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Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

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Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#71

Post by Galxeagle »

kkfx wrote: post #66
Galxeagle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overhead wires take a lot of maintenance - point of reference, Vancouver BC's transit authority reported maintenance costs per km were actually higher for their electric trolleys than both their diesel and CNG buses. And having lived with them, being effectively restricted to being 'on rails' leads to challenges in traffic or road closures where traditional buses would re-route down a different street. I think batter…

Thanks for the report, not so easy to source valuable information! I nevertheless object with a side reasoning: costs are complex beast, in an age of scarcity, where oil is pushed aside no matter if for good or bad reasons, how costs can change? I mean: maintaining an aerial network and relevant trolleys is surely expensive, but expensive in what? In natural resources or in worked hours q and hour of vehicle mandator…

I'm not a transit or budget costing expert, but I understand that trending increase around 2008 to be around warranty ("All vehicles... were off warranty coverage by 2010, explaining why costs rose over the five years").

re: your point on infrastructure, I think my argument would be that anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail, leaving electric buses like this relegated to distributed suburban areas. I actually think the future is the marriage of ride-hailing and public transit - fixed, schedule transit routes are from the 60's. I'm really excited by some of the experiments that dispatch buses based on app requests [1]

It's a fair point around battery production - to complement your point, it's a well-known issue that Tesla remains primarily battery bottlenecked over anything else. I guess we're in an interesting conflict between what's best for society/environment (electrify asap) vs cities (best possible public transport), but personally I'd put stock in battery production scaling up faster than expected.

https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/Conferences/2019/DRT/K...

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#72

Post by subw00f »

warning26 wrote: post #63
subw00f wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert, but I would think creating or changing existing routes for trolleybuses would require setting up overhead wires, which probably need a few things to be in place beforehand. Isn't that just slower/costlier than simply driving on a different street? What about intercity routes? Doesn't sound superior to me on that front. edit: grammar

Changing routes isn't really that frequent once you have a working setup. As for intercity travel, this should be set up as rail, not a bus, in basically 100% of cases.

I've been to major European cities in the last few weeks, Paris, London, Edinburgh, all of them, with no exception had bus routes changed temporarily because of construction, protests, events etc. Of course it's frequent.

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#73

Post by netsharc »

mumblemumble wrote: post #57
trmonx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric buses are not a new hip thing, we have had electric buses since forever. It's called a trolleybus. At the moment its in every way superior to batteries.

I can't see it as being superior in every way. In most cities where I've spent significant time with the public transit system, it's relatively common for the buses to need to reroute around things like road construction and street festivals. Also, buses frequently need to pass other buses on the same route that are stopped due to equipment problems or running slowly due to overcrowding. A trolleybus would have a har…

The buses I've seen are still capable of going under their own power, and they can easily attach/detach from the wires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k1z10U3utc

So detours and overtakings are no big deals.

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#74

Post by rvz »

ageitgey wrote: post #15

Don't take this as an indictment of all electric buses. London has over 500 electric buses (out of 9,000). A lot of the buses in my neighborhood are the new electric double-decker ones and it's extremely nice. They are quieter, run smoother, don't polute the air, and have cool features like USB charging at every seat. It is like riding in a Tesla - just an obviously better bus experience. It will just take some time…

> Don't take this as an indictment of all electric buses.

Exactly, or any electric vehicles. Interesting to see this here to remind others that a bad electric bus should not spoil the bunch of other electric buses.

> It will just take some time to get all the tech worked out everywhere as all these buses are custom spec and not mass produced models yet, but we will get there.

Yes. There will always be issues in the technology and it takes time to iron the issues out. Question is with that specific manufacturer / developer / maintainer however is whether if partners or clients are going to wait for fixes to be resolved or will they move to a competitor or back to the status quo.

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#75

Post by ttoinou »

ageitgey wrote: post #15

Don't take this as an indictment of all electric buses. London has over 500 electric buses (out of 9,000). A lot of the buses in my neighborhood are the new electric double-decker ones and it's extremely nice. They are quieter, run smoother, don't polute the air, and have cool features like USB charging at every seat. It is like riding in a Tesla - just an obviously better bus experience. It will just take some time…

> don't polute the air

It does pollute the air, but not at the same place (where the energy is produced) and not where the bus is running (in town)

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#76

Post by gregoriol »

Paris is experimenting with a few brands/models of electric buses right now, and it's the same brand/model that caught fire two times. That is quite a lot, but it's only this brand/model that is being suspended, not all electric buses.

I don't know if this brand/model is used elsewhere, but it's a french manufacturer that doesn't have a very long record on making buses. They have made quite some of electric cars, without fires, even though they failed to get customers on them.

I would give them a chance to check and fix: it's still a new tech.

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#77

Post by ReactiveJelly »

ttoinou wrote: post #75
ageitgey wrote: post #15

Don't take this as an indictment of all electric buses. London has over 500 electric buses (out of 9,000). A lot of the buses in my neighborhood are the new electric double-decker ones and it's extremely nice. They are quieter, run smoother, don't polute the air, and have cool features like USB charging at every seat. It is like riding in a Tesla - just an obviously better bus experience. It will just take some time…

> don't polute the air It does pollute the air, but not at the same place (where the energy is produced) and not where the bus is running (in town)

Pretty sure net pollution is reduced because power plants can burn fuels more efficiently than the ICE in a vehicle, and the power plants don't have to idle or waste energy with friction braking.

But I don't have a source on hand.

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#78

Post by kkfx »

Galxeagle wrote: post #71
kkfx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the report, not so easy to source valuable information! I nevertheless object with a side reasoning: costs are complex beast, in an age of scarcity, where oil is pushed aside no matter if for good or bad reasons, how costs can change? I mean: maintaining an aerial network and relevant trolleys is surely expensive, but expensive in what? In natural resources or in worked hours q and hour of vehicle mandator…

I'm not a transit or budget costing expert, but I understand that trending increase around 2008 to be around warranty ("All vehicles... were off warranty coverage by 2010, explaining why costs rose over the five years"). re: your point on infrastructure, I think my argument would be that anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail, leaving electric buses…

Warranty period might be a nice catch, thanks :-)

> [...] anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail [...]

Honestly I'm against public transport, ad I'm against actual/modern cities: yes, in actual cities we absolutely need public transport, especially in dense EU cities where moving by car is a nightmare, BUT if we see in the world the various "economic environments":

- low density/low demographic areas are in mean underdeveloped and not very nice to live in, they tend to be poor areas for humans;

- high density areas tend to be nightmares where some start fleeing not knowing much where to flee and with density issues that have surpassed the advantage of density economic booster and being dense haven't much room to evolve;

- mid-density areas are middle ground, some are bad places some good ones, so looking at them I see a variety pattern:

- areas dedicated to something in general do see a quick flourishing period than agony;

- areas with a variety of activities and residential tend to prosper better than actual cities until density start to be high (in Riviera's terms).

As a result I see the Riviera model the best we have at today technological level: TLCs and logistics make possible to be "near enough" to have the density economic advantage without being a city, so without the downsides of cities. Surely we can't develop anything with this model, mining, heavy mechanics, metallurgic industries etc can't exists in such models, they need to be districts, but also cities nor other solution work form them and pure districts, like suburbs does not work because they have no variety. We can sustain a failure of a dedicated-to-something district if the rest of the country is resilient and agile enough to evolve, like a riviera, we can't evolve cities, so we are not resilient nor agile with them...

Long-story short in this present time I can't identify something stable enough for land-based networks, nor rails nor roads. Surely what's already build and still in a good shape can be used, but no investments in such infra seems to be a good enough one to my eyes... That's why I'm a partisan of aviation and naval, they still need infra, but such investments are cheaper if we remain at a certain scale so changes can happen with contained losses.

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#79

Post by lapinot »

saturn_vk wrote: post #58
trmonx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric buses are not a new hip thing, we have had electric buses since forever. It's called a trolleybus. At the moment its in every way superior to batteries.

Trolleybus routes require additional costs for maintenance. This might be significant

Otoh vehicule maintenance, cost and energy use is smaller.

Re: Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

#80

Post by lapinot »

subw00f wrote: post #54
trmonx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric buses are not a new hip thing, we have had electric buses since forever. It's called a trolleybus. At the moment its in every way superior to batteries.

I'm not an expert, but I would think creating or changing existing routes for trolleybuses would require setting up overhead wires, which probably need a few things to be in place beforehand. Isn't that just slower/costlier than simply driving on a different street? What about intercity routes? Doesn't sound superior to me on that front. edit: grammar

Most trolleybuses I know have independent emergency propulsion and can reattach without too much difficulty at specific places (usually stops). So temporary short rerouting isn't difficult. Apparently they even have trolley/battery hybrids in zurich where the battery is used as part of normal operation (claiming to need wires only for ~half of the route).
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