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

gothamist.com

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

#491
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if i told you, you still need to charge ur fire truck

Alternators won't do it?

The fire apparatus I’ve worked on have a 120V inlet called a shoreline to keep equipment (MDT, radios, cardiac monitor, portable suction, and Lucas battery chargers, interior lighting, etc) operational at station without draining the battery.

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

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So I'm actually quite confused here, because Wikipedia lists and cites a number from the US Census which puts Raleigh's population at about 1.1M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...

That's pointing to this spreadsheet hosted by the census:

https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/2020_Census_ua...

But, if we go to this fact table, they give that ~470k number.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/raleighcitynort...

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a lot of the extra cost for the 33% more trucks get canceled out by each one getting driven that much less, so requiring less maintenance and lasting longer? Other than the part of depreciation that happens because of age rather than mileage/usage, what costs would remain?

I'm not even sure depreciation matters with these anyway! Idk how much of a resale market there is. You might just run it into the ground and then scrap it.

Meanwhile, batteries are consumables for purposes of EU warranty. Yet they make up the most expensive part of an EV.

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

#495
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But a few dedicated snow machines would make the work go so much faster. They’re more effective also because they actually remove the snow (in concert with a heap of regular construction dump trucks) rather than just shoving it onto the gutter/sidewalk. Sure, in NYC it melts fairly quickly, but for main avenues it would be a huge improvement.

"A few" undersells the scale of DSNY's operation. They've already got a few hundred specialized salt/plow trucks on top of the thousands in the mixed garbage truck fleet, and a couple dozen snow melters, about 80 dump trucks, and a few hundred front-end loaders. They recently bought about 50 narrow plows just for bike lanes and bridge sidewalks.

After heavy snow are mostly plowed, its a very common sight on busy city blocks to see snow hauling/removal and melting happening overnight.

Its just that nothing related to their snow removal obligations is small stuff.

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

#496

Earlier 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.

Wouldn't a lot of the extra cost for the 33% more trucks get canceled out by each one getting driven that much less, so requiring less maintenance and lasting longer? Other than the part of depreciation that happens because of age rather than mileage/usage, what costs would remain?

No. Capital costs tend to be bonded, and infrastructure to support idle trucks is expensive.

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

#497

There'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…

Can't charge your truck if the local hookup is buried under 5 feet of snow.

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

#498
post #486
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times. This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable when its you with your consumer-grade whatever, and has absolutely no relevance to large scale logistics and planning. Fuel in ground tanks when the black out starts is...fuel in the ground tanks which is going to stay there because no amount of human labor is gett…

Omly need to get one truck going: The pump truck.

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

#499
post #486
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times. This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable when its you with your consumer-grade whatever, and has absolutely no relevance to large scale logistics and planning. Fuel in ground tanks when the black out starts is...fuel in the ground tanks which is going to stay there because no amount of human labor is gett…

Fuel in ground tanks can be pumped out by manually pumping enough to power a generator to power the regular pumps... which is pretty trivial to set up.

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

#500
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cold weather and battery life are two things that do not get along.

That, and when it snows in NYC, we tend lose power, so I don't know what the contingency is there. Diesel generators, I suppose. Is that better?

If only they could throw some kind of diesel generator in a truck. You could plow a ton of snow
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