convenient over the hybrid.
In some cases reliability actually improves, as the extremely reliable electric motor can replace things such as reverse gear and the starter motor, reducing complexity of the ICE system and transmission. The only parts being serviced that you pay for continue to be the gas bits exactly as before.
That said, I really appreciate early adopters of EVs who are helping push the infrastructure.
[0]https://nypost.com/2013/06/30/mta-hasnt-purchased-a-hybrid-b...
[1]https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/200-electric-buses-are-...
The MTA operates 5,800 buses [1]. At 525 kWh per bus [2], that’s 3 GwH of batteries fleetwide. Charging those daily is enough to keep a large power plant busy.
[1] https://new.mta.info/project/zero-emission-bus-fleet
[2] https://chargedevs.com/newswire/new-yorks-mta-orders-60-more...
It's okay as an intermediate step but all electric is much better long term.
Not for NMC batteries, which continue to go up in price (so much for the downward EV battery price trend EV promoters promised would materialize with the economies of scale).
And LFP batteries don't have the necessary performance characteristics for high load applications.
The great EV brownout of 2023 has arrived.
Sure, but given the long term might be longer than the average consumer holds onto a new car, there's a lot of value in a good intermediate solution.
The average person drives less than 30 miles a day. Building a 360 mile EV battery just to handle long-tail events seems very wasteful.
Given that Lithium battery production is largely the bottleneck to full electrification, you could use the batteries from 1 Tesla and make 6 plug-in hybrids from them. And then get pretty close to 6x-ing the amount of carbon saved.
Hybrids are probably the end-game for any forms of transportation that require operation for a long period of time. A dump truck, for example, could have its 12L, 400hp diesel engine replaced with a 1L, 60hp engine that charges the batteries that drive the electric motors. Since the auxiliary engine only needs to be able to provide just enough juice for cruising, it can be made much smaller.
This is how the LEVC taxis work in London; a 30kWh battery, charged by a 1.5L 3cyl petrol engine. Although in this case the kerb weight is about 200-300kg more than the previous (diesel) black cabs.
Plugin hybrids cars are expensive, not at the least because they require both a traditional ICE drivetrain and a large battery and electric motor, and specialized power split transmissions to make those work together.
Therefore, most plugin hybrids are higher end (just like EVs) and marketed at wealthier people who want to drive electric most of the time but have range anxiety or don't want to deal with DC fast charging. Look for yourself:
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g15377500/plug-in-hybr...
That said, they can make a lot of sense if you need 1 car that can do everything, both short daily drives and long trips. The sleeper hit here is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The new ones have 38miles electric range and seat 7.
However, the falling price of batteries and growth of DC fast charging infrastructure means that they will PHEVs will be a bridge technology.
Many city buses however are starting to convert to some form of plugin hybrid, although even their
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_electric_bus#List_of_tr...
However, even city buses are moving towards full electrification since the maintenance and fuel costs tend to dominate the total cost of ownership for them, and those are much lower with full electric.
The thought occurs to me to make the rear wheels powered by the ICE and the front wheels electric.
Then no wacky transmissions.
I don't know anything about a "power split" transmission, but isn't that the sort of thing a differential gear set does very well at?
That's why for instance we do not have much multi-motors EVs without a mechanical coupling...
AFAIK, no multi-motor EV has a mechanical coupling between the motors. Do you know of a counter-example?
A planetary gear set is often a component of a power split transmission, but there are other components. The key thing is that it is able to blend power from multiple sources [1]
> The thought occurs to me to make the rear wheels powered by the ICE and the front wheels electric.
> Then no wacky transmissions.
The problem is you then have a car that switches the basic drive characteristics (FWD to RWD) depending on what fuel you are using. Everything from the chassis to the suspension in a car is designed according to where the power is coming from.
Mitsubishi addressed this problem in their Outlander PHEV by using 2 electric motors, 1 on each axle, with the front axle being supplemented by the ICE engine (via a 1 way clutch) when more power is needed than the small battery can output, or when the battery is depleted [2]. This doesn't completely solve the problem but makes it less noticeable, and eliminates the need for a mechanical driveshaft between the front and rear.
Also, this approach only switches the vehicle from FWD to AWD, not from FWD to RWD. It's the same with dual motor EVs, they switch from 1 axle drive to 2 axle drive - they don't switch from one axle completely to the other. Imagine your car suddenly becoming RWD when the battery was depleted. That would be weird, and potentially even dangerous.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941....
By using two electric motors connected to a planetary gearset you can replace the starter and alternator, allow for electric drive and regenerative braking, and provide a continuously variable transmission for the gas engine all with a set of constantly meshed gears (i.e. no shifting components).
They have to carry with them an entire gas engine, plus large electric motors, plus a huge battery. That's a lot of mass. This makes them inefficient as gas vehicles, and less efficient as EVs.
Take a look at the Toyota Prius Prime, considered a great PHEV. It's got almost the same gas milage in combined city/highway driving as my 2012 Honda Civic (around 50 mpg). The Prius has got a slight edge. But that's combined, which presumes 45% highway and 55% city. You don't want to take that car on a road trip because once the battery is dead, you'll be needing to stop to refill the gas tank every 90 minutes. My Civic will drive 600km or more on highways, easily.
PHEVs are the best vehicle if you drive less than 60km per day, and mostly have stop-go city driving (so you can recharge on braking).
The 2021 Prius Prime is rated at 53mpg highway. Let's assume that is optimistic and it gets 50mpg. Its fuel tank holds 11.4 gallons, but you don't want to run it dry - let's say 10 gallons are usable. That is a 500-mile (~800km) range after the battery is dead. At 75mph, that requires stopping to refill the gas tank every 6 hours and 40 minutes.
The most efficient 2012 Honda Civic is the hybrid, which is EPA rated at 44mpg highway. That is very efficient. However, 44mpg -> 53mpg is a 20% increase in distance per gallon of fuel. The Prius Prime is significantly more efficient. Since we're intentionally ignoring electric range in these numbers, I think the efficiency gains are mostly from the 9 years of R&D that passed between these two cars being built.
Interestingly, the non-plugin 2021 Prius Eco is also rated at 53mpg highway. I do think it's odd that the extra weight from a larger battery didn't have a bigger impact on fuel economy. It looks like that makes a small difference in town, where the Prius Eco gets 58mpg vs the Prius Prime's 55mpg.
And it will get much better fuel economy than the Civic as soon as traffic gets bad or some city driving is required.
Picking highway MPG cherry picks the solution that makes the Hybrid or EV look the worst compared to the traditional ICE car.
Not that the Civic is/was a bad car. But all cars are a lot bigger and safer than they were, so it's almost always cherry picking to go back and take an example of an old fuel efficient car. A lot of those old cars could not pass modern emissions or safety testing, they got their good fuel economy by being a) Slow b) Light. A big part of light was not having extra mass for safety or emissions. On top of all that the mileage ratings for cars have also changed, so you can't even directly compare the ratings for an old civic with a new one.
I do wholeheartedly agree with you, though. Even when cherry picking data (highway mpg's, ignoring miles driven in EV mode, choosing the most efficient Civic) and ignoring other factors (larger, safer, lower emissions), the Prius Prime is much more efficient. I think plugin hybrids have their place.
The general complaint that I hear about other PHEVs is that car manufacturers publish the "combined highway/ city" rating, which is weighted heavily in favor of city driving- which is where a PHEV is incredible thanks to regenerative braking.
But if you're not using the brakes and just driving a long distance, your battery stops helping after 30-ish minutes and now you're just in a gas car with an undersized engine carrying a very heavy battery.
Better to go pure EV instead, which is what I'm on a damned long waiting list to do right now.
This is just wrong. The Prius Prime has an 11.4 gal tank and is rated 53mpg on the highway [1]. If you drive 70mph you'll need to refill after 7+ hours of driving and 500+mi.
[1] https://www.toyota-slo.com/blog/the-new-2022-toyota-prius-pr...
Nit: it's the low average speed of stop-go driving (less air resistance) that makes city driving more efficient for EVs. You'd get even better efficiency for the same average speed if it weren't stop-go driving.
Another tempted but so far not promising was the hybrid-series EVs (like ships, with electrical engine powered by a generator) so far Nissan have tempted again, but honestly sound to be a failure...
I want a full conversion just as much as anyone who lives on this planet does, but I can see some cases being allowed for as our technology catches up to the lingering problems.
A total conversion to electric isn't feasible in a lot of places like that.
During our lifetime there are certain ICE applications that we really have no good alternatives for. So finding a palatable cost for carbon removal we are collectively willing to pay buys us a lot of options.
For a snow plow that needs to run for hours at a time, I suspect that the additional cost of the batteries of a plug-in hybrid isn't worth it over a normal hybrid, or just a diesel-powered engine.
We don't need to electrify everything, and even if that will happen in the long run, we don't need to rush to do it now. What percentage of total NYC emissions come from these trucks? Probably a pretty small portion.
It's not politically correct for NYC to buy more diesel trucks, but it is probably what they should do.
Of course electric busses are vastly more convenient. They are almost silent compared to the heavy noise a diesel bus makes on acceleration. Their routes are predictable, so charging can be accounted for. Although a bus can also mount very large batteries to begin with.
But apart from the slight difference in maintenance quota, there also was a problem in winter. When it was cold outside many busses refused to work. They would need to stay within a depot in winter which increases costs again. Still electric busses seem to be an efficient way to curb in-city emissions and noise pollution to a large degree. And I think the problem with temperature can surely be solved somehow.
I do think perfect became the enemy of good here. But there are still valid economic reasons for the private companies that provide these vehicles. Ultimately they don't get paid for their vehicles to be more economical and less noisy.
I don't think it is worth to replace heavy machinery yet. There are just too few vehicles that the investment doesn't seem too reasonable yet as long as there are that many more efficient things to replace.
* They solve the power availability problem
* They reduce the need for batteries, reducing cost and waste from manufacturing and disposal.
* They could be used for electrifying other vehicles like buses
* Their ROI seems especially high in dense cities, especially NY: One overhead wire serves all the traffic on the road below. Plus, dense cities like NY already have infrastructure citywide, and experience servicing it.
* What if we could provide power to electric cars in NYC. That could be transformative. I don't know that electric wires would be the best form for that, or how it could be done (is there a safe way to embed something in the ground?).
* Some point out that the garbage trucks need to cover almost every street in the city. The power supply doesn't have to do that; it only has to be available enough to charge the vehicles sufficietly to plow/pickup on the side street and return to the main road.
The trolley poles could be mounted to the cab, it would seem.
1. High rise apartments generate a lot more trash, but they already have bulk garbage disposal systems and thus aren't part of the problem of picking up garbage bags off the street.
Not that number exactly, but many streets or blocks have no trash - office buidings, the highrise apts you mention, parks, highways, etc. And it's time, not distance that matters - you can charge the trucks where they spend the most time. My point is that you don't need 100% coverage or likely near that.
A drawback is that garbage pickup needs probably don't align with bus, snow plowing, or other needs, so ROI is lower for those wires.
The fact that it's time, not distance, that matters makes matters event worse: garbage trucks will spend a brief period of time on a major thoroughfare to get to their trash pickup zone, but then spend hours and and hours working through block and after block of residential and low density (for NYC) neighborhoods with no overlap between truck routes. There are no roads where you can deploy power lines that will charge garbage trucks for any significant stretch of time. The only place where garbage trucks do spend long stretches of time is the depot: and you just need normal EV charges there. The low-density, distributed nature of garbage pickup fundamentally is at odds with overhead lines.
What makes you say it's uniform? Skyscapers, businesses, and others not using public trash services aren't clustered on one street; you find them all over town. The number of stops per street can vary considerably.
1, 1, 9, 1, 2, 0, 8, 1, 9
In reality it's like this:
1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1
There's a few gaps where there's little trash to pick up. But there's no hot spots where there's massive amounts of garbage bags to pick up off the street.
Overhead charging systems with automatic connection for buses have been developed by a couple of vendors (e.g. OppCharge) but are only used while stationary and have not achieved wide deployment. Wireless charging via pavement-embedded coils is actually a much better established technology and is in reasonably wide use for electric buses, but also hasn't been demonstrated in motion and is even more expensive to install than overhead catenaries.
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/06/03/the-mtas-new-electric...
I wonder if something can be embedded in the street. Obviously, a subway-style third rail would be a bad idea!
Even if you kept a percentage of plows gas, you'd be risking the scale of power outages not overcoming your back up capacity
After heavy snow are mostly plowed, its a very common sight on busy city blocks to see snow hauling/removal and melting happening overnight.
Its just that nothing related to their snow removal obligations is small stuff.
https://theprepared.org/features-feed/montreal-snow
And this article makes it seem like a huge investment, but in reality these workers do other jobs most of the year, in construction, roadworks, gardening, waste management, etc.
It really seems like NY are wedded to their old ways -- something that was a sensible reuse of an asset (garbage trucks) has solidified into the only possible way to do it. It might be bureaucracy and unions, unimaginative leadership, or inability to allocate the cost due to politics, but it isn't technical.
The first step is informing citizens when their streets will be cleared. In dense, downtown neighborhoods, most people park on the street and their cars need to move. No parking signs get installed block by block and notifications go out through the city-maintained snow removal app, InfoNeige (equivalent to InfoSnow in English). Municipal lots are opened up with free parking, and as one final warning, tow trucks blare a siren before hauling away any outstanding vehicles.
Are these current trucks doing 12 hour shifts plowing snow and hauling garbage on a single tank of diesel, or are they refueling? I get that fast changing infrastructure is hard and waiting 15-90 minutes to charge a battery isn’t ideal.
But couldn’t they stop to swap out batteries or have another vehicle meet each truck with replacements?
Edit: Googling suggests that garbage trucks get 3mpg on average, with a 70-90 gallon tank and go 25k mi/yr on average (80mi/day 6-day week) so one tank would cover a whole day.
3mpg is awful though which does seem to support electrification being a good plan for this use case.
Given these trucks almost never get highway speeds, I would assume it’s even as good as 3mpg because heavy idling uses less fuel than highway speeds, but stop and go is much worse.
I assume EVs would have some of the same stop/go efficiency issues for stop/start but that would gain somewhat on idling and breaking.
That was all sort of a tangent, the point is that most garbage trucks are built on a truck platform, the Mack LR, that is specifically a garbage truck platform. I believe I have seen cement mixers built on the LR platform too but Mack doesn't seem to advertise it for anything other than garbage trucks.
Cargo ships. Jumbo jets. Military aircraft. Specialized industrial vehicles, such as those used for mines.
Unless these use cases are made obsolete (possible, such as military) society will depend on fossil fuels for many decades to come.
The mining industry is in a full swing transition towards a low environmental impact mode of operation, and its key players are working to phase out diesel vehicles, which are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions and generate high operating costs. Currently, there are no electric-powered heavy-duty trucks on the market that meet the difficult operational and climate needs of open-pit mines. Faced with the industry’s new needs, IVI, Propulsion and the NRC brought together select partners to make the first-ever electric heavy-duty vehicle for the mining sector.
To ensure the success of this major project, Fournier et Fils, a recognized operator in the mining sector, will provide the project with a Western Star 6900XD truck with a 40-ton loading capacity, as well as its technical experts, who will assist the electrification experts in converting the truck to accommodate the new components. The motorization aspects will be developed by Dana TM4, a world leader in electric motors.
https://www.danatm4.com/news-events/a-first-for-canadas-open...
https://investors.caterpillar.com/news/news-details/2022/Cat...
A lot of industrial vehicles that need high torque at low speed are effectively turbodiesel generators driving eletric motors already.
Replacing such a setup with a battery is a lot easier that a full blown ICE vehicle.
Like the ones that generate more power than they use?
> Because of the requirement that it fuel the entire fleet within an hour in the event of a snow emergency, natural gas hasn’t proved practical especially since CNG fueling stations require too much space in such a dense city, according to Commissioner Garcia. Right now the fleet is about to undertake initial testing with renewable diesel, which is not only better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but can be used as a complete replacement for diesel, not just as a 5 to 20% blend.
So they already forwent CNG (unlike most municipalities) because of this requirement.
One of the few business books worth reading, the Innovator's Dilemma, is all about this, and is supposedly beloved in the tech business. It's where "disruption" entered marketing discussion.
How much gasoline was distributed back in 1930? 10% of today? 2%? Seems they did fine?
These buses usually have some battery, but not a lot, and coming on and off the wires is often a manual procedure.
I see so far no feasibility study about:
- converting highways to rails with dual-usage vehicles (all vehicles, cars and trucks banning bikes) so vehicles can run normally on road but for just the long range usage they run full electric form grid, converting them to wheels only for going out or maneuvering on a faulty vehicles;
- crafting a urban rail network again at least for some "important traversing roads".
Perhaps the result would be negative anyway, but at least a broad simulation with public discussion, some eventual experiment etc...
The answer to me is just living without being able to plow for 12 hours straight charge up in between, and buy some more trucks or battery packs to run shifts. Just ask if diesel plow trucks didn’t exist - what would you do?
One thing that's clear: until battery-powered EVs are able to handle real muscular work (snow removal, hauling, plowing, etc.), diesel engines will be purchased, maintained and fueled by all levels of authority. Exactly how will roads be maintained without graders, pavers, etc.?
First, the climate change models are imperfect. In the worst case we're already out of time, in the best case we have a lot. A lot of people stopped believing in Climage Change when Al Gore's chosen predictions did not come true on the timeline he suggested in "An Inconvenient Truth". Being overly alarmist can cost credibility, which leads to my next point: there is only so far people are willing to go voluntarily to fight climate change. At some point they will say the expenses are not justified, especially when aggressive predictions do not come true. "Prediction is hard, especially about the future" as Robert Oppenheimer said.
How much is the average American, let alone the average global citizen willing to spend, willing to lower their quality of life to protect the climate? This isn't a theoretical matter of eating a few less hamburgers, it's about spending weeks in a cold house in Winter instead of a toasty, comfy one. "I'll just put on a sweater", doesn't work for everyone. In fact there is a huge racial equity issue involved with telling people to turn down their thermostat: darker skinned people are genetically tuned for warmer climates. It's a lot more painful for a Somalian immigrant in Minneapolis to be forced to run their thermostat at 58 degrees Fahrenheit in the midst of a sub-zero Winter than, say, someone of Swedish heritage.
Once people reach their voluntary limits of sacrifice for the climate change cause, things get a lot more difficult. Do you simply force them to comply? How? What kind of force do you use? What sort of dystopian methods must be employed to force people to make sacrifices they don't want to make?
My point is this: a measured, careful, response to Climate Change will likely yield better long term results than a panic driven response based on the most aggressive climate models. Just as in a fire drill people are encouraged to act in an orderly manner to avoid the suboptimal outcome of mayhem, a measured, thoughtful response, that balances costs will lead to a better outcome. We only have one chance to do this, let's do it right.
Other than this ploughing requirement, they seem a good early opportunity for conversion.
Improving fleets has large ROI. The benefit is all the emissions from all those vehicles. The cost should be lowered per vehicle due to standardization, and due to professional managers, maintainers, and drivers who can handle much more complexity and deal with novel issues.
I have always thought that municipal road services had great potential to be electrified via partial catenary: take power from (and charge batteries) where the roads are electrified, discharge battery where the roads are not electrified.
They're optimizing for trained drivers who can drive safely in the snow rather than hire two.
For a dangerous job on snowy roads, I think the fewer people employed with better pay is better than more people with lower pay for the same skills.
That said, there are a lot of places which can buy EV garbage trucks before we get to the snow or ice.
Who's not buying them is not as relevant when we're supply capped on the production of decent trucks with batteries in them.
Sure, it affects the total-market calculations & how the development is funded, but might not change how many are sold per-year until the production scales.
It is much more efficient to press the thousands garbage trucks into this rapid snow plowing service a few days per year than to waste 20 acres storing snow plows for the 350 days per year when they are not needed.
So, were there separate trucks for the two tasks, the trash trucks would sit idle until after the snow plow trucks had finished their rounds.
Given the infrequency and relatively small volume of snow NYC gets, plus the curbside trash collection, sharing trucks and drivers is reasonably efficient.
As for why they use garbage trucks to plow, I speculate that it's an issue of scale. Buying a special purpose plow truck to replace every garbage truck that currently does double duty would leave you with a pretty significant/expensive fleet of trucks that are sitting idle most of the time (not to mention taking up space, which is at a premium in NYC).
They aren’t looking hard at all. If you just had a super capacitor bank to capture regen, all the energy from the stop and go could be retained and they could probably run the truck on the batteries that they are currently saying last only 4 hours.
But "they aren't looking, why don't they just.." really rubs me the wrong way. Surely these people are experts in their own field and know what's available. After all, they are ordering trucks from a vendor, not designing trucks to their own unique requirements. Plus these Mack trucks indeed already have regenerative braking.
One only need look at the volumetric and mass energy density of diesel fuel and electric energy storage options to see that electric vehicles CURRENTLY store significantly less than diesel fuel tanks. That's well known and not a shock to anyone. Energy desnity of electric power storage (batteries, or even H2 fuel cells) will improve over time.
* a brand-new battery chemistry based on cheap and readily-available elements that avoids the issues related to existing lithium-based cells for vehicle applications (e.g. cost, cold, low power density, towing, large vehicles, etc)
* a way to synthesize fuel via CO2 capture from the air, perhaps in a fluctuating demand way to soak up solar from solar-rich regions (to make it net neutral-ish for CO2 capture) or if we finally get it together and build a bunch of nuclear reactors, which become net negative for CO2 emissions (from building the plant) in a matter of weeks
I would love to not have to deal with tedious car maintenance. I wish my car was as reliable as my phone, which never needs any sort of ongoing maintenance other than charging!
This is a step … where basically 9 months out of the year there is no emissions in the city and the trucks are effectively the same 1:1 replacement.
I also understand that this is a much harder article to write “the city got away with using the wrong tool for the job for years and now has to address the problem they created” (this cuts both ways). It probably seemed like a win win at the time but now a solution will need to be engineered to solve it… im also sure having a hybrid fleet (some ICE and some EV) will be great for times of increased demand and having backups when something breaks…
Something like this:
https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/media/image/8/h/gritter1.jpg
That's one of the smaller ones, which Glasgow City Council ordered up with a hydrogen-powered engine. Most are still diesel but there are some diesel/propane dual-fuel ones too.
It's not a forever decision. They can review in the light of changes in power budget and recharge times, battery swap and fuel cost.
I have read elsewhere that PepsiCo who committed to the Tesla truck are sticking to their shorthaul routes as a problem solution at first. Also entirely reasonable, and also probably a well studied cost benefit decision.
I'm not sure it's too outlandish to postulate that the union would act in their own interest here. I think any plan to convert to autonomous vehicles should include a plan for these workers. But I don't think you get to be Sanitation Commissioner in NYC without union support.
Wouldn’t this incentivise earlier fleet turnover to electric? If you’ve just bought an electric fleet, it’s tougher to justify turning it over again for autonomous only.
I'd have to think any fully electric car is a better target for autonomous retrofitting, because the drivetrain is already completely fly-by-wire?
Using a random estimate, a $100,000/vehicle autonomous retrofit probably pays for itself in like a year. The initial outlay of let's say a half billion to replace the city's fleet with EVs is a much bigger hurdle.
Today's snow ploughs use a lot of force.
But perhaps with better engineering, new ways to move snow could be invented - for example conveyor systems that move and compact the snow.
Theoretically you can generate power by compacting snow, since the stuff at the top has gravitational potential energy and gives it up when compacted down. Find a way to collect that, and your snowploughs won't need any recharging.
In Canada there's been some recent success using an electric cargo bike as snow plow.
I'm not suggesting that's right for New York, but maybe somthing a lot lighter than a garbage truck could work!
It gets even more complicated when EV fires happen in places like garages under buildings, because that makes it hard for fire fighters to dump the 40,000+ gallons of water needed to keep battery fires cool enough that they don't explode.
https://thedriven.io/2022/02/10/janus-unveils-first-electric...
https://cte.tv/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Four-Season-Analys...
That would probably offset the need for EVs for now.
You might be able to capture methane produced at a dump and use it to drive generators, but that's effectively waiting for large scale decomposition to happen.
I wonder if their trucks can do 8 hours of driving without refueling?
The problem is more optimized for manufacturers.
Oh, and don't forget creating fully staffed battery depots scattered around the already very full city?
Yeah, I know, climate change. Still, kindof a neat idea if we could figure it out.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/06/07/mack-t...
The truck doesn’t care if the battery slab is pulled and replaced with another battery or a hybrid powertrain, it just cares it has enough power to accelerate and decelerate.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/r40x15/why_are_...
That's just high tech engineer fantasy though.
Turbine is great for steady loads and terrible for cyclical loads which is what a garbage truck does all day. Electrical is great for cyclical but batteries just don't support the energy density to do it all day. You can theoretically bridge the gap real well with a hybrid system but it's only theoretical because in the real world other people's money is not actually an unlimited resource and you're not getting a turbine into anything cheaply. There's a reason you only see them in vehicles that are already fantastically expensive (tanks) and benefit greatly from some of the specific performance attributes. It would be really cool though...
Right now the trucks can do 1/3 of what they need with the batteries they have. Commercial vehicles like this are very much constrained by weight. The "nearly free" and shovel ready solution is to just raise the weight limit for the vehicles in question so they can pack on the other 2/3 of the batteries they need and let them roll around at 120k+ all day like concrete trucks. Sure you'll get a little more wear and tear on stuff but this solution doesn't require an unforeseen technology (battery) or economic (turbines) breakthrough.
Right. This would certainly apply to the mechanically coupled turbine truck prototypes from the 70's.
But if its driving a generator then you can let batteries or capacitors handle the cyclic loads of acceleration and have a computer throttle the turbine according to the overall demand.
Now you could say well we made snow plowing worse, and of course in this specific example you'd be right, but you'd be ignoring longer time horizons and not really comparing or accounting for the impact of negative externalities.
An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window. You wouldn't say "things are worse now!", you'd recognize that you're making a change which is better over the long term.
I apologize if that wasn't extremely obvious from what I already wrote.
The concern here is that the stopgap measure (the tarp/electric trucks) are implemented too early. The superior replacement window does not yet exist. There is no need to remove the older window and deal with a hole in the side of your house for half a year while you wait for new windows to hit the market.
There is no way I will give up the convenience of EV for those 5%.
A more apt analogy would be if the new window was not even invented yet.
Or we can just electrify applications that currently make sense and work from there as the technology improves.
I do not see the point in downvotes on this site. It seems like any slightly political article/discussion results in this sort of behavior.
Sorry for the meta comment.
I think in this case it's fine to argue something "is not a big deal" but I think you have got to add more to the discussion than "technology always gets better".
It's fine if you think my comment is low-quality or something, but cherry-picking mine to disagree with and then to go off on an argumentative tangent with poorly formed discussion points isn't really the answer either. It's not a big deal, this is all for fun and everything, but I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to get out of my original comment.
The easy solutions will go first, working its way up with better tech and design.
I think car/fleet size batteries isn't really feasible with swapping batteries. Small scooter batteries seems like a no brainer.
Firstly, I know someone who works on Daimler's electric trucks and he assures me that their electric powertrains are EXTREMELY dangerous just from the amount of power represented. Union operators have expressed negative interest in connecting/disconnecting the batteries outside of the factory.
Secondly, the economics - the battery pack on a Tesla already represents over half of the materials and manufacturing cost. And it's the only scarce thing about EVs. If you are a fleet operator and have to maintain a bank of batteries to charge, you may as well just buy the bodies to go with.
So I would guess that in an EV fleet future where the cost of batteries has dropped significantly, you will probably see the size of the fleets increase as operating costs drop.
This is already happening with municipal bus and school bus fleets. The bus count is over-provisioned to allow for the longer electric 'refueling' times.
As fleet managers understand, when a vehicle is being refueled it is out of service.
To be fair, union operators express negative interest in anybody outside their union doing anything that might be construed as otherwise the union's work.
That's assuming you can deal with safety, theft and other related issues.
In seriousness, heating streets with abundant solar energy harvested nearby would be reasonable. But sunshine in winter months is not as intense, and you'd have to build, as usual, a huge battery to keep the energy for the night. (When this is solved, more problems would get solved along the way than just de-snowing streets.)
Looks, I get that I'm biased being in Canada, but do they understand that you can buy dedicated vehicles for plowing snow? They're called... snowplows. They're pretty fantastic.
You need garbage trucks every day, all year. Electrify those. You need snowplows on a handful of days per year- and that number is falling thanks to climate change. So buy purpose-built snowplows for those days that use fuels instead of batteries.
But it's silly to decide to have an all-fuel fleet of garbage trucks just because they can't also be used as snowplows a few days per year that you need them.
(But I don't think a separate fleet is the answer.)
You said a separate fleet is better “for the folks and the budget” of New York, and added a parenthetical clarifying that it isn’t the answer. I’m agreeing with the second sentence, that a separate fleet isn’t the answer. I’m also refuting the first point, that it’s better than the status quo.
I'm just trying to include the factor of climate change, which does and will cost a ton.
Or can you show the conversion saves resources even when you have to buy and maintain dozens of extra vehicles?
This seems to me like you’re making a negative decision just because you find it emotionally satisfying, without any reasonable basis to believe that it improves things.
To balance your suggestion, the environmental cost of constructing, shipping, and maintaining a fleet of single-purpose snow plows is not close to zero.
> only a handful of days of snow in the year
Then this question of truck fleet would be moot.
Second: Just because the snow stops falling doesn't mean the problem goes away. The snow can take a couple of weeks to melt (essentially until the next rain, or a hot enough day), so stopping and waiting for nature to resolve the situation on its own would shut down the city for a month or so every year.
Congratulations, you shut off logistics and emergency services for a population the size of Virginia.
But if they are not and especially if they are going back and forth, then you’re getting slush, half-frozen slush, frozen slush packed into ice, or half-frozen slush on top of frozen slush packed into ice, and not only do you not want to drive on that, it’s also a pain to remove even from pedestrian paths, because you need power tools to break it up and then you have a crapton of inch-thick sheets of ice you have to transport and dump to melt somewhere. They take a couple of weeks to melt naturally on the road, or a couple of months under the spring sun if you pile them up on the side of the road (which also happens to look hideous).
Total the costs of icy sidewalk slip and falls, lost economic activity, and excess deaths (QALY) over 10 years. Spend 1/4 of that on a series of underground passageways (un)like MIT.
No garbage-truck/plow is going to fix that, whether it be powered by EV, ICE, or unicorn farts.
Alternatively, the large fleet could be appropriately specced and the small fleet can be “mothballed” the rest of the year, thus preserving its longevity.
The large fleet is “2,230 general collection trucks, 275 specialized collection trucks, 450 street sweepers, 365 snowplows, 298 front end loaders, and 2,360 support vehicles” [1]. Those general collection trucks, together with the plows, constitute a circa 2,300-plow snow fleet [2].
Dedicated fleet means buying 2,000 more snowplows. There is no small fleet option.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Department_of_...
[2] https://nypost.com/2020/12/05/nyc-spent-12m-per-inch-of-snow...
But yeah fair point. There's pretty few places in the southern hemisphere that are in the mid to high latitudes. I wonder why that is
You are sort of answering your own question here.
> snowplows a few days per year that you need them
NYC has 6,300 miles miles of streets. Maintaining an entirely separate fleet of plow vehicles large enough to clear the streets quickly would have its own additional costs.
I don't understand what you're saying, I guess. I don't understand how a city being large can just automatically lead to a loss for trash companies.
Public services can be cheaper, more reliable, and you have more control than if you pay someone else to maximize their profit. NYC government has tons of experience and expertise in managing something like this.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/seventeen-new-york-city...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/bribery-fraud-charges-are-dism...
No they can be subsidized with tax money. That doesn’t mean cheaper
Would I rather pay garbage through taxes and fees or would I rather pay garbage and private profits through fees? In general, public services treat employees better, are more accountable to elected officials (good and bad) and aren't obligated to skim an extra little bit off the top to pay someone else. There are countless examples of privatization making services less efficient in the long run, it's not an automatic win.
Sod off with this, I've seen someone literally hospitalised because of an army of private sector contractors we've had to deal with finding ingenious efficiency savings, powered by ideologues like you. Now our costs have tripled.
Oh, and guess f*king what; now several other suppliers are bankrupt, taking their already mostly-worthless support contracts with them, because they never invested a cent in resilience, and, get this, are blaming us for giving them that power. The same power they were so adamant, just like you, that they were so good at wielding. Their only efficiency ever was stripping all resilience, not inefficency - deliberate resilience.
The private sector is made of goddamn children at times,
We have both: “New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY)…serves residential buildings, government agencies, and many nonprofit facilities. The private system is regulated by the City’s Business Integrity Commission (BIC) and consists of more than 250 waste hauling firms licensed to remove non-construction and non-industrial waste. The private haulers serve businesses ranging from small pizza parlors to large office buildings” [1]. The public system guarantees minimum service to the population.
[1] https://cbcny.org/research/12-things-new-yorkers-should-know...
They don't even use dumpsters, they just pile bags of trash on the sidewalk. And then wonder why they have a huge rat problem.
There are some large buildings where it would be practical, but much of the residential housing consists of buildings with <10 apartments and no alleyways (let alone driveways).
Residential trash in NYC is hauled away by city employees at the Department of Sanitation, and has been since the late 19th century.
Both, though, expect trash (whether from a business or from an apartment building) to be simply piled up in bags on the sidewalk.
Perhaps because it's easy to add a connector plate and a bit of hydraulic in front of a truck and they already have them for garbage, they regularly run the on roads and their driver knowing where garbage containers are avoid some classic (at least here in UE) where the snowplowers push/launch snow everywhere not caring about anything else then keep the road clear... In a city handling snow it's even harder than in the countryside...
> But it's silly to decide to have an all-fuel fleet of garbage trucks just because they can't also be used as snowplows a few days per year that you need them.
Keeping up two fleet is not that cheap either: trucks/wheeled vehicles need to run regularly to keep their wheel well round and balanced, ICEs need to run regularly to keep the engine well lubed, starter and service batteries need to be kept charged, vehicles need to be parked somewhere (two fleets, twice the place), for ICEs you need to keep the fuel infra ready, and the amount of fuel it's not so little and so on.
IMVHO as an EV owner I doubt ALL trucks can be electric so far, simply range, charge time, battery weight are still below a practical usability levels...
They already have a fleet; it seems like a creative, effective solution - the kind of creativity that cynics say government lacks - to repurpose them for snow removal.
Are there any non-garbage truck BEVs with snowplows that can do that?
Also, this being hacker news I'd expect praise for efficient use of available equipment.
Another way of looking at this is, I used to get by with a ~$250 dollar electric snowblower; that thing died just last week when I asked too much of it trying to rid 10+ inches of very heavy, wet snow off our long driveway.
I'll be replacing it with nice Toro gas powered snow blower (~$1000-1500) because I expect the same / worse going forward. Fewer snow days, but when it does snow, it's a lot more than we used to get.
They need to do both:
Drive a big truck around the city streets pushing a plow to clear them of snow and ice
And
Drive a big truck around to collect garbage
It's much more efficient to do both at the same time, use the same trucks and skilled labor to run them.
It's a classic two birds one stone situation
You can just go on, making it less and less efficient each step.
Point is, a truck that plows snow and a truck that is a trash truck are mostly the same thing. You take a diesel cab truck chassis, and add either a plow or a trash compactor to it. It's also easy to add both.
It's not as if the trash trucks in cities that don't use them to plow are some highly specialized thing. They're the same trucks as new york has, just no plow. A plow bolts on.
Still get the economy of not having to buy twice as many big trucks
The weirdness of climate change is that warm air holds more water. So you'll get stronger storms, but some areas will see drought as the atmosphere holds more water and is less likely to give it up as rain/snow.
So, less days on average, but more "once in an X" storms.
Fewer vehicles to acquire, maintain, store, etc. That seems self evident.
Further, the scheme works fine. The issue isn't whether plowing snow and collecting garbage with the same vehicle is a workable idea. The issue is that there isn't an electric replacement available yet.