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Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

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Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#321

Post by TheCoelacanth »

njarboe wrote: post #314
wool_gather wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, while the Big Dig was a total crapfest while in progress, the end result made a tremendous positive difference to the walk- and bike-ability of that area. It's still not perfect (four+ lanes of angry commuters), but it's not like they could just get rid of I-93. Totally agreed on the dollars for transit part, though. Still way too much emphasis on making cars' lives easier in Boston at the expense of eve…

"cars' lives" Every car at the moment contains a person. Objectifying people so it is easier to hate on them is not nice. People should realize by now that it is not just privileged rich assholes that drive cars. A well working personalized point-to-point transport system (cars plus roads) can save the person working 70 hours a week at two low paying jobs much precious time.

If you can afford to park in central Boston every day, you are almost certainly not that poor. A monthly parking pass is like $400-500. That's like a quarter of the pre-tax income from a full-time minimum wage job just to park at one of your jobs.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#322

Post by romwell »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #298
reissbaker wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, and they are evenly spread out across the country, right? Not evenly — but the population in the US is in fact much more geographically dispersed than in most of Europe, India, and East Asia. These measurements are not what you claim ("total area / total population"); here is a map of population density per square kilometer over the globe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File... It's tr…

The image you link to does not support your assertion: The US looks "speckled" because there is a lot of empty space, which does not have to be connected. So the others that are all-red have it actually worse. Asia has a lot more people too, so yes, that leads to higher density - but that's hardly an advantage to have to deal with over a billion people instead of a few hundred millions. They still are just as distrib…

Not defending the OP (or continuing their line of thought), but here's an exclusivity argument for why it's difficult to build public transport infrastructure in the US.

The US is special because its cities were either built to be pedestrian-hostile, or were made so during the Depression years when the transport companies went bust.

Now, in addition to the mindset shift, I think you'd need to rebuild entire cities/metroplexes to make the public transport work.

Case in point: the South Bay Area, where I live now. Sure, you can add trains (at a huge cost). But once you get off the train station, where do you go? The sidewalks are those narrow strips separating the roadway from the parking lots adjacent to stores, they are no joy to walk on, and it will take you forever.

Where in Europe you have:

[store][sidewalk][roadway, 2 lanes][sidewalk][store]

Here, you have:

[business][parking lot][impenetrable hedge][sidewalk][roadway, 3 lanes][uncrossable median][roadway, 3 lanes][sidewalk][impenetrable hedge][parking lot][business]

Then, due to the zoning regulations you don't have stores and cafes right next to place where people live - you have huge blocks with nothing in them but houses, houses, houses.

Ditto for business districts.

It's not enough to have public transport, one needs to rethink entire cities from ground up to make them walkable, bikeable - and accessible by public transport - even if it exists.

Another case in point: Seattle. Lacking a good train system, they made the buses work with dedicated bus lanes, which make the buses fast - faster than traffic.

This works because the city has not been developed in the sad way I described above.

As for the suburban wasteland, which makes up huge chunks of the US population-wise, you can throw all your trains and buses at it, and it will be but a drop in the bucket.

Disclaimer: lived half my life in the US, half my life in urban Ukraine. Big fan of public transport, but drive most of the time - and when I don't, I bike, outrunning public transportation in most cases on distances up to 6 miles or so.

EDIT: see the urban sprawl point below[1]:

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16918434

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#323

Post by seanmcdirmid »

romwell wrote: post #322
ItsMe000001 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The image you link to does not support your assertion: The US looks "speckled" because there is a lot of empty space, which does not have to be connected. So the others that are all-red have it actually worse. Asia has a lot more people too, so yes, that leads to higher density - but that's hardly an advantage to have to deal with over a billion people instead of a few hundred millions. They still are just as distrib…

Not defending the OP (or continuing their line of thought), but here's an exclusivity argument for why it's difficult to build public transport infrastructure in the US. The US is special because its cities were either built to be pedestrian-hostile, or were made so during the Depression years when the transport companies went bust. Now, in addition to the mindset shift, I think you'd need to rebuild entire cities/me…

Where in Seattle do the buses have their own lane? I can only think of the tunnel downtown and a bit of road south of it through the southern industrial area (but I think that has given way to link). It isn’t much when you consider where metro and soundtransit go.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#324

Post by DoctorOetker »

bertil wrote: post #320
DoctorOetker wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the need for CO2 is extremely low, why is carbonating drinks even referenced whenever carbon capture is mentioned? the amount of CO2 absorbed in the drink will be released upon opening the drink, or else burping or farting. the amount of CO2 the plants in a green house absorbs is offset by atmospheric CO2 not absorbed by the plant... yes CO2 has niche uses, but whenever I see people mention CO2 utilization in the con…

I mentioned beer because the process of capturing CO2 from fermentation and re-injecting it was invented by my family a century ago and apparently was the first of its kind (according to my uncle). My cousin and a friend of my father are working on accelerating plant and algae growth with CO2-rich atmosphere and water, in urban farms (not greenhouse) and mixed-use aqua-farming respectively. Neither have reached scale…

we all know CO2 and H20 can be recombined to form fuels, its where the fossil fuels originally came from. Where do these bacteria get their energy from? Either from photosynthesis elsewhere, or by photosynthesis themselves. In either case, in order to offset the power plant at the rate is converting fuel to electricity, you need a huge area of plants or solar to recover _all_ CO2. But then you could just remove the fossil fuel burning power plant out of the equation.

It is still perpetuum mobile...

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#325

Post by danans »

vel0city wrote: post #309
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And somewhat useless. Changing the temperature from 72 to 75 in my well-insulated house does take off a few kWh. But it seems a bit meaningless when the shop down the road is trying to get more people to come in by setting their thermostat at a chilly 65 and leaving the door open all day. Likewise in spending thousands to upgrade from an average 25 mpg car to a 35+ mpg car, only to drive down the road alongside coal-…

> Likewise in spending thousands to upgrade from an average 25 mpg car to a 35+ mpg car I'm really curious about this as well. I drive an old Honda Accord that gets ~22-26mpg. In Texas I can choose to only purchase renewable energy, but how much environmental impact will be had from my purchase from an electric car compared to keeping this nearly two-decade-old car running? What is the point where this car is better…

This depends on a lot of factors, including:

- How much you have to drive. The more you drive, the more you can offset the embodied carbon footprint of the EV, and the more fossil fuels you offset.

- How fast your decades old ICE car deteriorates, and therefore decreases in efficiency and increases its operational pollution emissions.

- The embodied carbon footprint of the vehicle parts you replace through maintenance of an old vehicle.

High range EVs with large batteries cancel their embodied footprint in 18 months with a typical drive cycle, even lower if you are mostly using renewably sourced electricity. Lower range EVs take even less time [1]

It sounds to me like from your situation (old car, renewable power available) the numbers already suggest you should do it now. From the report linked below, driving an EV in Texas today is like getting 52 mpg with an ICE car. If you're using only renewables it is multiple times more efficient (see equivalents for CA and NY)

1. https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life...

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#326

Post by danans »

zaroth wrote: post #276
danans wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same level of investment into electric buses in the US would be a tradgedy in the sense of actual lives lost due to gross misallocation of public funds. I get it that you don't like public investment in electric buses, but there is no evidence to suggest that such investment would cause any "actual lives lost", vs the other much bigger public budget items in the US. If anything, more people in buses would likel…

I have no issue at all with the appropriate level of investment in electric buses. Investment in public transit in general is besides the point. It’s economic fact that paying more for an electric bus and building the infrastructure to support them is more justifiable and will provide better ROI in China where the pollution is 5x more deadly. If your metric is spending dollars efficiently to save lives, there’s bette…

> If your metric is spending dollars efficiently to save lives, there’s better ROI in the US by spending the money elsewhere.

It's massively oversimplifying the trade-off to reduce it to a single metric, and it proposes a false choice.

Why not also consider reducing congestion, reducing local-air-pollution related respiratory conditions, etc?

And compared to the known types of huge government expenditures that might be doing actual harm to some subset of citizens (i.e. lives lost in wars of questionable value) why point the finger at electric buses?

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#327

Post by jimmywanger »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #315
jimmywanger wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> writing often drastically limits the number of strokes. I’m sorry, but I must question your experience with Chinese, because all this is covered in any reasonable introduction to the script reform. No, it's not the same. When you make the abbreviated strokes you try to simulate things. It's not turning four apostrophes into a straight line. I also like the little dig about my knowledge about Chinese writing. > This…

> It's not turning four apostrophes into a straight line. Yes, it definitely is. The reduction of four strokes to one at the bottom for the character for "horse" is a perfect example of how the simplified form proposed by the Chinese state merely copied the rapid way of writing the traditional character. Again, I must question your familiarity with this subject.

> Yes, it definitely is. The reduction of four strokes to one at the bottom for the character for "horse" is a perfect example of how the simplified form proposed by the Chinese state merely copied the rapid way of writing the traditional character.

Again, we're talking about mutual legibility. You can scan through traditional sloppily written chinese because there are still subtle cues that you're used to. With simplified there is none of that, as well as the upper part of the character being just a straight line when it was a vertical line with two lines crossing it. If you scribble something there you still make things vertical and a bit bumpy to suggest the original shape.

Traditional is legible sometimes, as not all characters have changed and some changes aren't important. Take the symbol for country. That is completely puzzling.

You seem to be arguing from how you think things work logically. However simplified is very difficult to figure out from traditional sometimes, no matter how you slice it.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#328

Post by petre »

Beltiras wrote: post #284
petre wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, using electric vehicles does create more battery storage to charge using solar during daytime off-peak hours. You go to work, park your car in a parking equipped with chragers and your car charges while you sit and work. The parking lot and the neighbouring buildings can have solar panels on their roofs to supply the electricity. Same during night time off peak hours: you car can charge while you sleep mainly u…

Solar rooftops on cars don't provide enough juice for it to amount to much. Let's say for the sake of argument you could fit a square meter of a car's roof as a 20% efficient solar panel (a ludicrously high efficiency). Solar irradience is roughly 1 kW per square meter giving you roughly 200W. That will provide roughly 1.6 kWhr of energy. This is enough to drive roughly 8 miles on an average EV (20 kWhr/100 miles). T…

I am aware of this. This is why you need more rooftops than the parking lot's and your home's to produce electricity and feed it into the grid. Parkings could just buy that electricity, meter it and sell it to you along with the parking fee.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#329

Post by adrianN »

GoToRO wrote: post #254
adrianN wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Berlin a good chunk of the scooters I see are already electric. I don't think that the noisy two stroke engines will live much longer.

Hey AdrianN! can you give some online shops where can I buy the most popular models? Thanks.

Since I have some Amazon stock, I recommend Amazon.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#330

Post by [deleted] »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #280
contras1970 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so USA has poorer public transport than Europe because the latter has much more uniform population distribution; USA also has poorer public transport than Australia because the latter has much more skewed population distribution. american exceptionalism at its finest. :)

It's the Goldilocks syndrome. Population density has to be juuuust right to result in American transit. It couldn't possibly be due to any other factors.........

[deleted]
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