Going with the “batteries catch on fire argument” is stupid. “Batteries are heavy and expensive” is probably more compelling. But yeah, wires are better solution for things going in fixed routes.
The ammount of water required to put out a normal car is infinitely less than the amount required to put out a battery fire.
Not to mention the extra weight, nor the retention loss per recharge meaning we need to change batteries every 2-4 years polluting a lot more, we ain't even talking about the energy loss when doing the conversion to electric and then again to mechanical.
The electric transport is the way to go in the future, but firts it needs to have a solid foundation, and nuclear is the way to go at least in this moment. Otherwise we are only making things worse.
Wait, what‽ No. We don't need to change batteries every 2-4 years. That's what you do with TV remote controls and temperature sensors, not electric car batteries, LOL!
Electric car batteries are made to last at least 7 years (from a warranty standpoint) but in reality it's more like 10. Not only that but they're not single, gigantic objects. They're made of lots of "cells" so if one of them is going bad you can replace just that one bad cell.
Anecdote: The batteries in my Prius lasted 15 years before I had to replace one of the cells. Then a year later I had to replace another one. A year after that I sold it so I have no idea how the batteries are doing right now but I'm sure another cell would probably need to be replaced by now 19 years in service).
I'd also like to point out that the latest electric car batteries are vastly superior to the ones in my Prius.
Yeah, what I've heard is that water cooling the batteries (like almost every EV does now) massively extends the life. Early Prius batteries had no cooling and the heat degraded them faster. 15 years is a pretty good life still.
On the subject of battery warranty:
The federal government requires manufacturers to offer an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty on all EV batteries. California does one better, mandating a warranty of 10 years or 150,000 miles. Some companies will cover a battery only if it completely stops working, while others will replace the battery if it falls below a certain capacity, usually 70% of the original, while still under warranty.
It's important to note, a degraded battery, even with 50% of its original capacity is still useful. Someone who doesn't need the range could drive it, or the battery could be taken apart, and have the cells repurposed or recycled. Lithium and some of the other rare metals used in batteries are quite valuable for recycling, and our abilities to do so are getting better every year.
Electric car batteries are made to last at least 7 years (from a warranty standpoint) but in reality it’s more like 10. Not only that but they’re not single, gigantic objects. They’re made of lots of “cells” so if one of them is going bad you can replace just that one bad cell.
Sincere question, what happens with the second hand electric vehicle market? New electrics make a ton of sense, but in my mind the 'used car' market becomes essentially unobtainable for poor folk. If a 12 year old electric vehicle hits the market, eventually the second or third owner is going to have to replace the batteries and poor people can't afford the 5000 plus labor to get new cells for it.
This isn't a situation that affects me, at the moment, but there are millions of people around the globe who buy the $1000 car and drive it until it just doesn't go anymore. I don't see that being an option for electrics.
I didn't mean it literally, but easily it could be considering how u lose performance if u use a battery powered vehicle in somewhere to hot, or to cold.
According to Geotab a Tesla will be at 90% of it's initial State of Health (SoH) after 5 years of use while a Leaf (which is well-known for shit thermal management and poor battery quality) will be at 80%. That's worse than their other charts which show averages of 85% SoH in an equivalent amount of time.
Regardless, even operating at 80% after five years is completely fine. The curve isn't really linear anyway so after about 10 years the batteries will likely be operating at about 70% of their original SoH in the worst case scenario.
Also consider that the price of lithium ion batteries has dropped consistently year over year for the past decade. There was a bit of a hiccup because of COVID but that's over now and the price is continuing to drop. That means the cost of a replacement battery pack in 10 years will likely be 60-90% cheaper (if the current trend continues) than it is today.
So? First of all, my platina already has more than 12-13 years and if I lose any performance if I lose any at all, is gonna be maybe, MAYBE %3. And the real matter is all the implications of making those batteries, contamination, and NO FUCKING IMPROVEMENT OVER A NORMAL CAR, in any case it would be worse. What's the point of making ur car battery dependent when the energy used to charge it comes from burning the same fossil fuel as before, but now losing energy in the conversions from one kind of energy to another.
That's without even talking about all the draconian software locks, how companies r starting to lock functions wich already come with the vehicle, how they r trying to kill the right to repair, etc, etc, etc. We don't even know if changing batteries is gonna be allowed or if its gonna be illegal in some way as apple shenanigans already did it in Mexico where its now illegal to even install linux in a computer u already buy it since it would be "alteration without agreement". Want a real change and really helping the planet? we need better public transport and changing how we produce electric energy as a whole, because right now just putting a battery in a car and calling it a day is just additional problems to the already present ones in traditional cars.
Sure, that replacement time isn't 4 but 15-20 years (well, except early Leafs that didn't have battery temperature management of any kind), but my 20 year old car's gas tank fits just as much gas as it did 20 years ago.
If you think any ICE car is going to outlast an electric you're mistaken. EVs have a fraction of the moving parts of an ICE car and as a result are expected to last a lot longer. 30+ years for an electric car isn't out of the question. Especially the latest ones with their water cooled batteries.
The number of moving parts is just one (albeit a great big) factor as to why EVs are a lot more reliable and will last a lot longer than an ICE car. There's other elements as well such as the regenerative braking... You basically have an expiration date that tells you when to replace the brake pads instead of a number of miles (or thickness). Because the brake pads themselves will never wear enough from normal driving to warrant replacement. Instead you have to figure out the replacement time based on exposure to natural radiation (LOL) and seasonal hot/cold cycles.
The magnets in the motors lose about 5% of their strength every 100 years. So again, the thing you're accounting for when figuring out how long the motors will last is the exposure to natural radiation degrading the insulation of the wires (LOL).
I'm aware an ICE car requires more maintenance. But, two things. My gas tank doesn't get smaller over time and good luck taking your Tesla or Chevy Bolt to an unauthorized repair shop and let them try to fix anything without access to OEM diagnostic tools. Yes, new ICE cars are also full of this bullshit, but hey, my 20 year old ICE car isn't!
Just remember that "good" solutions are still preferred over "bad" solutions, and there are never any "perfect" solutions. I see too many people think electric cars are terrible because of what they've been told, like the batteries. For me, it's like "Yeah, but they're still better than ICE vehicles". They'll get better, they're definitely not perfect, but they are just better
YOu can't really stop a lithium ion battery fire, all you can do is keep it from catching other things on fire around it, you pretty much just have to let it burn out.
I'd be paying that anyway for renewable power given the geography of my country, where nuclear is impossible (ABSOLUTELY impossible). If someone could cut the natural gas from our energy pie and give us clean electricity as a replacement we'd be grateful, given our limited space and relative lack of renewable resources.
I'm aware of the Nucleon, that is why I don't want this in my car. But, I would love to have a tiny nuclear reactor in my neighborhood substation or something
Why would I want a ducking bomb under me ? No, I want I city with solar+nuclear power energizing public transport and THEN maybe u could use a battery personal vehicle to move like an autonomous trolleybus.
My problem with "electric" cars right now is where the energy comes from.
Yup batteries are not the way. By the time the batteries need to be replaced you might have helped slightly but probably not. Batteries is a illusion to going green right now. Just another product that has a demand and an easy market for it.
You can toss a lit match into a puddle of diesel and the match will go out. Diesel burns, but since it doesn't evaporate as fast as gasoline, you don't have those flammable gases hanging in the air. A trail of diesel that's being burned at one end will not spread, unlike gasoline.
Gasoline vehicles also don't tend to catch fire spontaneously while parked. That risk exists with every unattended lithium-ion battery undergoing recharging. People technically shouldn't be plugging their phones in at night and then going to sleep, but everyone does it anyway.
Doesn't matter much for phones, but when talking EV charging... Night electricity tends to be cheaper when it's not solar energy season. So people are definitely going to charge at night unattended.
Can't wait for miles of 240V extension cords when EU makes even used non EVs illegal. Yes, millions of city dwellers in apartments totally have a garage to charge in.
There will be solutions by 2050 (the proposed timeframe for having a zero-emissions fleet). For an example, vehicles with combustion engines can still be newly registered after 2035 if they use only CO2-neutral fuels. I think EU would rather ban sale of fossil fuels than ban used cars that can technically burn fossil fuels. If only plant-based fuels are available, it doesn't matter what the cars can technically burn.
The German big 3 are already developing cars that would only run on non-fossil fuels I believe.
Secondly, chargers near apartment buildings and on sidewalks can be added. We have plenty of time.
And I'm sure Germany will water down the regulations even more so in the end, I'm fairly sure they'll consider new MHEVs fine after 2035.
And finally, those who can't charge at home will do so at the charging stations. It's not a huge issue if you have a battery with 500+ km of range. Might be an issue for i-miev and first gen Leaf owners though.
Unless we get mass producable, cheap fuel like CHOOH2, "cars can use co2 neutral fuels" is translation to "in reality no ICE cars for the mass population"
Secondly, chargers near apartment buildings and on sidewalks can be added. We have plenty of time.
And who will pay for those? My town can barely get enough money to maintain street lights, who will install and maintain the charging infrastructure on streets where it will inevitably get destroyed?
And finally, those who can’t charge at home will do so at the charging stations.
Oh yes, so now instead of 15 minute wait at a gas station I will only have to wait 2 hours before a space is available and then 30 minutes to charge, all while thinking "how much is this quick charge degrading my battery"
There's 27 years to go till EU's predicted (not required by law) end of ICE cars. There's time to invest, time to innovate and hopefully time for your town to reduce crime and gain more resources.
Also HVO is pretty affordable nowadays. Maybe 20% more than regular diesel fuel at most. It is claimed to be carbon neutral. I'm sure something similar will be developed for otto cycle engines.
Also unless you're planning to use a first gen leaf past the 2050s, quick charging isn't very bad. All modern EVs have battery cooling and will also throttle charging when the temperature rises. The don't full on go 350kW for 20 minutes straight.
Waiting 2 hours is solved by installing more chargers. Clearly a regional issue with fuel pumps as well because I never have to wait over 2-3 minutes.
It didn't suck as a solution when it was implemented. The buses function like small diesel trains; they don't have to deal with traffic, and can travel faster because they kinda lock in to the rails. It didn't need as much land as a freeway or cost as much as a dedicated train line because you could just retrofit old buses. Plus the advantage of being able to run a standard bus route at each end of the line, no need for connecting services.
I'm very aware of that Tom Scott video, don't worry. It is an okay middleground, but look at the people in comments pointing out the wear on the trolley.
WTF Germany how did I not know this was a thing and why aren't we doing it here in the US?
Question though. Obviously the wires can't cover every road and the truck sometimes has to drive off the wired road. Do they have small batteries to carry them between the wires?
There are 5 testing areas for this atm and only a handful of trucks which use that. These are hybrid trucks having batteries and electrical engines besides the main traditional diesel engine. So it's far from an widely adopted tech right now.
If they can get that to work this can be massive, assuming we don't want to improve our rail infrastructure. It will also keep trucks from the passing lane
Is this a trial or is it getting installed all over? It's the best solution to electrify goods transport by road. Only a small battery required for off grid to delivery point and back
Shhh they've been fed their propaganda by Fox news and they want to clutch it as hard as they can.
God forbid they ever see what Europe or the rest of the world is doing while the US is being left behind. We might as well be pulled by horse and buggy still compared to how easy it is to get around Europe
Europe or the rest of the world is doing
Are you talking about public transit or Germany banning gas and diesel cars EU wide all while also getting rid of the best source of electricity, essentially making individual vehicle transportation for common folk a thing of the past?
Switzerland runs a lot of these buses. Also trams, normal buses , trains. For those people in the U.S., it's a very effective and efficient system called public transport.
Honestly, for growing places, or places with bad public transit, diesel busses are the way to go. They are the cheapest and require almost no new infrastructure so it can offset car emissions quicker than the other options. Established bus routes that are popular should be converted to tram lines or BRT.
Diesel busses should be considered the last alternative though, out of all the mass transit options they are still the worst for the environment. Not unless a city has exhuasted all other options should they look into them, or truly have no money for alternatives.
Downtown areas can easily be canternaried for electrified busses, and battery busses are great for trips within cities.
If a city is growing then it's the perfect time to lay down rail and plan it out properly before road infrastructure gets in the way, and rail always pays off in the long run.
For longer trips then fine, diesel, but only if 1) It's out of range for electrified busses and 2) there is not ridership enough for rail. (but even then, look at the UK's request stop numbers and I'd say that argument is pretty flimsy)
I honestly disagree. If you can get 5 car users on a diesel bus, you are making a positive impact on the environment. And you can deploy way more diesel busses than electric ones. Once you build demand, you can skip busses altogether and replace with trams. The batteries in busses are a cool technology, but still exploit child labor and extended neocolonialism in the same way oil does. Also battery fires are much worse than normal fires.
I think we should electrify fleets as soon as possible but I think adding a few battery busses here and there won't do anything but pander to environmentalist
The problem with battery fires is that most batteries are made out of lithium which reacts with pretty much everything and is extremely difficult to put out.
In addition obtaining the rare earth metals for these batteries ecologically is a real challenge and it will only get worse the more we use.
I'm not saying we should abandon electric cars but we should know the benefits and drawbacks of each option before making a decision.
Obviously diesel burns and batteries don't really explode, but the only way to put out an EV fire is to dunk the car for a few days in a tub of water. And how many of those will a fire department have? 1-5?
We USians are so hooked on, and controlled by, car infrastructure that we’ll come up with any lame ass excuse to undermine public transit. “Busses (or trains or any other form of public transit) aren’t perfect because of X, so we should just keep destroying our health, our communities and our planet”
We have some electric but lines in San Sebastian (Spain) too, no issues, the buses are lovely, they work fine. It has been about 4 years since they first got introduced, no major issues.
Yeah, who the heck complains about either of those points? Hybrid buses have been a thing for a long time. And even if it was a plain diesel bus, it'd still be better than having dozens of gasoline cars.
This. Trams are so much nicer, carry more people, way less maintenance cost and the tracks look so good if grass grows between it, also I don't get motion sickness on them. You don't even need any asphalt for them which is expensive to maintain, looks worse than pretty much anything except maybe a literal pile of garbage and heats up the surrounding area.
Doesn't work in hilly cities. That's why San Francisco has trolleybuses too (and the historical cable cars, but those are more for tourists). They do have light rail where it does make sense though.
I don't quite remember what they're called but in the UK there's both old mining trains and old cliff trains/trolleys that use toothed wheels and toothed tracks on the hill portions to go up/down hill with little issue, obviously it's only safe for some gradient, but still with the right gearing it would be of possible
Trams.... Where isn't possible trams use trolleybus... That's it!!! But what is sad, Eastern Europe falls into buying electric buses because it's mainstream 😬
We had trolley busses here in Wellington NZ for decades. The network needed an upgrade so our shortsighted council ripped it down while promising battery buses to replace the trolleys.
We ended up with old, dirty, diesels chugging round our city for years, an I'm not sure we've gotten rid of them all yet.
It was a disaster.
The best thing trolleybuses have going for them is their relatively low dependence on rare earth elements in production in contrast with BEV buses with their large batteries. Trolleybuses environmental toll is way smaller and it makes producers and operators way less dependent on third world countries devastating the environment with slave labor.
There's also the centralization advantage and long lifespan. Centralized power generation is nearly always most efficient, and EV batteries degrade relatively quickly, while there are real life examples of 30 year old trolleybuses still operating fine.
Those 30 year old trolleybuses die when power dies, but even semi modern ones (aka 15-10 year olds) can still have diesel backup. New ones always have battery backup.
That's true but still those batteries are significantly smaller than those of BEV buses - usually trolleybuses with batteries have 5-15km of range compared to 200-350 km of equivalent BEV buses which also means that the trolleybuses are significantly lighter than BEV buses, which helps with efficiency of electricity utilisation. Another efficiency factor is that not having to charge and deplete a huge battery will save quite significant ammnount of power that is lost as heat during battery operation.
Hurr duurr rareearth . Written from your phone with rare earth materials, tomorrow you're going to drive to work using rare earth to work on your laptop with rare earth materials.
Neither batteries nor drive train components of bevs HAVE to use rare earth. There's tons of cars without them (bmw electric cars for example).
If you even respond, please include a modern car which does not contain ANY rare earth material and does not use electricity for energy storage.
Nothing is black and white you know. No decision is 100% good or 100% bad, we live in a sepectrum where some decisions may be less bad than others and that is the point.
Also current batteries will use cobalt or lithium, other options are either not efficient enough (like metal hydride or sulphuric acid batteries) or developed enough - solid state batteries, or LiFePo.
Also current BMW BEVs are still using lithium based batteries, whose mining pretty much is environmental disaster as a process.
Let's face it: in most US cities there probably isn't much aesthetic for the power lines to spoil. Just like in the grey Soviet cities where they come from
Greetings from Winterthur, a pretty nice, human-friendly, town in Switzerland which bunch of old buildings. Also called the bike-city of switzerland.
It turns out that the trade off is worth it. I rather have power lines than cars or fuel powered busses.
Yes! I used to live there for most of my childhood, and thus have always considered those power lines to be a normal part of any city as a kid. Growing older and starting to visit other cities (without either trams or trolleys) I was surprised to see them missing and thought it looked strange, like a crucial piece of infrastructure was missing.
Those wires are only there if you are looking for them.
This is in my city. It looks this way because it is the biggest public transport intersection, with trolleybuses going all 4 directions meeting a tram line.
Seriously, after a while you just ignore those wires.
Works just as well as the diesel buses. Sometimes they hop off the guide wires and the driver has to get out with a fibreglass pole to reattach them but that usually only happens due to driver error
I see it the other way. Trolleybuses (with either battery or diesel backup) are the best of both worlds. Much cheaper to built (compared to a tram) and doesn't pollute in the city (compared to a full diesel bus)
Trams are surely better, but the simple infrastructure and relative simplicity of the drive train make trolley often cheaper than a diesel bus. Trolley buses with a small battery can also deviate from standard lines or bridge small areas between trolley lines.
I think someone else mentioned that San Francisco has these. I also wanted to throw in that Seattle has got them too. Maybe it's a West Coast thing in the USA? I'd be curious to know if other parts of the country have them too.
Down here in NZ my city used to have these too! Apparently it was the last commercial trolleybus network in Oceania. But as a mostly suburban kind of city environment (not quite American suburbia but still low density), their utility definitely was quite limited by the predefined routes. Eventually more and more routes weren't even using them. But they were still servicing the old main road high frequency routes, so they were still very useful in those instances. Much better than the diesel buses, too, which were so loud you could hear them coming from several stops away! Eventually they phased the trolleys out in 2017, citing all the usual rubbish like maintenance costs and such. But we hadn't yet electrified our bus fleet, so for a while we had to borrow a bunch more diesel buses. Still on the road to having a fully electric fleet, and I imagine it will be a good while yet before that happens.
I heard we tried that in some German Cities way back in the 80ies or even late 70ies, but the technology wasn't that far yet and the overhead cables would get damaged when the buses engaged them, sometimes leading to complete outages of the tram network, and as such it was scrapped again. Glad to see that other places took it on later, we could really need that right now.
Trolley Buses are over 100 years old as a technology. They were super wide-spread in the entire eastern block and now cities in hungary, the czech republic and romania introduce a lot of newer (better) models: For example, Skoda has one that can easily integrate with exsisting tram infrastructure and has batteries to bridge smaller distances in places where there are no overhead lines.
They're also fairly popular in China! When I was visiting family in Shanghai, a sizeable chunk of the bus service consisted of electric trolley busses.
Trolleybuses the best compromise. Uses electricity without having downtime to charge and weight of lot of batteries and doesn't need tracks (but can still have dedicated bus lanes)
I love trams, light rail, and subway systems. I've had to think long and hard about why. Busses have notable advantages for flexibility and redundancy in the system, so why do I prefer to use a railed transit solution?
For light rail, grade separated trams, and subways it's easy: they're faster in the city. Like... WAY faster. They don't fight traffic so I wait a few minutes (at most) in any city with real transit solutions, ride for a short bit, hop off, and I'm there. Not having to deal with my car is freedom.
So... trams.... why trams over busses?
First of all they're bigger. There's more elbow room and it's easier to get on and off. It's easier for a group of people (see: me and the kids) to all climb on and make room. The doors are larger and it's easier to use multiple doors to load a large group so the people getting on and off a tram can go much faster. There is less shuffling along trying to wedge yourselves into the tram like you're forced to do on a bus.
Second, they're predictable and have a visible route. When I'm walking around, I can tell where the tram will be because I can follow the rails. I don't have to guess what the route will be or where I should go to meet it. Yes, busses have signs every so often, but it's not nearly the same as seeing the rails and knowing I'm on the route. This is especially true if they do move the bus route (which is what everyone who advocates for busses says is a good thing), and I don't know it. The bus is just gone.
Thirdly, the tram drives in a predictable path. I can be near it and know where it's going to go. In fact, whole big crowds of people do it all the time in plazas in Europe. You can walk near the rails and know that you're still safe. Check out the plaza in front of the main train station in Amsterdam. They chose to run the trams right through it, but not allow busses since they weren't safe and predictable enough.
Fourth, they're quiet. Trolley Busses get this too, but trams have had it a long time. They can co-exist with a people-oriented space without being too disruptive. When you sit in a cafe talking with your friends and the tram goes by it's no big deal. When a diesel bus goes by it's incredibly noisy.
Lastly, they're a community commitment. When a city installs a tram, the whole city knows that the route it travels will be supported for a long time. If you choose to live near a stop, you'll have transit. If you're choosing to start a business, you'll want to be close to the tram line so customers can easily get there. The same isn't nearly as true for a bus line. I haven't really pinned down why yet, but there's a very different feel to rolling along on a tram while looking at businesses to visit, and rolling along on a bus. You just don't have the same kind of connection to the street around you on a bus that you do on a tram.
I totally agree with passenger space, predictability, speed and overall commitment towards development of the parts of the city that the tram goes through.
However I personally cannot agree on trams being quiet at least in my country. They have an incredibly loud squeal when cornering at higher speeds. Sometimes one can hear a tram squealing by half a kilometer away.
The tram supremacy doesn't lie in the inherent nature of the technology but in the way we treat it! Trams get:
their own lane
dedicated signals at intersections (often even priority)
infrastructure money and thus planning effort
In short, they are (usually) treated like public transport. Busses on the other hand are too often treated like just another car that's thrown in with the rest but also has the obligations of public transport. If you treated trams like that (sharing the road, waiting behind cars) they would be even worse than busses.
Seattle used to have these as well. Sadly, the US (outside of a few cities that kept their 1930's infrastructure and updated it) can't find it's ass with both hands when it comes to public transportation.
here in Santiago we have more than 1000 Electric Buses In operation, they work great.
Trolleys can't divert trough an alternative route if the original route got blocked somehow (for example it got barricaded.) wich is a common occurrence here in Santiago.
I'm Czech and my city has a trolleybus network. Every single trolleybus has either a) diesel engine or b) battery backup, depends on their age. Hell, there are even entire lines where 1/3rd they run on batteries. But, they can be smaller, so the vehicle is lighter.
that still doesn't adress the cost of implementing it on the more than 300 bus routes there are in Santiago or how probable is that the infrastructure would get damaged or destroyed every time there are protests.
This number, 300, doesn't say anything. How many miles is that, excluding duplications? The inner city is easy and cheap to cover in power lines for trolleys to replace busses here, and everything other may be best kept on diesel.
What protests, lol? Repairing power lines is easy and fast and I doubt someone would target them.
its not that costly tonimplement. Why do you think they were implemented back then, instead of running everything on diesel engines?
The upfrontninvestment might be higher, but the running costs are lower, since the electricity is far mor energy efficient and electric engines need way less maintenance than IC-engines.
I tried to find more information about this repeatedly, because it's so unbelievable that the city would allow it. I found no other sources. Only chatter that this was an April fool's joke. That seems to be the case. Certainly someone would have posted video of this by now.
And the same people who gripe about overhead cables apparently have no trouble staring at a street full of idling, polluting, and noisy cars. It's really impressive.
Because diesel catching on fire is totally unheard of.
On it's own? Pretty much unheard of. Usually is a leak and something else set it on fire.
Batteries on the other hand plenty of cases where the battery itself was the starting point. Is usually cause by a bad design or external factors? Yes, not saying otherwise.
And tbh Diesel is the worse example you could put as requires either high pressure or a continuous exposure to a flame as you could throw a lit match on it and it wouldn't set it on fire.
Petrol/Gasoline on the other hand...
Not always, a bad design/construction of a battery I wouldn't call it external factors.
It doesn't need anything external to set on fire.
But I agree that it's not common.
On the Diesel/petrol case.... it would need a leak to begin with and usually it's not s difficult thing to design a tank/engine without leaks. Let's be honest a battery is a more complex system to fuck up.
Yes, there have been recalls as well in some cased.
Here there is info about incidents, althought not only due to internal faillings alone, there are crashes and other stuff as well.
The usual issue is that a thermal runaway happens.
In my city in Spain I remember them from when I was a child. They were removed during the early 2000s.
But ten years ago, last time I visited, they still had some in Seville.
This is just a tram without the tracks? Guessing it is just for charging otherwise why not just have a tram which is much safer, more space and can basically drive itself
It has some benefits if they are worth or not I am not so sure.
It's easier to change the routes, either permanent or temporally. In the case of temporally if it has a second source of power like battery or non electrical engine it can like use a non electrified street if there is some emergency or construction or whatever.
You can change routes for special days easily without junctions or whatever is needed for trams without big issues.
And even if it needs to electrify a new zone it, it probably much faster than the work for adding new rails and junctions.
Exactly, you don't need to build tram tracks, and you can easily build routes uphill/downhill. I'm no expert on trams but I think it's pretty complicated to have them go through versatile environments without having to build tunnel systems etc, so building a network that makes even more remote corners of a city accessible is much easier.
Its much easier and cheaper to install above ground than in the ground. Bonus points you could open it to Electrical trucks for emission free cargo in the city.
Rail systems are not necessarily more reliable (at leats tram vs bus I mean), I do love the aesthetic of trams, and they are also more efficient due to the small rolling resistance.
And it is definitely easier to transition into trolley than it is to transition into tram.
I use them every day for commute. Trolley buses are absolute pieces of shit. Slow, drivers understand mash the throttle like it's on and off button and in cold winters their electrical cables overhead freeze and you get delays.
Btw their electrical cables make the city look like garbage. The only ones who think trolleys are a good idea are those who don't use them.
First off, Diesel Busses Are equally environmental friendly as electric trains. (On long distance trips) this is due to infrastructure emissions, which are far higher for train infrastructure.
Furthermore looking at batteries: Batteries are expensive and very sensible to temperatures. They are virtually unusable in some climate zones. Furthermore a battery burns much hotter than gasoline. Much much hotter. So hot in fact that the damage to roads is immense.
In addition to that, battery driven cars and buses are extremely heavy and damaging asphalt infrastructure as well.
The best solution is to shift mobility towards Diesel driven Busses and facilitate car sharing.
It’s flexible, mich more flexible than other solutions. This makes it adaptable to many environments and situations.
And it does not force people to give up achievements of mobility.
The example in the meme is extra problematic, because steel cables and train infrastructure is heavily reliant on coal. And replacement of coal with hydrogen is not to be seen in the foreseeable future.
What sort of “infrastructure emissions”? That doesn’t really make sense to me, once you build the infrastructure it already exists, so it doesn’t just emit on its own. Also rail infrastructure being worse than road infrastructure doesn’t makes sense. Electric trains have extremely negligible emissions (I dare say practically none in normal operation). Electric road vehicles (of any type) still have tyre emissions (and make them worse because they are heavier). Electric trains are over all the best way forward dice intercity transport.
What sort of “infrastructure emissions”? That doesn’t really make sense to me, once you build the infrastructure it already exists, so it doesn’t just emit on its own.
Let me rephrase it: infrastructure maintaining emissions.
You have to think about all the people involved in organising train infrastructure each day. It’s immense.
I can’t find the source anymore. But a german agency once published a calculation, that on a 100 km trip, the train was still emitting less, including every emissions connected to this one train ride. But the difference to a diesel Bus became basically unmentionable. Just a few kg CO2 more. But not much.
And keep in mind that a bus is much more flexible than a train.
Also rail infrastructure being worse than road infrastructure doesn’t makes sense. Electric trains have extremely negligible emissions (I dare say practically none in normal operation). Electric road vehicles (of any type) still have tyre emissions (and make them worse because they are heavier). Electric trains are over all the best way forward dice intercity transport.
Not quite. As every city is dependant on road infrastructure. It starts with the building of houses and the transport of material. You cannot use rail infrastructure for every house. It does not bring the needed flexibility. Same goes for emergency services, police, firebricks, ambulance, craftsman,… asphalt based infrastructure is irreplaceable. Might as well use it for public transport instead of creating a second infrastructure to care for.
One little new building project and a rail route in a city is blocked for 1-2 years. Car infrastructure is flexible and can evade this problem.
This seems too unbelievable for me to take your word for it. Find the source or stop spouting nonsense.
Repairing asphalt roads causes a huge amount of emissions, and the more traffic those roads see, the more often they need to be replaced.
In what world does maintaining a rail line even come close to the emissions produced by maintaining buses, trucks, and the road itself?
Asphalt is a byproduct of oil refinery. It’s literal main component is production waste. There is a ton of it.
Steel on the other hand must be produced in the so called blast furnace process. It’s the reduction of iron oxide with carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. But the hydrogen is it added separately. It’s a byproduct of the process that reacts as well reductive towards iron oxide.
You need to burn immense amounts of coal to create elemental iron.
And trails are equally time consuming and resources consuming with maintenance as asphalt streets are.
I don’t know what kind of source you want there. Do you need a link towards Wikipedia? Or can you find the production of iron and asphalt yourself?
The article you linked makes no mention of maintenance and infrastructure emissions. There's just a single table that seems to be based on fuel emissions at the time of travel. It's also specific to existing rail infrastructure, which is fine, but for the purposes of argument and comparison, it would be ideal to compare the most efficient bus/roadway system with the most efficient rail system. Zero-emissions trains exist, yet somehow just maintaining the rail line would completely offset that according to your argument?
Asphalt is an oil product, yes, but it still needs to be processed and turned into asphalt. That also emits pollution. So does transporting it to the destination, and all the other environmental factors with building up a road surface. You can't just hand wave that away "because we already made a ton of it". That's not how sustainability works. We're explicitly trying to reduce our reliance on oil.
You also seem to be ignoring that rail lasts orders of magnitude longer than asphalt, and don't constantly have to be patched and repaired for pot holes.
Steel is also one of the most recycled materials on the planet. (Nearly 70% of all steel here in the US is recycled). Melting down old cars or whatever into new rail tracks uses significantly less energy than refining new metal.
The article you linked makes no mention of maintenance and infrastructure emissions. There's just a single table that seems to be based on fuel emissions at the time of travel.
I cannot look everything up. Soooooo … trust me bro.
It's also specific to existing rail infrastructure, which is fine, but for the purposes of argument and comparison, it would be ideal to compare the most efficient bus/roadway system with the most efficient rail system. Zero-emissions trains exist, yet somehow just maintaining the rail line would completely offset that according to your argument?
There also exist zero emission cars. So this argument doesn’t work so well.
We are talking about real life applications. And that’s why it is absolutely reasonable to compare existing infrastructure. Germany has invested heavily into both, automobile infrastructure and Railroad infrastructure. So the comparison seems to be alright.
Asphalt is an oil product, yes, but it still needs to be processed and turned into asphalt. That also emits pollution. So does transporting it to the destination, and all the other environmental factors with building up a road surface.
And so does steel and concrete.
You can't just hand wave that away "because we already made a ton of it". That's not how sustainability works. We're explicitly trying to reduce our reliance on oil.
I can hand wave this off completely fine, since it would be technically possible to frac bitumen into synthesis gas as well. So asphalt is still bound carbon. And that’s alright that way.
You also seem to be ignoring that rail lasts orders of magnitude longer than asphalt, and don't constantly have to be patched and repaired for pot holes.
This is wrong. They need to be ground down regularity, they need to be replaced regularity due to material fatigue, railroads need intense care - freed from plants regularity, much more frequent in fact than asphalt, due to its open structure.
In Addition to rails, there is need for electrical wiring above the train. This wiring is also needed to replace regularity due to material fatigue, constant rubbing of the metals onto each other.
Then we also have further infrastructure for people, so called train stations. Especially larger train stations must be heated in winter with immense amounts of gas and train stations made of glass in summer are in desperate need of cooling.
You just have to take a look at the prices for a ride. If it compares financially, then it most likely compares in emissions as well.
Steel is also one of the most recycled materials on the planet. (Nearly 70% of all steel here in the US is recycled). Melting down old cars or whatever into new rail tracks uses significantly less energy than refining new metal.
While this is correct, it is still very inefficient to melt down steel and then clean it up to recreate the requested alloys. Asphalt on the other hand can be recycled much easier. It is in fact a thermoplastic material. It needs much lower melting temperatures and is not dependant on reductive agents.
When the argument is emergency vehicles and "rail infrastructure for every house" it is clear that you are talking with an American that has no idea what they are talking about
You are talking with a European. A German in fact.
And I was not talking about rail to every house, I was mentioning the absolute necessity for asphalt streets. And that this infrastructure is far more flexible and adaptive than all the alternatives. Something irreplaceable in fact.
On the topic, the debate was never regarding if streets would exist or not. This is a moved-goalpost argument made by people who are trying to fight the pro public transport movement.
Supporting and promoting public transport doesn't require to demolish the streets or make cars illegal. Or cars cease to exist at all. This is an irrational fear of such peopke and it is actually funny when this is the counterargument.
On the topic, the debate was never regarding if streets would exist or not. This is a moved-goalpost argument made by people who are trying to fight the pro public transport movement.
I am not against public transport. But the pro public transport movement often leans into the extreme.
Asking for the removal of individual transport (well only cars, not bicycles).
But from my standpoint, it is clear that an infrastructure, that is irreplaceable and an absolute necessity, must be used to the fullest extend. This means that the primary objective in planing transport in a city must be to fill the streets with busses, cars and bicycles.
Rail comes secondary.
Supporting and promoting public transport doesn't require to demolish the streets or make cars illegal. Or cars cease to exist at all. This is an irrational fear of such peopke and it is actually funny when this is the counterargument.
Well, I might be a little sensitive, but some people here support a movement against individualistic solutions rather than a positively conotated idea of feasible reasonable, not ideological solutions.
Modern OHLE standards are significantly less messy than they were 100 years ago. And if they really are still that bad, conductor rails work almost as well.
"Conductors" as in any piece of metal that conducts electricity? Those overhead wires are also conductors, and will see some energy loss over their length like any other conductor.
OHLE is a conductor too. The issue with conductor rials is that they use DC rather than AC, which means that voltage is lower, meaning substations need to be more frequent. However, the conductor rail takes up no additional space in the loading gauge compared to OHLE, so for underground systems, or systems that need minimal clearance, conductor rails are better.
The whole thing about trolleybuses is that they don't pollute inside of the city. Obviously that pollution still happens somewhere, but it isn't under your nose.
Trolleybuses can use renewable electricity from wind and solar. This works today, right now. Diesel is still fossil carbon coming out of the ground and burned. It would be a different story if we could synthesize diesel using electricity, or used 100% biodiesel, but currently we can't and we don't.
Or better than solar panels is cheap, clean and safe uranium nuclear power :3 And even if that power is made from diesel, the pollution happens outside of the city
What the actual fuck⁈ “Batteries can catch on fire.” Sure, whatever could go wrong with a 1000l tank of FUCKING GASOLINE.
AAAaaaaHHhh I hate people!
Going with the “batteries catch on fire argument” is stupid. “Batteries are heavy and expensive” is probably more compelling. But yeah, wires are better solution for things going in fixed routes.
The ammount of water required to put out a normal car is infinitely less than the amount required to put out a battery fire.
Not to mention the extra weight, nor the retention loss per recharge meaning we need to change batteries every 2-4 years polluting a lot more, we ain't even talking about the energy loss when doing the conversion to electric and then again to mechanical.
The electric transport is the way to go in the future, but firts it needs to have a solid foundation, and nuclear is the way to go at least in this moment. Otherwise we are only making things worse.
Edit for those wondering about the battery degradation: https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
Wait, what‽ No. We don't need to change batteries every 2-4 years. That's what you do with TV remote controls and temperature sensors, not electric car batteries, LOL!
Electric car batteries are made to last at least 7 years (from a warranty standpoint) but in reality it's more like 10. Not only that but they're not single, gigantic objects. They're made of lots of "cells" so if one of them is going bad you can replace just that one bad cell.
Anecdote: The batteries in my Prius lasted 15 years before I had to replace one of the cells. Then a year later I had to replace another one. A year after that I sold it so I have no idea how the batteries are doing right now but I'm sure another cell would probably need to be replaced by now 19 years in service).
I'd also like to point out that the latest electric car batteries are vastly superior to the ones in my Prius.
Yeah, what I've heard is that water cooling the batteries (like almost every EV does now) massively extends the life. Early Prius batteries had no cooling and the heat degraded them faster. 15 years is a pretty good life still.
On the subject of battery warranty:
It's important to note, a degraded battery, even with 50% of its original capacity is still useful. Someone who doesn't need the range could drive it, or the battery could be taken apart, and have the cells repurposed or recycled. Lithium and some of the other rare metals used in batteries are quite valuable for recycling, and our abilities to do so are getting better every year.
Sincere question, what happens with the second hand electric vehicle market? New electrics make a ton of sense, but in my mind the 'used car' market becomes essentially unobtainable for poor folk. If a 12 year old electric vehicle hits the market, eventually the second or third owner is going to have to replace the batteries and poor people can't afford the 5000 plus labor to get new cells for it.
This isn't a situation that affects me, at the moment, but there are millions of people around the globe who buy the $1000 car and drive it until it just doesn't go anymore. I don't see that being an option for electrics.
Doesn't and won't exist. And it might be a "conspiracy theory" but I do think it is totally intentional.
I didn't mean it literally, but easily it could be considering how u lose performance if u use a battery powered vehicle in somewhere to hot, or to cold.
Also, look how much degradation suffers the battery's https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
According to Geotab a Tesla will be at 90% of it's initial State of Health (SoH) after 5 years of use while a Leaf (which is well-known for shit thermal management and poor battery quality) will be at 80%. That's worse than their other charts which show averages of 85% SoH in an equivalent amount of time.
Regardless, even operating at 80% after five years is completely fine. The curve isn't really linear anyway so after about 10 years the batteries will likely be operating at about 70% of their original SoH in the worst case scenario.
Also consider that the price of lithium ion batteries has dropped consistently year over year for the past decade. There was a bit of a hiccup because of COVID but that's over now and the price is continuing to drop. That means the cost of a replacement battery pack in 10 years will likely be 60-90% cheaper (if the current trend continues) than it is today.
So? First of all, my platina already has more than 12-13 years and if I lose any performance if I lose any at all, is gonna be maybe, MAYBE %3. And the real matter is all the implications of making those batteries, contamination, and NO FUCKING IMPROVEMENT OVER A NORMAL CAR, in any case it would be worse. What's the point of making ur car battery dependent when the energy used to charge it comes from burning the same fossil fuel as before, but now losing energy in the conversions from one kind of energy to another.
That's without even talking about all the draconian software locks, how companies r starting to lock functions wich already come with the vehicle, how they r trying to kill the right to repair, etc, etc, etc. We don't even know if changing batteries is gonna be allowed or if its gonna be illegal in some way as apple shenanigans already did it in Mexico where its now illegal to even install linux in a computer u already buy it since it would be "alteration without agreement". Want a real change and really helping the planet? we need better public transport and changing how we produce electric energy as a whole, because right now just putting a battery in a car and calling it a day is just additional problems to the already present ones in traditional cars.
Sure, that replacement time isn't 4 but 15-20 years (well, except early Leafs that didn't have battery temperature management of any kind), but my 20 year old car's gas tank fits just as much gas as it did 20 years ago.
If you think any ICE car is going to outlast an electric you're mistaken. EVs have a fraction of the moving parts of an ICE car and as a result are expected to last a lot longer. 30+ years for an electric car isn't out of the question. Especially the latest ones with their water cooled batteries.
The number of moving parts is just one (albeit a great big) factor as to why EVs are a lot more reliable and will last a lot longer than an ICE car. There's other elements as well such as the regenerative braking... You basically have an expiration date that tells you when to replace the brake pads instead of a number of miles (or thickness). Because the brake pads themselves will never wear enough from normal driving to warrant replacement. Instead you have to figure out the replacement time based on exposure to natural radiation (LOL) and seasonal hot/cold cycles.
The magnets in the motors lose about 5% of their strength every 100 years. So again, the thing you're accounting for when figuring out how long the motors will last is the exposure to natural radiation degrading the insulation of the wires (LOL).
I'm aware an ICE car requires more maintenance. But, two things. My gas tank doesn't get smaller over time and good luck taking your Tesla or Chevy Bolt to an unauthorized repair shop and let them try to fix anything without access to OEM diagnostic tools. Yes, new ICE cars are also full of this bullshit, but hey, my 20 year old ICE car isn't!
Good luck finding or affording gas in 20 years!
You'll have to go down to the boat dock to fill up your ICE car because there won't be gas stations anywhere else.
Just remember that "good" solutions are still preferred over "bad" solutions, and there are never any "perfect" solutions. I see too many people think electric cars are terrible because of what they've been told, like the batteries. For me, it's like "Yeah, but they're still better than ICE vehicles". They'll get better, they're definitely not perfect, but they are just better
YOu can't really stop a lithium ion battery fire, all you can do is keep it from catching other things on fire around it, you pretty much just have to let it burn out.
Which means you need to dunk it in a pool. How many of those does your local FD has? 1-5?
Nuclear is about to go away, looking at the statitics.
Frankly, I don't mind as long as I can get enough electricity at any time of the day.
So you don't mind paying 40 cents/kWh?
That would be if we had nuclear only.
I'd be paying that anyway for renewable power given the geography of my country, where nuclear is impossible (ABSOLUTELY impossible). If someone could cut the natural gas from our energy pie and give us clean electricity as a replacement we'd be grateful, given our limited space and relative lack of renewable resources.
Yeah.... not really something I want to see happening.
Ideally solar + nuclear could be the solution we need.
I thought he wanted nuclear energy in cars?
Small nuclear reactor in your car is stupid, but I would love if every city had its own nuclear reactor. Central power and heating!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
I'm aware of the Nucleon, that is why I don't want this in my car. But, I would love to have a tiny nuclear reactor in my neighborhood substation or something
Why would I want a ducking bomb under me ? No, I want I city with solar+nuclear power energizing public transport and THEN maybe u could use a battery personal vehicle to move like an autonomous trolleybus.
My problem with "electric" cars right now is where the energy comes from.
Yup batteries are not the way. By the time the batteries need to be replaced you might have helped slightly but probably not. Batteries is a illusion to going green right now. Just another product that has a demand and an easy market for it.
I think we're all aware of the costs associated with recycling batteries.
Are you aware of the costs associated with high CO2 levels?
Have to choose the lesser of two evils.
What would be a better alternative if you exclude the use of fossil fuels?
fixed overhead wires, as OP suggested?
You’re aware that diesel is quite hard to catch on fire
That's why he said gasoline tho
But that’s not relevant for busses
No it's not. It's harder to catch fire than gasoline.
It still catches fire easily.
You can toss a lit match into a puddle of diesel and the match will go out. Diesel burns, but since it doesn't evaporate as fast as gasoline, you don't have those flammable gases hanging in the air. A trail of diesel that's being burned at one end will not spread, unlike gasoline.
Okay
Gasoline and diesel can be extinguished relatively easily. Extinguishing an EV means throwing it into a tub of water for a day or two
Gasoline vehicles also don't tend to catch fire spontaneously while parked. That risk exists with every unattended lithium-ion battery undergoing recharging. People technically shouldn't be plugging their phones in at night and then going to sleep, but everyone does it anyway.
Doesn't matter much for phones, but when talking EV charging... Night electricity tends to be cheaper when it's not solar energy season. So people are definitely going to charge at night unattended.
Can't wait for miles of 240V extension cords when EU makes even used non EVs illegal. Yes, millions of city dwellers in apartments totally have a garage to charge in.
There will be solutions by 2050 (the proposed timeframe for having a zero-emissions fleet). For an example, vehicles with combustion engines can still be newly registered after 2035 if they use only CO2-neutral fuels. I think EU would rather ban sale of fossil fuels than ban used cars that can technically burn fossil fuels. If only plant-based fuels are available, it doesn't matter what the cars can technically burn.
The German big 3 are already developing cars that would only run on non-fossil fuels I believe.
Secondly, chargers near apartment buildings and on sidewalks can be added. We have plenty of time.
And I'm sure Germany will water down the regulations even more so in the end, I'm fairly sure they'll consider new MHEVs fine after 2035.
And finally, those who can't charge at home will do so at the charging stations. It's not a huge issue if you have a battery with 500+ km of range. Might be an issue for i-miev and first gen Leaf owners though.
Unless we get mass producable, cheap fuel like CHOOH2, "cars can use co2 neutral fuels" is translation to "in reality no ICE cars for the mass population"
And who will pay for those? My town can barely get enough money to maintain street lights, who will install and maintain the charging infrastructure on streets where it will inevitably get destroyed?
Oh yes, so now instead of 15 minute wait at a gas station I will only have to wait 2 hours before a space is available and then 30 minutes to charge, all while thinking "how much is this quick charge degrading my battery"
There's 27 years to go till EU's predicted (not required by law) end of ICE cars. There's time to invest, time to innovate and hopefully time for your town to reduce crime and gain more resources.
Also HVO is pretty affordable nowadays. Maybe 20% more than regular diesel fuel at most. It is claimed to be carbon neutral. I'm sure something similar will be developed for otto cycle engines.
Also unless you're planning to use a first gen leaf past the 2050s, quick charging isn't very bad. All modern EVs have battery cooling and will also throttle charging when the temperature rises. The don't full on go 350kW for 20 minutes straight.
Waiting 2 hours is solved by installing more chargers. Clearly a regional issue with fuel pumps as well because I never have to wait over 2-3 minutes.
Please don't put lithium in water; that will make it worse.
Tell that to firefighters.
Meanwhile in Australia:
Bitch I’m a truss
That looks pretty sick ngl
It didn't suck as a solution when it was implemented. The buses function like small diesel trains; they don't have to deal with traffic, and can travel faster because they kinda lock in to the rails. It didn't need as much land as a freeway or cost as much as a dedicated train line because you could just retrofit old buses. Plus the advantage of being able to run a standard bus route at each end of the line, no need for connecting services.
What am I looking at? A diesel bus on rails?
Pretty much. This is the O-Bahn in Adelaide. More info (and the original picture I shamelessly ganked) here: Wikipedia link
Missed opportunity not have these as 3rd rail trolleybuses on these segments
Yikes
We have something similar in the UK, guided busses.
Holy shit, I didn't know that. I always thought the O-Bahn was a unique piece of Adelaide weirdness. Adelaide has a lot of weirdness.
Meanwhile on the Autobahn:
Steel rails have even less friction
This is a very nitche application. Tom Scott did a video on it.
I'm very aware of that Tom Scott video, don't worry. It is an okay middleground, but look at the people in comments pointing out the wear on the trolley.
Not from nimbys
WTF Germany how did I not know this was a thing and why aren't we doing it here in the US?
Question though. Obviously the wires can't cover every road and the truck sometimes has to drive off the wired road. Do they have small batteries to carry them between the wires?
There are 5 testing areas for this atm and only a handful of trucks which use that. These are hybrid trucks having batteries and electrical engines besides the main traditional diesel engine. So it's far from an widely adopted tech right now.
If they can get that to work this can be massive, assuming we don't want to improve our rail infrastructure. It will also keep trucks from the passing lane
We’ve had these in Boston since I was a kid, but recently they’ve been taking down the wires.
Aren't those fro the T though? Or did bus routes use them too?
The busses out of Harvard station used them (71, 73, 75? and some others).
Silver line to the airport too, right?
The wires aren’t for propulsion, but for recharging electric trucks.
Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Is this a trial or is it getting installed all over? It's the best solution to electrify goods transport by road. Only a small battery required for off grid to delivery point and back
It is a trial atm. On 5 highways in different areas, a few trucks.
Battery fires are also less common than gasoline fires. But batteries are expensive, so overhead lines are still a good idea
Shhh they've been fed their propaganda by Fox news and they want to clutch it as hard as they can.
God forbid they ever see what Europe or the rest of the world is doing while the US is being left behind. We might as well be pulled by horse and buggy still compared to how easy it is to get around Europe
Switzerland runs a lot of these buses. Also trams, normal buses , trains. For those people in the U.S., it's a very effective and efficient system called public transport.
Yes Switzerland is famous for its public transport
Yeah literally, what is this post even saying
Honestly, for growing places, or places with bad public transit, diesel busses are the way to go. They are the cheapest and require almost no new infrastructure so it can offset car emissions quicker than the other options. Established bus routes that are popular should be converted to tram lines or BRT.
Diesel busses should be considered the last alternative though, out of all the mass transit options they are still the worst for the environment. Not unless a city has exhuasted all other options should they look into them, or truly have no money for alternatives.
Downtown areas can easily be canternaried for electrified busses, and battery busses are great for trips within cities.
If a city is growing then it's the perfect time to lay down rail and plan it out properly before road infrastructure gets in the way, and rail always pays off in the long run.
For longer trips then fine, diesel, but only if 1) It's out of range for electrified busses and 2) there is not ridership enough for rail. (but even then, look at the UK's request stop numbers and I'd say that argument is pretty flimsy)
I honestly disagree. If you can get 5 car users on a diesel bus, you are making a positive impact on the environment. And you can deploy way more diesel busses than electric ones. Once you build demand, you can skip busses altogether and replace with trams. The batteries in busses are a cool technology, but still exploit child labor and extended neocolonialism in the same way oil does. Also battery fires are much worse than normal fires.
I think we should electrify fleets as soon as possible but I think adding a few battery busses here and there won't do anything but pander to environmentalist
People need to learn the difference between „Doesn’t catch fire“ and „Doesn’t burn AS EASY AS gasoline“.
The problem with battery fires is that most batteries are made out of lithium which reacts with pretty much everything and is extremely difficult to put out.
In addition obtaining the rare earth metals for these batteries ecologically is a real challenge and it will only get worse the more we use.
I'm not saying we should abandon electric cars but we should know the benefits and drawbacks of each option before making a decision.
Depends on battery tech. LFP batteries dont use cobalt and manganese, and have have much less chance of fire when punctured for example
I didn’t mean batteries, I was talking about diesel. Should have made that clearer, my bad.
Obviously diesel burns and batteries don't really explode, but the only way to put out an EV fire is to dunk the car for a few days in a tub of water. And how many of those will a fire department have? 1-5?
"Electric buses aren't safe because the batteries can catch on fire"
London here running hybrids for over half a decade with no issue.
We USians are so hooked on, and controlled by, car infrastructure that we’ll come up with any lame ass excuse to undermine public transit. “Busses (or trains or any other form of public transit) aren’t perfect because of X, so we should just keep destroying our health, our communities and our planet”
We have some electric but lines in San Sebastian (Spain) too, no issues, the buses are lovely, they work fine. It has been about 4 years since they first got introduced, no major issues.
Yeah, who the heck complains about either of those points? Hybrid buses have been a thing for a long time. And even if it was a plain diesel bus, it'd still be better than having dozens of gasoline cars.
trams!!!
This. Trams are so much nicer, carry more people, way less maintenance cost and the tracks look so good if grass grows between it, also I don't get motion sickness on them. You don't even need any asphalt for them which is expensive to maintain, looks worse than pretty much anything except maybe a literal pile of garbage and heats up the surrounding area.
Doesn't work in hilly cities. That's why San Francisco has trolleybuses too (and the historical cable cars, but those are more for tourists). They do have light rail where it does make sense though.
Lisbon is very hilly and uses trams
I looked it up and it can indeed go up to 13.5% inclination but they can only run powered cars, no attached wagons. That reduces capacity.
I don't want to shit on trams. I don't like this bus vs tram bashing in either direction. I'll happily take either improvement over a sea of cars...
I don't quite remember what they're called but in the UK there's both old mining trains and old cliff trains/trolleys that use toothed wheels and toothed tracks on the hill portions to go up/down hill with little issue, obviously it's only safe for some gradient, but still with the right gearing it would be of possible
Don't they use rubber tired trams, aka guided buses?
Nope, they use the old style
Interesting. How steep would be the steepest hill?
Trams.... Where isn't possible trams use trolleybus... That's it!!! But what is sad, Eastern Europe falls into buying electric buses because it's mainstream 😬
We had trolley busses here in Wellington NZ for decades. The network needed an upgrade so our shortsighted council ripped it down while promising battery buses to replace the trolleys. We ended up with old, dirty, diesels chugging round our city for years, an I'm not sure we've gotten rid of them all yet. It was a disaster.
I hate that they were taken out. I rode on the as a kid regularly, it was always a little adventure when the driver had to reset the runners
Same in Dunedin!
The best thing trolleybuses have going for them is their relatively low dependence on rare earth elements in production in contrast with BEV buses with their large batteries. Trolleybuses environmental toll is way smaller and it makes producers and operators way less dependent on third world countries devastating the environment with slave labor.
There's also the centralization advantage and long lifespan. Centralized power generation is nearly always most efficient, and EV batteries degrade relatively quickly, while there are real life examples of 30 year old trolleybuses still operating fine.
Those 30 year old trolleybuses die when power dies, but even semi modern ones (aka 15-10 year olds) can still have diesel backup. New ones always have battery backup.
That's true but still those batteries are significantly smaller than those of BEV buses - usually trolleybuses with batteries have 5-15km of range compared to 200-350 km of equivalent BEV buses which also means that the trolleybuses are significantly lighter than BEV buses, which helps with efficiency of electricity utilisation. Another efficiency factor is that not having to charge and deplete a huge battery will save quite significant ammnount of power that is lost as heat during battery operation.
And that is an advantage. Lower cost and lower weight.
No argument here. We need more trolleybuses.
Hurr duurr rareearth . Written from your phone with rare earth materials, tomorrow you're going to drive to work using rare earth to work on your laptop with rare earth materials.
Neither batteries nor drive train components of bevs HAVE to use rare earth. There's tons of cars without them (bmw electric cars for example).
If you even respond, please include a modern car which does not contain ANY rare earth material and does not use electricity for energy storage.
Nothing is black and white you know. No decision is 100% good or 100% bad, we live in a sepectrum where some decisions may be less bad than others and that is the point.
Also current batteries will use cobalt or lithium, other options are either not efficient enough (like metal hydride or sulphuric acid batteries) or developed enough - solid state batteries, or LiFePo.
Also current BMW BEVs are still using lithium based batteries, whose mining pretty much is environmental disaster as a process.
Let's face it: in most US cities there probably isn't much aesthetic for the power lines to spoil. Just like in the grey Soviet cities where they come from
Greetings from Winterthur, a pretty nice, human-friendly, town in Switzerland which bunch of old buildings. Also called the bike-city of switzerland. It turns out that the trade off is worth it. I rather have power lines than cars or fuel powered busses.
Yes! I used to live there for most of my childhood, and thus have always considered those power lines to be a normal part of any city as a kid. Growing older and starting to visit other cities (without either trams or trolleys) I was surprised to see them missing and thought it looked strange, like a crucial piece of infrastructure was missing.
Those wires are only there if you are looking for them.
This is in my city. It looks this way because it is the biggest public transport intersection, with trolleybuses going all 4 directions meeting a tram line.
Seriously, after a while you just ignore those wires.
We have these in Vancouver, a lot of them. And a few battery buses as well
Ehhhhhh! A fellow Vancouverite! Greetings from Scotland!
How are they?
Works just as well as the diesel buses. Sometimes they hop off the guide wires and the driver has to get out with a fibreglass pole to reattach them but that usually only happens due to driver error
The torque on these things...
There's also an idea of doing this in highways.
Tom Scott video on it: https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg
I always upvote Tom Scott
add some steel wheels then its perfect
... on tracks. Steel wheels would destroy the wheels, blacktop, and concrete.
And connect them together.
Choo choo
My grandfather ran a printing press using old trolley bus motors, reliable and powerful shit.
that rocks
They are still running in The Netherlands, although only in 1 city.
Vancouver, Canada, still rocking these bad bois
Really sad we should have more of them their just better then battery electric.
I think trams are pretty good as well, which I know the Netherlands has a lot of
Basically the same thing but with actual rails.
When I was there I found those busses really cool. But to my knowledge, they're being phased out. They essentially combine the worst of bus and tram:
I see it the other way. Trolleybuses (with either battery or diesel backup) are the best of both worlds. Much cheaper to built (compared to a tram) and doesn't pollute in the city (compared to a full diesel bus)
Best solution: trams (or streetcars, for Americans)
The fact that "streetcar" means something unrelated to both a street and a car is above my IQ
Trams are surely better, but the simple infrastructure and relative simplicity of the drive train make trolley often cheaper than a diesel bus. Trolley buses with a small battery can also deviate from standard lines or bridge small areas between trolley lines.
Trolleybuses are the best compromise because they can (and in my country/city do) work as diesel/battery buses
i actually like the aesthetic.
I think someone else mentioned that San Francisco has these. I also wanted to throw in that Seattle has got them too. Maybe it's a West Coast thing in the USA? I'd be curious to know if other parts of the country have them too.
There's a few in Philadelphia I think
Vancouver, Canada has them as well
San Francisco has a fair number of overhead electric busses, too.
I assumed they were pretty common in cities. I don't know how practical they would be in suburbs.
Down here in NZ my city used to have these too! Apparently it was the last commercial trolleybus network in Oceania. But as a mostly suburban kind of city environment (not quite American suburbia but still low density), their utility definitely was quite limited by the predefined routes. Eventually more and more routes weren't even using them. But they were still servicing the old main road high frequency routes, so they were still very useful in those instances. Much better than the diesel buses, too, which were so loud you could hear them coming from several stops away! Eventually they phased the trolleys out in 2017, citing all the usual rubbish like maintenance costs and such. But we hadn't yet electrified our bus fleet, so for a while we had to borrow a bunch more diesel buses. Still on the road to having a fully electric fleet, and I imagine it will be a good while yet before that happens.
I heard we tried that in some German Cities way back in the 80ies or even late 70ies, but the technology wasn't that far yet and the overhead cables would get damaged when the buses engaged them, sometimes leading to complete outages of the tram network, and as such it was scrapped again. Glad to see that other places took it on later, we could really need that right now.
Trolley Buses are over 100 years old as a technology. They were super wide-spread in the entire eastern block and now cities in hungary, the czech republic and romania introduce a lot of newer (better) models: For example, Skoda has one that can easily integrate with exsisting tram infrastructure and has batteries to bridge smaller distances in places where there are no overhead lines.
They're also fairly popular in China! When I was visiting family in Shanghai, a sizeable chunk of the bus service consisted of electric trolley busses.
You can also find them in North America, in Vancouver!
They are still in use in Stuttgart/Esslingen since 1944. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/TrolleyBusEsslingenVanHool_P1010048.JPG/624px-TrolleyBusEsslingenVanHool_P1010048.JPG
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberleitungsbus_Esslingen_am_Neckar
They are pretty nice and if you are on your bike in traffic behind one, the feeling of not being dieselized is amazing ....
Buses are lame. They combine the cons of public transit with the cons of driving a car in a city. I believe in tram surpremacy.
Buses > trams. Something breaks down in bus lane? Bus go round. Breakdown on tram track? Tram stuck.
Trolleybuses the best compromise. Uses electricity without having downtime to charge and weight of lot of batteries and doesn't need tracks (but can still have dedicated bus lanes)
I love trams, light rail, and subway systems. I've had to think long and hard about why. Busses have notable advantages for flexibility and redundancy in the system, so why do I prefer to use a railed transit solution?
For light rail, grade separated trams, and subways it's easy: they're faster in the city. Like... WAY faster. They don't fight traffic so I wait a few minutes (at most) in any city with real transit solutions, ride for a short bit, hop off, and I'm there. Not having to deal with my car is freedom.
So... trams.... why trams over busses?
First of all they're bigger. There's more elbow room and it's easier to get on and off. It's easier for a group of people (see: me and the kids) to all climb on and make room. The doors are larger and it's easier to use multiple doors to load a large group so the people getting on and off a tram can go much faster. There is less shuffling along trying to wedge yourselves into the tram like you're forced to do on a bus.
Second, they're predictable and have a visible route. When I'm walking around, I can tell where the tram will be because I can follow the rails. I don't have to guess what the route will be or where I should go to meet it. Yes, busses have signs every so often, but it's not nearly the same as seeing the rails and knowing I'm on the route. This is especially true if they do move the bus route (which is what everyone who advocates for busses says is a good thing), and I don't know it. The bus is just gone.
Thirdly, the tram drives in a predictable path. I can be near it and know where it's going to go. In fact, whole big crowds of people do it all the time in plazas in Europe. You can walk near the rails and know that you're still safe. Check out the plaza in front of the main train station in Amsterdam. They chose to run the trams right through it, but not allow busses since they weren't safe and predictable enough.
Fourth, they're quiet. Trolley Busses get this too, but trams have had it a long time. They can co-exist with a people-oriented space without being too disruptive. When you sit in a cafe talking with your friends and the tram goes by it's no big deal. When a diesel bus goes by it's incredibly noisy.
Lastly, they're a community commitment. When a city installs a tram, the whole city knows that the route it travels will be supported for a long time. If you choose to live near a stop, you'll have transit. If you're choosing to start a business, you'll want to be close to the tram line so customers can easily get there. The same isn't nearly as true for a bus line. I haven't really pinned down why yet, but there's a very different feel to rolling along on a tram while looking at businesses to visit, and rolling along on a bus. You just don't have the same kind of connection to the street around you on a bus that you do on a tram.
You. You get it.
I totally agree with passenger space, predictability, speed and overall commitment towards development of the parts of the city that the tram goes through.
However I personally cannot agree on trams being quiet at least in my country. They have an incredibly loud squeal when cornering at higher speeds. Sometimes one can hear a tram squealing by half a kilometer away.
The tram supremacy doesn't lie in the inherent nature of the technology but in the way we treat it! Trams get:
In short, they are (usually) treated like public transport. Busses on the other hand are too often treated like just another car that's thrown in with the rest but also has the obligations of public transport. If you treated trams like that (sharing the road, waiting behind cars) they would be even worse than busses.
We have a ton of regular electric busses in my city in Denmark
Big powerlines everywhere in narrow city streets? People would get mad.. it looks terrible. And we already have all our power cables below ground.
I don't find these ugly https://www.google.com/maps/@49.7434095,13.3815119,3a,75y,272.2h,89.17t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1siHJWxjYb9X1tBghQLl0Ybw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DiHJWxjYb9X1tBghQLl0Ybw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D16.160854%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
Seattle used to have these as well. Sadly, the US (outside of a few cities that kept their 1930's infrastructure and updated it) can't find it's ass with both hands when it comes to public transportation.
Seattle still does.
Holy carp they're still there! You're right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Seattle
...we don't anymore?
You do! I had to look it up. I haven't seen them in a long time (I don't get to Seattle much anymore), but they're still in service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Seattle
here in Santiago we have more than 1000 Electric Buses In operation, they work great.
Trolleys can't divert trough an alternative route if the original route got blocked somehow (for example it got barricaded.) wich is a common occurrence here in Santiago.
I'm Czech and my city has a trolleybus network. Every single trolleybus has either a) diesel engine or b) battery backup, depends on their age. Hell, there are even entire lines where 1/3rd they run on batteries. But, they can be smaller, so the vehicle is lighter.
that still doesn't adress the cost of implementing it on the more than 300 bus routes there are in Santiago or how probable is that the infrastructure would get damaged or destroyed every time there are protests.
This number, 300, doesn't say anything. How many miles is that, excluding duplications? The inner city is easy and cheap to cover in power lines for trolleys to replace busses here, and everything other may be best kept on diesel.
What protests, lol? Repairing power lines is easy and fast and I doubt someone would target them.
Oh for sure people target them, just as they target buses and metro stations.
I wouldn't even know how to find said information, there isn't even an up to date map I could find, but here is this heavily outdated map
My city only really has trolleybus lines in the city center where it is cheaper and means no localized pollution
Mine – too. It's just rational to do that for most popular and short routes.
Fortunately riots aren't an issue in my city
yeah, but how many routes?
9 trolleybus lines, 3 of which I know have about 1/3rd without trolley wires at the end so buses go on battery/diesel
Santiago has 300 hundred lines of bus. all of them potentially serviceable by EBs.
Even if we electrified the main corridors, we would still need a lot of buses able to run the entire length of the rout independently.
and Santiago being Santiago that kind of infrastructure would be damaged on riots or something.
Okay? Doesn't mean Trolleybuses aren't the best compromise. Infrastructure costs money, so lets make the same argument about roads shall we?
its not that costly tonimplement. Why do you think they were implemented back then, instead of running everything on diesel engines?
The upfrontninvestment might be higher, but the running costs are lower, since the electricity is far mor energy efficient and electric engines need way less maintenance than IC-engines.
non contiguous catenary is the best solution imo
The what? I'm not Bri*ish enough to understand that
I would like to drive around in one of these please.. in the front or back, i dont mind!
I've rode in the back of something similar. Don't be jealous. The cage really decreases the ability to appreciate getting to ride in one.
We have these in Seattle too
OMG. Did he get away with it?
I tried to find more information about this repeatedly, because it's so unbelievable that the city would allow it. I found no other sources. Only chatter that this was an April fool's joke. That seems to be the case. Certainly someone would have posted video of this by now.
This was awesome, thanks for sharing!
But cables ugly/s
And the same people who gripe about overhead cables apparently have no trouble staring at a street full of idling, polluting, and noisy cars. It's really impressive.
*and northern
*and the rest of Europe
tram :D
Also people from Vancouver ( Canada ) where hydro power makes electricity super cheap.
Because diesel catching on fire is totally unheard of.
On it's own? Pretty much unheard of. Usually is a leak and something else set it on fire.
Batteries on the other hand plenty of cases where the battery itself was the starting point. Is usually cause by a bad design or external factors? Yes, not saying otherwise.
And tbh Diesel is the worse example you could put as requires either high pressure or a continuous exposure to a flame as you could throw a lit match on it and it wouldn't set it on fire. Petrol/Gasoline on the other hand...
Both cases are "external factors causing a fire"
Not always, a bad design/construction of a battery I wouldn't call it external factors. It doesn't need anything external to set on fire. But I agree that it's not common.
On the Diesel/petrol case.... it would need a leak to begin with and usually it's not s difficult thing to design a tank/engine without leaks. Let's be honest a battery is a more complex system to fuck up.
Are there cases of EV batteries catching fire due to internal failings alone?
Yes, there have been recalls as well in some cased.
Here there is info about incidents, althought not only due to internal faillings alone, there are crashes and other stuff as well. The usual issue is that a thermal runaway happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicle_fire_incidents
Imagine your car catching fire while you are pumping fuel...
I don't have to imagine, I saw it with my own eyes. Although it was a bike. Some random spark somewhere ignited the fumes, scary shit.
A beauty
Wait this isn't a thing in the west?
They are being phased out in most places. I think in favor of train and electric buses.
In my city in Spain I remember them from when I was a child. They were removed during the early 2000s. But ten years ago, last time I visited, they still had some in Seville.
I like them because they are much quieter than buses and honestly it makes so much sense... buses rarely have to go out of their route
We have them in at least one city in Austria (Linz), although it's only one or two bus lines out of a few dozen I think.
This is just a tram without the tracks? Guessing it is just for charging otherwise why not just have a tram which is much safer, more space and can basically drive itself
It has some benefits if they are worth or not I am not so sure.
It's easier to change the routes, either permanent or temporally. In the case of temporally if it has a second source of power like battery or non electrical engine it can like use a non electrified street if there is some emergency or construction or whatever.
You can change routes for special days easily without junctions or whatever is needed for trams without big issues.
And even if it needs to electrify a new zone it, it probably much faster than the work for adding new rails and junctions.
Exactly, you don't need to build tram tracks, and you can easily build routes uphill/downhill. I'm no expert on trams but I think it's pretty complicated to have them go through versatile environments without having to build tunnel systems etc, so building a network that makes even more remote corners of a city accessible is much easier.
How is a tram safer?
Nah. Winterthur has them. Combines the worse aspects of trains and e-cars
Minor cosmetic changes like running above ground power infrastructure where it doesn't exist anymore?
Its much easier and cheaper to install above ground than in the ground. Bonus points you could open it to Electrical trucks for emission free cargo in the city.
They do still in some places. It's in my city, we have hybrid buses but we could use some of these.
Not in all though, that's the point. It's not an easy transition and rail systems are more reliable for public transit in my opinion.
Rail systems are not necessarily more reliable (at leats tram vs bus I mean), I do love the aesthetic of trams, and they are also more efficient due to the small rolling resistance.
And it is definitely easier to transition into trolley than it is to transition into tram.
Im also waiting for hydrogen to take off!
I use them every day for commute. Trolley buses are absolute pieces of shit. Slow, drivers understand mash the throttle like it's on and off button and in cold winters their electrical cables overhead freeze and you get delays.
Btw their electrical cables make the city look like garbage. The only ones who think trolleys are a good idea are those who don't use them.
I hate to see misinformation being spread.
First off, Diesel Busses Are equally environmental friendly as electric trains. (On long distance trips) this is due to infrastructure emissions, which are far higher for train infrastructure.
Furthermore looking at batteries: Batteries are expensive and very sensible to temperatures. They are virtually unusable in some climate zones. Furthermore a battery burns much hotter than gasoline. Much much hotter. So hot in fact that the damage to roads is immense. In addition to that, battery driven cars and buses are extremely heavy and damaging asphalt infrastructure as well.
The best solution is to shift mobility towards Diesel driven Busses and facilitate car sharing. It’s flexible, mich more flexible than other solutions. This makes it adaptable to many environments and situations. And it does not force people to give up achievements of mobility.
The example in the meme is extra problematic, because steel cables and train infrastructure is heavily reliant on coal. And replacement of coal with hydrogen is not to be seen in the foreseeable future.
What sort of “infrastructure emissions”? That doesn’t really make sense to me, once you build the infrastructure it already exists, so it doesn’t just emit on its own. Also rail infrastructure being worse than road infrastructure doesn’t makes sense. Electric trains have extremely negligible emissions (I dare say practically none in normal operation). Electric road vehicles (of any type) still have tyre emissions (and make them worse because they are heavier). Electric trains are over all the best way forward dice intercity transport.
And those emissions that exist happen outside of the city
Let me rephrase it: infrastructure maintaining emissions. You have to think about all the people involved in organising train infrastructure each day. It’s immense. I can’t find the source anymore. But a german agency once published a calculation, that on a 100 km trip, the train was still emitting less, including every emissions connected to this one train ride. But the difference to a diesel Bus became basically unmentionable. Just a few kg CO2 more. But not much. And keep in mind that a bus is much more flexible than a train.
Not quite. As every city is dependant on road infrastructure. It starts with the building of houses and the transport of material. You cannot use rail infrastructure for every house. It does not bring the needed flexibility. Same goes for emergency services, police, firebricks, ambulance, craftsman,… asphalt based infrastructure is irreplaceable. Might as well use it for public transport instead of creating a second infrastructure to care for. One little new building project and a rail route in a city is blocked for 1-2 years. Car infrastructure is flexible and can evade this problem.
This seems too unbelievable for me to take your word for it. Find the source or stop spouting nonsense.
Repairing asphalt roads causes a huge amount of emissions, and the more traffic those roads see, the more often they need to be replaced.
In what world does maintaining a rail line even come close to the emissions produced by maintaining buses, trucks, and the road itself?
Asphalt is a byproduct of oil refinery. It’s literal main component is production waste. There is a ton of it.
Steel on the other hand must be produced in the so called blast furnace process. It’s the reduction of iron oxide with carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. But the hydrogen is it added separately. It’s a byproduct of the process that reacts as well reductive towards iron oxide. You need to burn immense amounts of coal to create elemental iron.
And trails are equally time consuming and resources consuming with maintenance as asphalt streets are.
I don’t know what kind of source you want there. Do you need a link towards Wikipedia? Or can you find the production of iron and asphalt yourself?
For sure a car cannot compete with a trains emissions. But a diesel driven bus can. Here is a source. You might need a translator. It’s a German article. link to a german news agency. citing a study by the Umweltministerium (ministry for Environment)
I am in fact not spouting nonsense. I am merely stating the truth.
The article you linked makes no mention of maintenance and infrastructure emissions. There's just a single table that seems to be based on fuel emissions at the time of travel. It's also specific to existing rail infrastructure, which is fine, but for the purposes of argument and comparison, it would be ideal to compare the most efficient bus/roadway system with the most efficient rail system. Zero-emissions trains exist, yet somehow just maintaining the rail line would completely offset that according to your argument?
Asphalt is an oil product, yes, but it still needs to be processed and turned into asphalt. That also emits pollution. So does transporting it to the destination, and all the other environmental factors with building up a road surface. You can't just hand wave that away "because we already made a ton of it". That's not how sustainability works. We're explicitly trying to reduce our reliance on oil.
You also seem to be ignoring that rail lasts orders of magnitude longer than asphalt, and don't constantly have to be patched and repaired for pot holes. Steel is also one of the most recycled materials on the planet. (Nearly 70% of all steel here in the US is recycled). Melting down old cars or whatever into new rail tracks uses significantly less energy than refining new metal.
I cannot look everything up. Soooooo … trust me bro.
There also exist zero emission cars. So this argument doesn’t work so well. We are talking about real life applications. And that’s why it is absolutely reasonable to compare existing infrastructure. Germany has invested heavily into both, automobile infrastructure and Railroad infrastructure. So the comparison seems to be alright.
And so does steel and concrete.
I can hand wave this off completely fine, since it would be technically possible to frac bitumen into synthesis gas as well. So asphalt is still bound carbon. And that’s alright that way.
This is wrong. They need to be ground down regularity, they need to be replaced regularity due to material fatigue, railroads need intense care - freed from plants regularity, much more frequent in fact than asphalt, due to its open structure. In Addition to rails, there is need for electrical wiring above the train. This wiring is also needed to replace regularity due to material fatigue, constant rubbing of the metals onto each other. Then we also have further infrastructure for people, so called train stations. Especially larger train stations must be heated in winter with immense amounts of gas and train stations made of glass in summer are in desperate need of cooling. You just have to take a look at the prices for a ride. If it compares financially, then it most likely compares in emissions as well.
While this is correct, it is still very inefficient to melt down steel and then clean it up to recreate the requested alloys. Asphalt on the other hand can be recycled much easier. It is in fact a thermoplastic material. It needs much lower melting temperatures and is not dependant on reductive agents.
When the argument is emergency vehicles and "rail infrastructure for every house" it is clear that you are talking with an American that has no idea what they are talking about
You are talking with a European. A German in fact.
And I was not talking about rail to every house, I was mentioning the absolute necessity for asphalt streets. And that this infrastructure is far more flexible and adaptive than all the alternatives. Something irreplaceable in fact.
Apologies for misidentifying you then.
On the topic, the debate was never regarding if streets would exist or not. This is a moved-goalpost argument made by people who are trying to fight the pro public transport movement.
Supporting and promoting public transport doesn't require to demolish the streets or make cars illegal. Or cars cease to exist at all. This is an irrational fear of such peopke and it is actually funny when this is the counterargument.
No offence was taken.
I am not against public transport. But the pro public transport movement often leans into the extreme. Asking for the removal of individual transport (well only cars, not bicycles). But from my standpoint, it is clear that an infrastructure, that is irreplaceable and an absolute necessity, must be used to the fullest extend. This means that the primary objective in planing transport in a city must be to fill the streets with busses, cars and bicycles. Rail comes secondary.
Well, I might be a little sensitive, but some people here support a movement against individualistic solutions rather than a positively conotated idea of feasible reasonable, not ideological solutions.
Also overhead wires are hideous
Modern OHLE standards are significantly less messy than they were 100 years ago. And if they really are still that bad, conductor rails work almost as well.
Conductors are always connected to energy loss. I don’t mind the cables. They are not looking good, but I can live with them.
"Conductors" as in any piece of metal that conducts electricity? Those overhead wires are also conductors, and will see some energy loss over their length like any other conductor.
OHLE is a conductor too. The issue with conductor rials is that they use DC rather than AC, which means that voltage is lower, meaning substations need to be more frequent. However, the conductor rail takes up no additional space in the loading gauge compared to OHLE, so for underground systems, or systems that need minimal clearance, conductor rails are better.
The whole thing about trolleybuses is that they don't pollute inside of the city. Obviously that pollution still happens somewhere, but it isn't under your nose.
Trolleybuses can use renewable electricity from wind and solar. This works today, right now. Diesel is still fossil carbon coming out of the ground and burned. It would be a different story if we could synthesize diesel using electricity, or used 100% biodiesel, but currently we can't and we don't.
Or better than solar panels is cheap, clean and safe uranium nuclear power :3 And even if that power is made from diesel, the pollution happens outside of the city
And that’s the take of the people without any knowledge of what they are rankling about.