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Austria Converts Phone Booths To EV Chargers
separsons writes "Telekom Austria, a telecommunications company, aims to convert obsolete public phone booths into electric vehicle recharging stations. The company unveiled its first station yesterday in Vienna and hopes to create 29 more stations by the end of the year. The stations may not be super popular now, but they should be soon; Austria's motor vehicle association says the country will likely have 405,000 electric vehicles on the road by the year 2020."
A company with outdated infrastructure changing it's business model to adapt to changing technology- all in a quick, relatively efficient process? Yeah, you've got to be pulling my leg.
Wait, do you mean Corporate America isn't doing it right?
My webcomic
What's a phone booth?
Why, at that rate, they'll be able to simultaneously recharge 0.06% of the electric cars in the country!
And with the usual 30 milliamp analog phone line current, it will only take about a dozen years to recharge each car.
I understand their desire to reuse the prime real estate they have for their phone boxes and convert it into a new profitable market.
However in this case I'm not sure it will actually be so useful. Typically you position phone boxes in pedestrian heavy areas where people can see them and use them. Normally you would want recharging stations in car parks, where cars like to hang out for extended periods of time. Do you really want to base your business model over having cars parked beside the road in busy streets for 6.5 hours at a time? Looking at the phone booth in the picture there doesn't even seem space for a single car to stop.
Its the only way I can think of getting some value out of zillions of mini 6 x 6 lots with booth enclosure and electrical feeds.
The kangaroos will hop into the phone boxes and be electrocuted. Just horrible.
Better than shooting them. Bzzzzt
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Seems more practical to recharge bikes (either electric-assisted, or motorcycles), rather than cars.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
is Superman suppose to change if he ever visits Austria?
Else, they might be in for a huge shock when they walk into one of those booths and try to make a call.
I'll be here all morning, folks!
Crikey! Makes the meat tender mate!
However mein poster, kould be wurst.
Outlets to recharge a laptop or cell phone would be great too. Sometimes phone calls are *long*.
"Yes honey, I'm at the beach. Miss you!"
I imagine near the phone booth you could string out some cable to have outlets near park benches, and some wifi in the area would be nice. :)
*waves crashing*
Telekom Austria is a telecommunications company?
I'm just asking...
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
Power Plants may be. Just saying :)
Only if Austria has phone booths in the Zoo enclosures
Only if Austria has phone booths in the Zoo enclosures
How else would the Kangaroos get news from home?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Way too obvious, you look more like an orc than a troll.
we have lots of people who carry the electrons for us. they collect them, put them in buckets and dump'em into the phone booth. no problem. most of the time, we just have the kids do that, as they seem to serve no other sensible purpose. how do you do it?
I would prefer that we convert the phone booths to mobile phone, iPod, etc ie gadget charging stations.
May need to offer some lockable lockers with chargers similar to what they offer at music festivals. But not sure terror / vandal paranoid people would accept that.
I have to admit I still use phone booths, but only as a quiet place to talk on my mobile...
My other Sig is very funny.
That or the dingo can now steal you baby and cook it.
A handful of years ago I gave some thought to some business ideas that could make use of phone booths. I wondered if they could be viably transformed into secure, internet transaction booths, keeping the coin payment system as an option to CC payment. Phone booths have a high profile/key location thing going for them that's just waiting for the right entrepreneurial insight.
ideopath @ play
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/energy_policy/doc/factsheets/mix/mix_at_en.pdf
You're welcome.
Looks like they already have a marketing plan: http://unternehmen.telekom.at//Content.Node/media/medienarchiv/stromtankstelle_01.jpg
Suicide booths.
What are you looking at me like that for? They'll have plenty of juice there. That way if someone going to charge their car becomes overwhelmed by the mind-numbing emptiness of their life think how convenient that would be to have a suicide booth right there. They could even leave the phones intact so that in case someone thinking of suicide has second thoughts they can call a suicide hot line and someone can talk to them and make sure that they go through with it.
Think how beneficial it would be. It would help reduce the demands on the environment by reducing the population and the need for electricity, not to mention the positive effects it could have on traffic congestion.
From the wireline.
What's a phone booth?
It's where Clark Kent gets into his real work clothes.
areas with a lot of rich ecoloons who think electricity is "clean" because the gas, oil and coal plants making it are located out in the sticks.
The advantage of such "emissions displacement" is that it's a lot easier to clean the emissions from one big stationary engine than thousands of mobile engines.
But is an Austrian accent like the Governator's any easier?
Last I heard, electric vehicles were very limited in their range. Which doesn't seem to suit a country as large as Australia.
Have I missed some huge jump in development?
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Call Centres, staffed by the unemployed, criminals and retired folk will be employed to call the phone boxes constantly to maintain a 50-75 volt DC ringing signal down the line.
Where will Superman change his costume?
In Finland long-distance trains have phone booths without phones and maybe the trend will spread. They're booths with amplifiers so that you can get a better signal when the train is in areas with poor coverage, which is the case in some areas on the countryside. Privacy is of course also a benefit but the most important one is that your fellow passengers don't need to listen to "what? can you repeat that?, say again...". The latter is such a benefit that I wouldn't mind if phone use was only permitted in the booths.
I'm not a statistician, but as a check on numbers:
Population, Australia: 21,431,800 (2009)
Number of Vehicles registered: 15,674,436
Percent of Vehicles compared to population: 73%
Population growth: 1.69%
Pop in 2020: 25.3M, est
Cars in 2020: 18.5M, est
Estimated % electric cars, according to their estimate: 2.2%
I'll note that my quick growth check means that there will be something like 2.8 Million additional cars on the road in 2020, which means that only 14% of GROWTH would be in electric vehicles.
I don't read AC A human right
I don't know about Austria, but in the UK phone kiosks (booths) are mostly positioned at busy road junctions where they are most visible and accessible. OK in the olden days when they were first placed because there was not much traffic and you could stop a car anywhere.
Now their positioning is a pain. You would not be allowed to park near most of them for yellow lines and standing rules against parking near junctions, and even if you did, or they made a dispensation for car charging, you would start a traffic jam and road rage with the obstruction you caused. And how long will a charge take and so your obstruction last?
And when you do/did use them as phone booths you could hardly hear a thing because there would be heavy traffic outside including boy racers on motorbikes blipping their throttle as they waited at the traffic lights, although that is beside the point now.
Chargers need to be in car parks. If some jerk runs out of juice between home and a car park, let him call the AA to tow him away - he will be got out of the way quicker.
I'm an idiot. Austria != Australia.
Please excuse me, I need caffeine.
Corrected figures: .434%
Population, Austria: 8,336,926 (2008)
Percent of Vehicles compared to population: 55.8%
Number of vehicles: 4.65M
Population growth:
Pop in 2020: 8.7M, est
Cars in 2020: 4.86M, est
Estimated % electric cars, according to their estimate: 8.3%
Even reworked for Austria, that's not actually all that many electric cars.
I don't read AC A human right
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/france-telecom-staff-suicides-phone
we've done something similar: we've converted rarely used phone booths into thriving restrooms.
same thing planned in spain too
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/08/electric-car-plan-spain
Some 30 telephone boxes have been earmarked to form part of a test network of 546 state-subsidised recharging points in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville.
Phone boxes are often ideally placed close to the curbs of pavements and already have their own electricity supply, making them relatively easy to adapt.
The Spanish government will spend €10m (£8.7m) on kick-starting the use of electric cars over the next two years, with €1.5m going on recharging points. Madrid city council said that telephone boxes were a possibility, but that it was still in the process of identifying the recharging spots it planned to build.