501–510 of 545 posts
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A German guy told me that was a German expression. Which one of you is right?
Sounds like Dutch humour and phrasing to me, but I've heard Germans use "There's no such thing as poor weather, only poor preparation"
Seeing as my version is a rhyme, it's obviously the superior one.
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This is a typical neighborhood road in Berlin https://www.google.de/maps/@52.4463121,13.309308,3a,75y,244.... This is a road in central Tokyo https://www.google.de/maps/@35.705447,139.7784828,3a,75y,260... This is a random road in San Mateo https://www.google.de/maps/@37.5600243,-122.3067183,3a,75y,3... You need roads, but you don't need roads that as wide as those in American urban sprawl
I feel almost agoraphobic when I look at pictures of suburban USA. I think it's a combination of flat landscape, low buildings, wide roads, no mature trees (your example notwithstanding) and no real features on the horizon. Off topic, what's going on in the Berlin example? The whole left side of the photo looks like it's been redacted, are the homeowners requesting their houses be removed?
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Or build out infrastructure in those areas too. In suburbs, there's plenty of room for separate bike paths and trains. It doesn't require everyone to move into Soviet-style superblocks and towers.
Not everyone can ride bikes, and trains just take you from one place where you don't want to be to another place where you don't want to be.
Yes, pretty much everyone can ride bikes. Or scooters. Or velomobiles. Or hang gliders. There is some human-powered vehicle out there for everyone.
We just have to get out of this local maxima based around driving oil-burning SUVs.
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Laundry. That just might be the perfect example. What a huge division of experience between the wealthy and the less wealthy. Most homeowners have laundry in their home. Starting and switching loads is a few minutes, and the rest of their time is still free. Many high-end apartments have laundry within a short walk from each residence. It's largely the same experience. But then those with less ability to afford "nice…
God yes I don’t have laundry machines in my new place (there’s space for some but I gotta get my own) and walking several blocks to the laundromat on a weekly basis is A Hassle. I am lucky in that my work fits on a laptop so I can just sit there and get stuff done while the washer and dryer run. But if I had a shitty service job it wouldn’t be money-earning time for me.
Work laundry used a shared (inventoried from the shop when I worked retail) detergent, but personal loads required you to provide your own.
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Perhaps a laundromat with chargers. I've often said that if I were to open a retail business, it'd be a 24 hours combo, laundromat, pizza place, coffee shop and book store, probably with a side of bodega inside.
Laundromat thrift store. You need to wash all the clothing you take in and people want to wash stuff after they buy it. A food truck might bundle with a tool truck. Considering that food trucks occasionally run out of trailers you could explore the idea with minimal risk by owning one and partnering with someone who has the other The idea has potential but you'd need the experience of actually running these kinds of…
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I had to trench about thirty feet to install a charger in my back alley. It was expensive (about $1500) but I looked at it as a long-term investment that would pay off over a decade. If I could have shared that cost with, say, 10 neighbors it would have been pretty modest. My state also has a reimbursement program that will cover a portion of the installation costs. These capital costs are problematic but not really…
The estimate was about 10X more than that -- I'm not sure what made it so expensive, maybe because the wiring had to be sized to handle all 30 units, the HOA wouldn't let it be built to handle just the few people that wanted an EV charger today. And there was some sort of upgrade that had to be made to the underground electrical vault.
Besides garage orphans, also those with self standing homes and a garage will have (or become) a problem. Say that in you street that are 50 single family homes connected to a same cabin/transformer. The electric infrastructure powering them (lines, transformer, etc.) has been dimensioned to power them at their average current power consumption rate + something to take care of peaks + something more to take care of e…
My Model 3 charges at ~240v/48a, which is around 11kW. At peak times in our house, say, heat on, lights on, TV on, cooking, doing laundry, we pull perhaps 3kW. Our house is pretty efficient; gas appliances, LED lights, no air conditioning, etc. The car charges after 9pm, but that's just because our rate drops then. If midnight was even cheaper, it would charge then. We don't charge every day, but if we did, it would…
If the transformer serving a given number of houses is (say) 300 kVA, it remains 300 kVA, and as well the actual distribution cables/wires are rated for (still say) 100 kW each, they remain that size/gauge and both will likely need to be replaced by "beefier" stuff.
BTW I took the US as an example because they - on average - consume already a very high amount of electricity pro-capita something like 12,000 kWh per year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
and so it has surely an already well dimensioned infrastructure, but besides the nordic countries (Norway/Sweden/Finland) Europe is less than half than that, Germany and France around 6,500 most of the other EU countries around or below 5,000.
Besides there can be some repercussions on single homes as well, depending of course on local Laws, to give you an example here in Italy there is a "limit" at 6 kW, for constructions until 2008 there was no need of a project for the home cabling for power consumption below 6 kW while since 2008 the project is always compulsory, and 6 kW it needs to be made by an electrical engineer.
Since most houses are < 6kW, very few, even of the recently built ones have a project redacted by an electrical engineer and the moment you ask the provider to get (say) 10 kW you will need this project which will cost you (only the project) something in the 1,000-1,500 Euro range to which you have to sum the actual electrician/contractor work to add a line for the charger, probably another 1,000-1,500 Euro.
Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs - it's public transit, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, e-scooters, walking, etc. All these other modes are much lower impact on the environment than purchasing and operating an EV, much less an ICE.
It's been entertaining to read the discussions (below) about how to make this practical. So far, it looks like the only way to make this work is to a) live in a city, or rebuild your suburbia into a city, and b) construct your entire life around riding that bike - choose a job with a tolerant boss, spend extra hours every day showering and changing clothes after biking, etc. I'd rather drive an air-conditioned car, s…
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Westminster+Ave,+Toront...
These houses are a bit pricey now, but that's because urban living has become fashionable again. From the 1950s to 1990s prices were a lot cheaper because all of the demand was for white picket fences in the suburbs.
You can reasonable build reasonable density, where public transit is possible, without going to Manhattan- or Tokyo-like densities. Perhaps put some mid-rise (5-10 stories) buildings on the main arteries, but the side streets can be quite smaller-scale.
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> construct it around a car I don't, actually - it's that a car is far more useful than a bike. I drive 25 minutes to work; I haul (5 bike-ride-loads of) groceries several miles to my house; I visit friends anywhere from 1-5 hours away; I casually drive into the city and back. Even if I felt like riding 10 miles each way, rain or shine, or using public transit, it takes so much less time to drive my car, and I have t…
You don’t seem to able to wrap your ahead around the fact that driving appears to give you more freedoms only because you live in a city that was designed around cars, not because cars are inherently faster or more convenient. The convenience of the car is an artifact of city planning decisions, not a universal truth. Example: do you realize how preposterous the idea of driving several miles to get groceries is to so…