Canada doesn't like the snowplow-garbagetruck hybrid, either.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/snow-plow-garbage-truc...
"Garbage truck turned snow plow gets mixed review from city staff; Snow plow-garbage truck hybrid did not perform as well as dedicated snow removal machines"
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
#272The title of the post is not the same as the title of the article, and it's wrong. The problem isn't that the plows aren't powerful enough; it's that they can only plow for four hours before running out of battery life, and the city wants plows to last twelve hours.
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Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why have garbage trucks at all when you can have a series of tubes to transport garbage?
NYC technically already has this in Roosevelt Island.
More details: https://youtu.be/nfM4cjDoo6o
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#274Why 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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Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#275[flagged]
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was gonna suggest that they could simply share the snow plow vehicles for the rest of the year with other countries (like how we share firefighters with Australia) but then I realized the part of the world that would most likely need them when NYC doesn't is the opposite hemisphere and those vehicles are not easy to ship lol
I don't think it snows enough in big Australian cities :D And there aren't (yet) electric super-jumbo cargo planes to ship these mechanical monstrosities.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#277This smells to me at least a little bit like union pressure to slow the transition to electric vehicles, which is just a hop from fully autonomous city vehicles, putting them all out of work forever.
Seems like a random excuse to Trash talk unions.
Well, a union rep is quoted in the article, which was weird. His statement was also a little weird. The conclusions and the math involved don't really add up for me. They laid the groundwork for a fight against _any_ conversion to electric vehicles by warning the city council about the possibly prohibitive cost of installing a charger network...
I'm not sure it's too outlandish to postulate that the union would act in their own interest here. I think any plan to convert to autonomous vehicles should include a plan for these workers. But I don't think you get to be Sanitation Commissioner in NYC without union support.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#278What is needed is a means for removing weight from the garbage-collection apparatus when adding a front-end snowplow.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
First: I don't go out in snow beyond a couple of blocks, things can wait. But that's me. Second: Just because the snow stops falling doesn't mean the problem goes away. The snow can take a couple of weeks to melt (essentially until the next rain, or a hot enough day), so stopping and waiting for nature to resolve the situation on its own would shut down the city for a month or so every year.
I wonder how much it would cost to heat the roads rather than plow them, and how that would compare to the current solution, long-term. NYC already has an extensive underground infrastructure ...
It is essentially impossible to add anything underground in NYC _because_ of the extensive underground infrastructure. It is all but saturated.
Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
#280What is needed is a means for removing weight from the garbage-collection apparatus when adding a front-end snowplow.
Or swapping for an aux battery pack. I'm not sure the plow weight is a big issue, compared to the wet snow. Also I'm assuming they're not picking up garbage at the same time.