181–190 of 579 posts
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…
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> 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 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 pl…
> specialized power split transmissions 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?
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....
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> Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow? 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.
Why do they even have their own fleet of garbage trucks, though? I'm pretty sure the garbage trucks where I live are all privately owned.
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...
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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.
> only a handful of days of snow in the year I know modern economy has gone full-JIT but I naively wish we could just stop in this case and.. wait. Then this question of truck fleet would be moot.
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).
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Why do they even have their own fleet of garbage trucks, though? I'm pretty sure the garbage trucks where I live are all privately owned.
Why default to privately owned? 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...
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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.
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> specialized power split transmissions 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?
It's VERY hard to keep a vehicle run straight with non-mechanically-tied wheels, you'll almost never get a "perfect enough" balance ending up in an engine pushing/pulling against the other. 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?
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Better for whom or what? Surely not for the New York City budget, or the folks who pay for it.
Better for those folks and the budget, both of which will feel the full impact of climate change. (But I don't think a separate fleet is the answer.)
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.
Anyone else remember learning about the "Five Year Plans" of the old Soviet Union?