Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gothamist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 579 posts

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

#121

Post by MisterTea »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #15
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the above. Must Run trucks should probably be gas turbine hybrids, that can burn anything for fuel (diesel, biodiesel, Jet A, etc), versus full electric. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/06/07/mack-t...

>ust Run trucks should probably be gas turbine hybrids, that can burn anything for fuel (diesel, biodiesel, Jet A, etc), versus full electric. 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 theoretic…

> Turbine is great for steady loads and terrible for cyclical loads which is what a garbage truck does all day.

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.

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

#122

Post by nine_k »

gee_totes wrote: post #93
agtorre wrote: post #4

I wonder what the longer-term solution is for this? More trucks? Exchangeable batteries? Faster charging?

Heated streets?

It's ultimately heating the atmosphere above them. I heard this planed had some trouble with thermal balance recently, things were getting too hot.

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.)

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

#123

Post by mabbo »

legitster wrote: post #11

> “ With current technology, full electrification isn’t possible now for some parts of our fleet, but we are monitoring closely and really hope it will be,” Gragnani said. 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.

Plugin hybrids have the worst of both options as well as the best.

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).

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

#124

Post by chitowneats »

jeffbee wrote: post #80
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.

They also call it "the city that never sleeps" but they misleadingly omit the reason.

That reason being what? Cocaine?

Edit: oh, you must mean noisy garbage trucks

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

#125

Post by kkfx »

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…

> Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow?

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...

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

#126

Post by MAGZine »

hourago wrote: post #115

The "Elektromote", the world's first trolleybus,[6] in Berlin, Germany, 1882. Maybe New York is lacking the infrastructure, but the technology has existed for a long time. A trolleybus may be expensive to implement in rural areas but in the biggest city in the USA it should be quite cost effective. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromote - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus

few cities have ALL streets electrified. usually just main corridors where buses will operate.

These buses usually have some battery, but not a lot, and coming on and off the wires is often a manual procedure.

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

#127

Post by mabbo »

rsstack wrote: post #110
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.

You're not wrong. I agree with you. I just see that as a better option than continuing to burn fuel in trucks that don't need it 360 days per year.

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

#128

Post by samspenc »

tapoxi wrote: post #101
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...

Yeah having street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City, and I'm not surprised that cities that have them are slowly removing them.

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.

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

#129

Post by SllX »

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…

The power lines that trolleybuses use don’t cover an entire city. They’re only installed on the routes the buses are scheduled to run on, and only for the parts of the streets buses will use. They’re like train tracks in that way, but hanging in the air instead of embedded in the ground.

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.

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

#130

Post by ars »

novok wrote: post #105
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.

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…

It's not the parking spots - residents have zero interest in walking to the end of their block with garbage.

If they tried it people would just leave their garbage on the street. Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.

Post reply on HN