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NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

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Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#101

Post by tapoxi »

ecshafer wrote: post #70

Battery operated garbage trucks don't sound like a great idea, at least for all day use. 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…

Here in Massachusetts we just removed our streetcar power lines (MBTA 71 and 73 trolleybus) because the wires needed to be removed during construction. This might be a logistical issue for NYC.

https://www.mbta.com/news/2022-01-27/beginning-march-2022-mb...

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#102

Post by some_random »

nickpp wrote: post #83
chitowneats wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage.

Garbage is a difficult issue everywhere. Part of the entropy problem of the universe…

Garbage is absolutely not as big of a problem as it is in NYC though. You don't get to blame the fact garbage collection is awful on entropy when other cities very visibly do not have the same issues.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#103

Post by xtorol »

hef19898 wrote: post #68
i_am_proteus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the headline references "power," the issue is that these electric trucks do not have enough battery capacity to plow snow for a full day before recharging overnight. 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.

Stupid question so, why would you use a garbage truck to plow snow? Over here, cities, towns and musipalities use different vehicles for different jobs, suxh as garbage, snow plowing, street cleaning and so on...

NYC does have a number of dedicated salt-spreader/plow trucks [1].

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).

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/site/about/fleet

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#104

Post by mabbo »

Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow?

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#105

Post by novok »

chitowneats wrote: post #77
jeffbee wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC garbage trucks spend a very long time parked in front of the same building all night, crushing bags full of plastic coffee cups. Ask anyone who has ever tried to sleep in Manhattan. A completely reasonable solution that doesn't require a wholesale change in the way refuse is collected in that city would be to plug the truck in at the building where it is standing. That said, a wholesale change is what they need.

It never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage.

They can sacrifice street parking spots systematically throughout the city for garbage dumpsters, as many others have suggested, but it's politically untenable to do so because americans love their cars, even in NYC.

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#106

Post by nine_k »

jollyllama wrote: post #2

TIL some trash trucks are also snowplows in NYC https://www.trailer-bodybuilders.com/archive/article/2172888...

Snow is a rare enough problem in NYC (1-2 weeks in a year), and having a whole fleet of dedicated snow-removing machines is not reasonable.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#107

Post by fencepost »

ecshafer wrote: post #70

Battery operated garbage trucks don't sound like a great idea, at least for all day use. 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…

Garbage trucks are probably one of the best places for it actually, because they stop so frequently. Unfortunately the article is about plow trucks instead which have a very different use case - New York just happens to use the same vehicles for both so they have a smaller fleet that's not as well suited to either task.

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#108

Post by chitowneats »

burkaman wrote: post #99
chitowneats wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage.

Doesn't basically every city call itself the greatest city on earth?

Not like NYC. Not even close. At least, I've never visited or lived in one that rivaled it.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#109

Post by hericium »

chitowneats wrote: post #77
jeffbee wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC garbage trucks spend a very long time parked in front of the same building all night, crushing bags full of plastic coffee cups. Ask anyone who has ever tried to sleep in Manhattan. A completely reasonable solution that doesn't require a wholesale change in the way refuse is collected in that city would be to plug the truck in at the building where it is standing. That said, a wholesale change is what they need.

It never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage.

It was always handled efficiently by the mafia guys in movies.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#110

Post by rsstack »

mabbo wrote: post #104

Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow? 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 snowplo…

NYC has 30,000 streets and only a handful of days of snow in the year. By having garbage trucks that can deal with a few inches of snow, you avoid the need of buying dozens of dedicated vehicles that will rot 360 days a year.
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