Slashdot Mirror

Batteries can easily hold a charge for a day. The question is how much work is that battery doing in a day? Winnipeg says its buses travel 50K kilometers/year, which works out to 85 miles day. Bump that to 100 to account for days off due to maintenance, and that's still within the range of most EVs these days. And that's city driving, so they'll be using regenerative braking to recharge frequently.

Lower fuel costs, less maintenance, I can't see any reason e-buses won't work.

Here in Winnipeg the city Transit service has been testing electric buses for a local coachbuilder for quite a few years with what I have heard to be good results.

http://winnipegtransit.com/en/...

King County is also already a large customer for their hybrid diesel-electric buses.

https://www.newflyer.com/buses...

If they can work well here in our cold winters and hot summers they can probably work well in most places in North America.

this is what bus planners have always done with the best available data, in setting routes.

And therein lies the rub. Well that at and just general bureaucratic inertia. In our city, route changes tend not to keep up with road construction, destination changes, etc. We have major roads that are full of cars during rush hour, but hardly any buses and empty buses touring residential areas.

An example of an empty major road is Kenaston Blvd & Bishop Grandin Blvd (Note: Zoom in on the map - there's lots of route "close by"). Not a single bus route travels that stretch and yet this road is one of our "inner perimeters" where 42,000 vehicles drive it every day (PDF warning).

Another example is our 98 and 82. These are "feeder" routes. They collect residents and bring them to major routes where they can go downtown. However, if you live on one side of the river and wish to go to a business or school on the other side of the river, you need to take BOTH buses which only run every 1/2 hour. It would seem to me that the logical thing to do would be to combine them into a single loop. That way you aren't stuck in -30C weather waiting 29 minutes for your transfer because the first bus was running late.

this is what bus planners have always done with the best available data, in setting routes.

And therein lies the rub. Well that at and just general bureaucratic inertia. In our city, route changes tend not to keep up with road construction, destination changes, etc. We have major roads that are full of cars during rush hour, but hardly any buses and empty buses touring residential areas.

An example of an empty major road is Kenaston Blvd & Bishop Grandin Blvd (Note: Zoom in on the map - there's lots of route "close by"). Not a single bus route travels that stretch and yet this road is one of our "inner perimeters" where 42,000 vehicles drive it every day (PDF warning).

Another example is our 98 and 82. These are "feeder" routes. They collect residents and bring them to major routes where they can go downtown. However, if you live on one side of the river and wish to go to a business or school on the other side of the river, you need to take BOTH buses which only run every 1/2 hour. It would seem to me that the logical thing to do would be to combine them into a single loop. That way you aren't stuck in -30C weather waiting 29 minutes for your transfer because the first bus was running late.

this is what bus planners have always done with the best available data, in setting routes.

And therein lies the rub. Well that at and just general bureaucratic inertia. In our city, route changes tend not to keep up with road construction, destination changes, etc. We have major roads that are full of cars during rush hour, but hardly any buses and empty buses touring residential areas.

An example of an empty major road is Kenaston Blvd & Bishop Grandin Blvd (Note: Zoom in on the map - there's lots of route "close by"). Not a single bus route travels that stretch and yet this road is one of our "inner perimeters" where 42,000 vehicles drive it every day (PDF warning).

Another example is our 98 and 82. These are "feeder" routes. They collect residents and bring them to major routes where they can go downtown. However, if you live on one side of the river and wish to go to a business or school on the other side of the river, you need to take BOTH buses which only run every 1/2 hour. It would seem to me that the logical thing to do would be to combine them into a single loop. That way you aren't stuck in -30C weather waiting 29 minutes for your transfer because the first bus was running late.

I don't know about where they got this system from, but my local bus transit system has this thing called "NaviGo". Go here, click on the NaviGo link, feed it something random from the landmarks list, and give it a sane departure time.

It shows you multiple possible route choices, and shows fully interactive Google maps for each segment of the trip (walking bits included). The only really bad part about it (at least in the past - I haven't used transit in a while), is how often they're doing maintenance on it, and you get stuck with the lousy indecipherable PDFs and tables.

We've had this ability in Winnipeg for a couple of years now: http://www.winnipegtransit.com/main/index.jsp

The biggest problem with your comparison is the fact you live 10 miles from the nearest public transport terminal! And is public transportation REALLY that expensive there? $4.60 per day seems excessive unless that's for two one-way tickets or something. Is there no monthly passes or something similar? Here in Winnipeg, we have a lousy bus system for our public transit system, and for ~$70CDN, you can ride any bus for the month (or ~$16CDN for a monday to friday pass). It's slow, uncomfortable, noisy, and often dirty, but it's cheap.

Its a nice article, but is the link to Winnipeg Transit really necessary?