Slashdot Mirror
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A company with outdated infrastructure changing it's business model to adapt to changing technology- all in a quick, relatively efficient process?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.
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
Some of us can't understand an Australian accent you insensitive clod!
Only if Austria has phone booths in the Zoo enclosures
How else would the Kangaroos get news from home?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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
This is Slashdot. Some people would make a serious complaint if that was left out.
Looks like they already have a marketing plan: http://unternehmen.telekom.at//Content.Node/media/medienarchiv/stromtankstelle_01.jpg
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?
No, but you missed an important part of the story, I'll let you find the mistake yourself.
Hint: You're about one half of a large rotating thing wrong.
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.