NYPD should shovel, they have the budget.
NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
441–450 of 579 posts
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#442I'm ok with removing 98% of dead dinosaur burning but keeping a few use cases (I wouldn't want to be trapped in a city with the power grid downed from a snowstorm and the city being unable to charge its industrial vehicles)
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the city added batteries instead of plows? Have recharging stations that swapped batteries. Requires building the plows around hot swappable batteries and a station with some fixed hydraulics that can drop them in and out. Requires a bit of redundancy by having multiple stations to swap batteries and something like forklifts to drag them around and charge the spent batteries. Probably not a good consumer solu…
What if we had some type of fluid that carried potential energy that we could quickly pour into a giant tank on the trucks? Some things will just never go electric. Like fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, power company trucks, etc. that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation. Dead dinosaurs are the best answer for some problems, just not every car on the road.
> fire trucks
Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
> ambulances
Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
> tow trucks
Perhaps the only one that would be bad given the amount of power required to tow a vehicle.
> power company trucks
Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment and they are always working on electrical things.
> that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation.
Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
There are few places where EVs are bad fits. The main ones are airplanes and ships where getting power is hard and the power density needs to be high.
For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows. Probably because they have to use regular dollars to buy one or the other: cost-effectiveness cannot be ignored.
EVs will have a longer service life, less maintenance, and MUCH lower fuel costs. EVs are cost effective (but not immediately so).
Its doesnt seem realistic to say this as if it must always be true.
As others have pointed out - to get the same quality of service you'd probably need extra trucks stored somewhere in NYC (also expensive) so that there's no downtime in coverage. Are we really supposed to believe they are currently 50% the lifelong cost of ICE vehicles?
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day. NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.
Plus the drivers. Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.
You don't need more drivers, just more trucks.
A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy.
There's no reason to have drivers wait for the trucks to fully charge.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
> don't even hear people from LA or SF boast the way they do in New Yawk Every borough except Staten Island is larger than San Francisco [1][2]. Manhattan together with Queens or Brooklyn is bigger than LA, the second-largest city in America. (Staten Island is about the size of Raleigh or Atlanta.) New York solves problems at a scale no other American city comes close to imagining. [1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/planni…
Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta. Its much smaller population and area-wise, focusing on just their metro areas. Denser for sure, but not larger.
> Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta
Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if we had some type of fluid that carried potential energy that we could quickly pour into a giant tank on the trucks? Some things will just never go electric. Like fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, power company trucks, etc. that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation. Dead dinosaurs are the best answer for some problems, just not every car on the road.
> fire trucks Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel. > ambulances Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs. > tow trucks Perhaps the only one that would be bad given the amount of power required to tow a vehicle. > power company trucks Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment and…
Are you serious?! If my town loses power for two weeks I want fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, and especially power company trucks to work! Civic infrastructure should anticipate tail events.
> How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#449There's a lot of discussion here, but I haven't seen anyone link this slide deck which (albeit a couple of years old) does a great job describing DSNY's efforts to electrify and some of their results with pilot programs: https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DSN... A lot of the things being proposed as solutions by posters here are already being tried in the real world. They're not running long-dis…
> We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours This doesn't sound like they are trying to do short routes or fast charging stations. Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows. The majority of LI batteries can be recharged in 1 hour with enough juice. Even if you say "well, it's a truck, s…
Tesla semi is almost triple that (around 900kWh) and charges to 70% in 30 minutes with their megawatt charger. So it should be able to easily handle that use case.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#450I think you editorialized the headline. It’s not an issue of “powerful enough”. Electric motors inherently have more power and torque.