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Wirelessly Charged Buses Being Tested Next Year
An anonymous reader writes "From the article: 'Bombardier's electric transit technology will be tested next winter on buses in Montreal, followed in early 2014 on a route in the German city of Mannheim. The transportation giant's Primove technology is designed to allow buses to be charged by underground induction stations when they stop to let passengers hop on and off.' This technology while impressive may not make it to the U.S. even if proven successful due to the lack of popularity of public transportation. If they could only get my phone to charge wirelessly."
The article says that the induction charging stuff could also be used to charge trains.
If you carried a coil of wire with the correct circuitry attached you'd be able to charge your cell phone at the bus/train stop as well.
For most places, it's because the service is so crappy. And in places like Chicago, they think the solution is to cut services and raise prices. The auto/oil industry also has a lot of say in policy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The anonymous writer behind the summary slipped in his or her own opinion about the US's appetite for public transit, and the likelihood of such an innovation ever reaching our shores. Speaking as a New Yorker, we *love* public transit. If this proves to be successful, cost effective and green, I bet there would be a major push to adopt it - here at least.
Because I'd have to sit next to other people from the US! Really, have you seen us?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
That sounds kind of dumb. Why would a train need batteries for propulsion?
Because these days more and more ticket-buying passengers are refusing to help pump the handcar arm.
In to work
Drive: 20 minutes
Bus: 45 minutes, two transfers.
Out of work
Drive: 20 minutes
Bus: 1:30, two transfers.
Putting up a third rail or wire overhead incurs costs too. Plus, it's sometimes inconvenient when a train track has a level crossing with 'regular' traffic.
I'd be more worried about the huge magnetic fields being generated to transfer energy from the grid to the bus or train. You need a whopping amount of Joules to move a train, and to charge it in the short time it's waiting at a stop requires even more current. It probably would make for a very good hard disk degausser... (not to mention the danger to credit cards, RFID card and anything else with a wire loop in it)
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
Plus the bus schedules never line up with work schedules. Might have to get up at 4AM to catch the 5AM bus in order to work at 7. And god forbid you miss the bus and the next one isn't until two hours later. Then if you have to work on a weekend shift or late hours... Bus? Nope!
There's only a few major metropolitan areas where buses are any good. (Usually about 15 min apart in those cases.) Head out to the burbs or anywhere else and buses tend to really suck. (They're pretty much neglected in the U.S. in a manner similar to bicycle and pedestrian friendly transportation infrastructure. In other words: If you live in the U.S. outside of a major large city and don't have a car, you're gonna have a bad time.)
I'm from Australia, have lived in Japan, and am now living in the US. I think the US is a great country to live in (especially if you're a software engineer) but one of the things that I find strange is that the downtown areas of cities are so desolate, particularly at night. In every other country I've been to, the "downtown" area is the beating heart of the city - it's the center of business, culture and nightlife. It's a desirable place to be and you have to pay more money to live in or near it.
But in the US, urban environments are for some reason associated with crime, homelessness, the smell of urine and human misery, and so most "normal" (middle-class) people avoid the area. People don't want to live there, let alone be in the area outside of business hours. I find it bizarre that inner city neighborhoods are considered to be bad areas - in Japan and Australia, inner city neighborhoods are the most expensive ones because they're so convenient to live in.
Since most of the normal people (i.e. people who wouldn't urinate in a train) have moved out into the suburbs, American cities are usually left with a decaying urban core and endlessly sprawling suburbs. Public transport requires a certain level of density before it is worthwhile, and most US cities don't meet that level of density. That's the reason why public transport doesn't work here. In the few cities where there is a good level of density (e.g. New York City) there is a good public transport system. But New York is not a typical American city...
Australian cities have sprawling suburbs too, but the urban cores are not full of homeless people and does not smell of urine! The dole bludgers are usually living somewhere in the outer suburbs where land is more affordable.
Dude. Punctuation - it's your friend. As is grammar and spelling. I still don't know what you mean by the last half of your giant sentence.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Dude. Punctuation - it's your friend. As is grammar and spelling. I still don't know what you mean by the last half of your giant sentence.
You really shouldn't be giving advice on punctuation or grammar. Your spelling is great, though.
If by private you mean publicly funded infrastructure such as roads, bridges, highways, traffic systems and policing then you are correct. The only thing private are the cars.
No it's not the existence of this vast asphalt and concrete ball and chain that prevents the US from having a good public transportation system.
It is however the fact that land is plentiful outside metro areas and many people prefer to commute. There are a variety of reasons for this. Historically it has been the industrialization of the inner city areas with businesses wanting to be close to the transportation hubs the cities grew up around. This lead to the residential areas moving further away to avoid pollution and activities they wanted to avoid (bars, worker riots, etc). Which turned the inner city residential areas into lower class neighborhoods and eventually impoverished areas.
So now we have huge suburban communities that sprawl across the land and require decentralized transportation as each area may have residents commuting to entirely different business regions. People now choose where to live based on many factors other than where they work (neighborhood, price, schools, amenities like parks or natural environments) but they still need to commute to work each day.
Centralized transportation of any kind is a failed proposition for many US metro areas. At best it could be a long term strategy if attractive housing and amenities can be set up within walking distance so that young workers can have the choice rather than impoverishing themselves trying to afford a downtown lifestyle.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
(reposted after logging in from anonymous coward status) I was in Shanghai in January, and observed supercapacitor (as labeled) buses operating on major routes on-loading and off-loading passengers. Overhead cables lined the route, and at every stop the bus would extend a superstructure to the cables, make contact (whether directly or inductively - unobservable), wait 5-10s, retract, and onward the bus would go. I don't know who manufactured the buses. I simply thought it notable that the Chinese were fielding such a system. I'll leave the questions about liability, etc. to the floor. In any case, and irrespective of where the bus was manufactured, guess who's going to learn whatever shortcomings may lie in this technology and improve on them first for having deployed it. And if the buses were designed or made in China, then . . . props to them. Not trying to create xenophobic bogeymen here, quite the contrary, it's worth observing how different folks operate.
CALTRANS had an induction-charged bus deployed in Berkeley in the 1980s. It required precise parking at bus stops, so the two halves of the split transformer could connect magnetically. The system worked OK, but wasn't a huge win.
GE once patented a system where an entire lane had transformers, so vehicles could run on ground power. That was too expensive. It would cost like a maglev track.