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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

#541

Post by Manuel_D »

wolverine876 wrote: post #514
Manuel_D wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, much of Midtown doesn't have street trash pickup because skyscrapers have alternative garbage disposal infrastructure. The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution. There's no stretches of road where garbage trucks are spending significantly more time than others. The fact that it's time, not distance, that matt…

> The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution. What makes you say it's uniform? Skyscapers, businesses, and others not using public trash services aren't clustered on one street; you find them all over town. The number of stops per street can vary considerably.

Again, skyscrapers pretty much always use garbage chutes and consolidate their trash. It gets sent to the he dump multiple times per day, not part of the street trash pickup schedule. You seem to be under the impression that the trash distribution is like this sequence:

1, 1, 9, 1, 2, 0, 8, 1, 9

In reality it's like this:

1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1

There's a few gaps where there's little trash to pick up. But there's no hot spots where there's massive amounts of garbage bags to pick up off the street.

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

#542

Post by Closi »

Lutger wrote: post #528
Closi wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight. "The solution is simple - purchase extra fleet just to support a snow-ploughing operation that then sits idle for most of the year, and then hire extra people to drive less efficient routes in the hardest…

"The solution is simple - keep using old gasoline vehicles to save a few dollars, which cause massive emissions even while the country suffers megadroughts, winterstorms, wildfires, coastal homes are being flooded and hurricanes grow more intense every year. We pay more in the future, but at least this years budget looks good. If anybody complains, point the finger to China and India."

Sure, you can operate at a significantly higher cost base with more people and more equipment traveling more miles to achieve the same outcome with less emissions, but that's a bit weak.

Best way to get much broader adoption of EV's in transport is to use them where they will work best, rather than burn peoples fingers with projects that introduce huge operational issues.

Remember, one of the key rules of transport management is "reduce idle fleet", so telling a transport manager to save emissions by having loads of fleet idle is a bit like telling a CIO to reduce energy use by giving their developers smaller monitors and taking the graphics cards out of their computers.

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

#543

Post by ericmay »

legitster wrote: post #372
notinfuriated wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't understand this pattern of comment-making on the internet. For whatever reason, your comment was downvoted slightly so then you got targeted by people over and over again, even in subsequent replies, with the least generous interpretation of every comment made. I suspect your initial comment also triggered a reaction in saying "it's not a big deal", to which a bunch of people thought, "Oh yeah, well it'…

HN's guidelines are to downvote if something doesn't add to the discussion. I think in this case it's fine to argue something "is not a big deal" but I think you have got to add more to the discussion than "technology always gets better".

In that case, I'm not sure your comment added much to the discussion either. But the OP generically asked what the solution was, and the generic solution as far as I can tell is the long march of progressively better technology. It's very clear that the tech will continue to improve and is only in its infancy. Had the OP asked something like "what specific improvements can we expect to see in battery weight reduction and charging speeds so that this won't be an issue in the future" I probably wouldn't have replied because I don't know the specifics.

It's fine if you think my comment is low-quality or something, but cherry-picking mine to disagree with and then to go off on an argumentative tangent with poorly formed discussion points isn't really the answer either. It's not a big deal, this is all for fun and everything, but I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to get out of my original comment.

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

#544

Post by prottog »

hoseja wrote: post #523
RhysU wrote: 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.

You are really blind to the amount of established infrastructure needed to get dinosaur juice to all the boonies.

Isn't the point that the established infrastructure is already established?

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

#545

Post by Our_Benefactors »

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…

> 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

They’re ugly eyesores.

They only exist in a handful of cities in the USA to begin with.

They limit your driving speed.

They create additional noise.

They can detach fairly easily, impeding traffic. Much bigger issue if this could potentially happen to every vehicle.

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

#546

Post by marssaxman »

mike_d wrote: post #428
lamontcg wrote: post #425

Earlier 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.

> Some things will just never go electric.

And yet they will have to, if we want to continue having a civilization...

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

#547

Post by jollyllama »

angry_octet wrote: post #521
sethhochberg wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

If they had even a 10th of the organisation of Montreal they wouldn't have such problems. They're relying on the wrong tools. https://theprepared.org/features-feed/montreal-snow And this article makes it seem like a huge investment, but in reality these workers do other jobs most of the year, in construction, roadworks, gardening, waste management, etc. It really seems like NY are wedded to their old ways -- somethin…

Nice link.

  The first step is informing citizens when their streets will be cleared. In dense, downtown neighborhoods, most people park on the street and their cars need to move. No parking signs get installed block by block and notifications go out through the city-maintained snow removal app, InfoNeige (equivalent to InfoSnow in English). Municipal lots are opened up with free parking, and as one final warning, tow trucks blare a siren before hauling away any outstanding vehicles.
NYC is a long way away from this I think.

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

#548

Post by freejazz »

Lutger wrote: post #528
Closi wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight. "The solution is simple - purchase extra fleet just to support a snow-ploughing operation that then sits idle for most of the year, and then hire extra people to drive less efficient routes in the hardest…

"The solution is simple - keep using old gasoline vehicles to save a few dollars, which cause massive emissions even while the country suffers megadroughts, winterstorms, wildfires, coastal homes are being flooded and hurricanes grow more intense every year. We pay more in the future, but at least this years budget looks good. If anybody complains, point the finger to China and India."

Does the garbage truck fleet cause massive emissions? I feel like this is a strawman argument. Global warming is real and as a society, we need to change our ways, but I'm not sure that things like municipal utility vehicles are going to be the difference between us making it as a society and not. And if we were to have to choose between which vehicles should be electric vs ICE, it's clear that there is a greater societal benefit to the municipal vehicles.

If Americans were to make a slight change in their meat eating habits, I'd imagine the effect would be orders of magnitude greater than all the garbage trucks in the US, let alone just NYC.

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

#549

Post by Robotbeat »

jacquesm wrote: post #516
Robotbeat wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that battery vehicles with substantial batteries (and so could be run on lines without ANY overhead infrastructure in a pinch) but that usually charge via overhead lines on a portion of the route is the ideal option. No charging time, no massive new infrastructure (the catenary only needed on a small fraction of total served lines) but also full flexibility. Actually better than fossil fuel variants which nee…

Yes, it certainly looks like a very clever solution. I know they tried the same thing with a flywheel based bus but that ultimately did not work out. Let's see how this works in practice.

It helps that batteries have literally two orders of magnitude greater range than an old school flywheel.

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

#550

Post by comte7092 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #198
comte7092 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an apartment. I drive a full EV and the 200+ miles range allows me to get away with charging at public chargers intermittently rather than having to plug in basically every night. If I had a plug in hybrid, it wouldn’t get plugged in.

If you could charge at home with your own dedicated charger, would you plug in a plug-in hybrid?

Of course, but that would be a completely different scenario.

Frankly having my own charger at home would make owning a full EV even more convenient over the hybrid.

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