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Comment by dendrite9 | Hacker News Reader

I remember looking into this a little bit and the conclusion seemed to be that for most garbage truck uses the range was not the limiting factor. Pickup time was more important, and batteries are attractive given that most garbage pickup is stop-pickup-start-drive a short distance then stop again. In Seattle I believe I saw the longest route was less than 70 miles but I can't find a source. There was a purchase of battery garbage trucks with a range of 55 miles a few years ago. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/seattle-makes-history-w...

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...

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Manhattan used to have hundreds of miles of street level trolley - but mostly powered by underground center third rail because overhead wires just didn't work with the density of lines and equipment. When the system needed to be cleared after snowfalls they used horses and later ICE trucks to plow. See any book on the Third Avenue Railway system for details

> Caternary lines have always seemed like a good solution but there must be a good reason they aren't more popular

What reason?

Ugly, expensive, maintenance headache. What's not to like... They are however more environmentally friendly than diesel engines and it works well if you only have a few well trafficked routes. But you can't do this for a whole city, and garbage trucks and snowplows need to go into every street, not just the main boulevards.

Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything (not a criticism - I have no idea myself).

However, you don't need availability on every street, just enough to charge the vehicles sufficiently for the smaller streets.

Arnhem in NL and Riga in Latvia, both cities I spend a lot of time in still have them, but I wonder for how long. They're pretty iconic but every few years there is debate about whether or not it is still worth it. Another problem I forgot to mention is that these systems are not very flexible in dealing with mishaps, you can't overtake another trolley bus so if one has a problem the whole system grinds to a halt. An ICE bus just goes around the obstacle and continues.

I agree about the trolleys on rails and obstacles, which I've seen for myself, but electric vehicles would likely have some battery and run on tires, allowing diversions from the route.

Anyway, I'm guessing it's been considered and I'd love to see the study.

I've been reading a bit more about it in the meantime: so, the trolley network in Arnhem is slowly diminishing in size, but it's still there and it will likely be there for quite a while to come. They are looking at ways to use a combination BEV / trolley system to allow the buses to recharge when they're on the line so they can depart from the route for longer stretches.

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.

I think that battery vehicles with substantial batteries (and so could be run on lines without ANY overhead infrastructure in a pinch) but that usually charge via overhead lines on a portion of the route is the ideal option. No charging time, no massive new infrastructure (the catenary only needed on a small fraction of total served lines) but also full flexibility. Actually better than fossil fuel variants which need usually to be refueled at the end of the shift at a depot or whatever.

Yes, it certainly looks like a very clever solution. I know they tried the same thing with a flywheel based bus but that ultimately did not work out. Let's see how this works in practice.

It helps that batteries have literally two orders of magnitude greater range than an old school flywheel.

Yes, definitely, they are trialing this in Arnhem, I'll go have a look at it to see how it is all put together. By the looks of it they take a 'normal' trolley bus, remove diesel engine + tank + associated bits and pieces then put a battery in the spot where the tank used to be, and a bunch of electronics (regulator/inverter/charger) to create a voltage high enough to run the normal bus hardware of and to recharge the battery when the bus is connected to the overhead grid.

Another thing is that battery-electric vehicles can be used as drop-in replacements on all existing routes. You don’t need to do environmental reviews or meet with NIMBY stakeholders or shut down local businesses while you install the overhead infrastructure, you just buy the trucks and go (can charge overnight using on-board charger and existing electrical infrastructure… can expand this to accommodate the increased load like you would for any other increased electrical load like the move to air conditioning… but you can get up and operating immediately).

The buses I’m familiar with that use overhead power lines don’t use them exclusively - they have batteries or diesel for when they venture off the powered lines.

Interesting, I've seen them stuck more than once, I'll have to check up on what the deal is there, I walk by the depot every couple of days and I'm sure they'll be happy to talk about it.

I wonder what they do when a bus runs out of power - towtrucks? Charging trucks?

The only ones I have spent a lot of time looking at are in Seattle and at least they used to all be diesel and could hookup to the lines or lower them to run off the lines. For pure electric I assume they must tow them away but I don't know enough about the failure modes.

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...

Extension cord into the nearest bodega? :P

Trolley buses in Lausanne are(were?) equipped with small auxiliary ice engines that would take over in case of loss of power. In the hills with passengers it was just enough for the bus to go at walking speed but that was enough to move out of the way or overtake a stranded vehicle.

The "E" in ICE means engine.

> Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything

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.

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