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To Really Cut Emissions, We Need Electric Buses, Not Just Electric Cars
An anonymous reader writes: All the EV attention these days is going to Tesla and other sedan manufacturers, but this article makes the case that it's far more important to switch our buses over to electric power than our cars. "Last year, according to the American Public Transportation Association, buses hauled 5.36 billion passengers. While usage has fallen in recent years, thanks in part to the growth of light rail and subway systems, buses still account for more rides each year than heavy rail, light rail, and commuter rail combined—and for about half of all public transit trips." This, while managing around 4-5 miles per gallon of gas, and public buses usually average about 50,000 miles per year. The electric buses themselves are significantly more expensive, but the difference is made up dramatically lower fuel costs. And there will be difficulties: "The range—up to 30 miles—limits Proterra buses to certain routes, so it's hard for an agency to go all in. Drivers have to be trained to brake and accelerate differently, and to maneuver into the docking stations. And Doran Barnes of Foothill Transit notes that some of the cost advantage of using electricity instead of diesel can dissipate. Electric cars can be charged at night, when power prices are low. But buses have no choice but to recharge in the middle of the day, when utilities often impose higher peak usage rates."
Diesel engines are powerful but they pollute A LOT. And don't forget ships. That bunker fuel many of them burn is NASTY.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
We have lots of CNG ones why not just have more of them
A bus will only get a few mpg, but carries a lot more people. Replacing every bus in the states would be far less helpful for our environment than doing the same with cars/trucks/SUVs. I get the feeling this article is just for generating press for electric buses.
I know i'm old but there was a time when most buses ran off electricity using an overhead wire for power transfer. What's with wanting to go to battery power for this use. It's not like we could have forgotten this technology and with an update using today's technology we have to be able to make it better. Buses have defined routes so we can't argue that it limits flexibility...buses aren't cars, they don't have to be able to go down every road.
The biggest inefficiency with a (short-route) bus is stop-starting a heavy vehicle laden with people.
We have electric and hybrid buses in London, but using a Flywheel (first developed as a fuel-saving measure for F1 cars) to preserve kinetic energy has made the greatest difference to efficiency for London buses.
30 mile range is ideal for a vehicle that drives non stop all day.
you have a problem with that?
Trolleybus networks were rolled out in a great many Eastern European cities decades ago, with liquid-fuel-consuming buses often serving a minority of routes (typically ones going beyond whatever the city limits were when the trolleybus lines were build). It's amusing to think that we are going back to this, though now battery technology should be advanced enough that cities no longer have to deploy unsightly wires down all the thoroughfares.
For an effort of this magnitude, either battery swapping or storage of energy during the day would likely be worthy of the expense incurred.
Shanghai has had some buses using these for several years. They recharge at some of the bus stops.
I read the entire article, and the full summary, and no where is mentioned to single most important datapoint for evaluating the claim in the headline:
How much total CO2 is generated by buses as compared to cars? Since they didn't put it in the article (and since the article reads like an advertisement for an electric bus company), I'm going to guess it's just an advertisement.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So, what you do is what SF does - string wires above and turn them into rubber tired trollies.
Reno recently purchased 4 of these spending about 1 million per bus:
http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada/reno-unveils-4-new-electric-buses
How much advantage is there in using electric over CNG?
A quick mental calculation using the stats in the article for bus mileage, miles per year, and a google search for the approximate number of buses in the us yields 5 billion gallons of fuel annually for buses.
Vs 134 billion gallons for cars.
Buses aren't a statistically significant part of the problem.
Charge both buses overnight.
Use one bus in the morning.
Use the other bus in the evening.
If not enough, use three buses.....
It's pretty well established that the bulk of public transport users are the poor. How about freeing up land usage and getting rid of zoning so they can walk to work instead of having to catch public transport at all?
How does fuel consumption per person per mile compare between cars and buses? Its not a fair comparison without that.
To really cut emissions, we need nuclear shipping vessels, as the top 15 emit more harmful emissions that the world's cars and trucks combined...
The battery on the Model S is replaceable by robots, surely you could put a rooftop battery on there, and then just swap them out at large bus stations near neighborhood substations for charging? Who on earth builds an industrial grade public bus without swappable batteries in this day and age?
Propane and natural gas powered buses have had their fuel tanks on the roof for decades now. With hooks and simple optics it wouldn't be hard to lift an old battery pack off and swap it for a fresh one in under 5 minutes.
moox. for a new generation.
The 15-30 largest container ships in the world (depending on who's estimates you're using) produce more pollution than all the cars combined.
WHY ARE WE NOT ADDRESSING THEM?
If you count cars, buses and transport trucks, there are over a billion in use in the world, and instead of targeting 30 objects ... we want to target over a billion objects?
Its hard for me to car about vehicle emissions for millions and millions of cars when the obvious, easy target is overlooked. I'm not saying I don't want reduced emissions, I'm just saying that if you're going to talk about efficiency, and lets be clear, thats what this discussion is about, reducing emissions is about increasing efficiency ... if you're going to increase efficiency, should you at least start being doing so in the most efficient cost effective manner?
You want to reduce emissions? Pay for it to be grown locally instead of on the other side of the globe. Stop buying the cheapest of chip shit from Asia.
Cars need to be addressed, but thats not where the conversation should start.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
not to nitpick... oh fine, I'm nitpicking. Buses aren't significant -- as in important -- but they are statistically significant, as in reliably measurable. There is a 0% chance that buses don't exist and are really just a random fluctuation in your data.
If you are going to be limited to certain routes, why not electrify the routes and then save the weight of the batteries? Then you won't have to worry about recharge times either so you'll get more daily miles out of each bus too.
You might get the occasional free-rider but only on april 1st.
Instead of a single bus driving around picking people up and dropping them off, have stands with small electric vehicles for individuals. Instead of waiting for a bus, you go to a stand and check out a vehicle and drive it to where you want. Or it drives itself. With self-driving electric vehicles, you could keep all the stands in supply.
This has to be one of the best use cases I've seen for wireless charging stations. Put one at every bus stop where it's practical. Just by sitting there, while letting people on and off or just waiting to get back on schedule, the bus can be recharging. Also, buses are long, so the density of power sent through the charging coils doesn't have to be as high as with a car.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
good news, we're never leaving Afghanistan. Enjoy your permanent war on terror for some stupid toxic batteries.
Humans like cars, not buses.
And if you taxed larger or powerful cars heavily*, people would drive more fuel efficient cars. High gas taxes are doing that in some parts of Europe.
In the USA, at least, cars are a status/phallic symbol and thus are larger and/or more powerful than they need to be in a practical sense. There are times I wanted a more powerful car to compete with other more powerful cars during rush hour. But that's size escalation. If you lower the average then there is less need to compete with beefy cars.
Further, taxing beefy cars would encourage more to take public transportation. I know conservatives will balk, but taxes would help with three problems: traffic, pollution (and GW), and gas dependance. Four actually: gov't revenue to help pay down debt and other uses.
* Exemptions would be made for large families and legitimate business use.
Table-ized A.I.
In San Francisco a good percentage of our bus fleet is electric with overhead wires, so the tech is still there, works great, and is not as expensive and problematic as batteries. Trolley buses, look it up. Only issue is the wires are U G L Y
The newer buses even have enough battery power to go a block or two off the wires on battery power and pass an obstruction, something that would bring the old trolley bus system to a standstill.
There are two major problems with buses: crime and infectious disease. Crime can be solved with adequate law enforcement - including cameras on the buses. But infectious disease is hard. Eventually we'll have real time pathogen detectors so, the minute someone with an infectious disease coughs or sneezes, the bus can be evacuated and the infected person removed to quarantine. A person will able to go many years without having to suffer through an infectious disease. But real time pathogen detectors are still a decade or two off in the future. About the best we could do in the near term would be individual transport pods - which might just become a reality sooner rather than later due to Google's research into self-driving cars.
To really reduce emissions we need nuclear power. Converting CO2 heavy transport to using electricity generated by CO2 heavy coal wont do any good:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
Right, because if you aren't talking about global warming, you won't breathe either!
Taxes are already like you suggest. Not sure why you propose something that has been done for over 5 years at this point already. Perhaps you didn't know, but that brings up the point that if you really did care and really thought it was a good idea you would have done at least 5 minutes of research to learn that. I'm guessing you don't really care.
Even better, put them on rails and go really fast so that we can finally get the rapid mass transit of the future!
Or maybe 1968.
I guess you didn't read the summary. The batteries last about an hour. So 12 buses will replace one. At a cost of a million dollars each. Roughly 150 times the cost of diesel or CNG buses, so figure the fare will be about $150.
I know your solution to that - have the taxpayers pay the fare. So you're paying for your neighbor to ride the bus. $150 each way is $300 per day, times 250 work days = $75,000 / year in new taxes for you. Have fun with that.
We should have been working hard at improving nuclear power, and solving its problems, to the point that this would, by now, be a no-brainer. So those polluting diesels are another thing we can blame on the environmentalists that shut down nuclear power research in the '70s.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I seem to remember (I used to be involved with the local CIC many years ago) that all public transportation including buses collectively account for percentage of commuters, in the US, down in the single digits. (Less than 10%.) This is from memory, but I think the highest usage of mass transit (which again lumped all forms into one statistic, not just buses) was in Massachusetts, and even there it was in the low tens. (Maybe 12 - 15%.)
Comparing the pollution of individual buses directly to individual cars is disingenuous because buses typically carry more passengers per mile. (Although the big articulated bus I follow home at night with typically six or seven passengers seems to be the exception...)
Conclusion being, converting to electric buses won't make an appreciable impact on the air pollution level. They're not collectively a significant source of pollution, compared to other major sources.
Moreover, it is my understanding that the black smoke seen in bus diesel exhaust is mostly particulate matter which eventually settles out of the air. It makes storefronts and sidewalks dirty, and tends to stick to your clothes and skin, but doesn't contribute to global warming in a meaningful way.
But it would make people feel good, I guess, to not see a big gout of black smoke out of the bus they're following, and I suppose that has marketing value. But I don't see how the electric part could work without overhead power lines.
Incidentally, our commuter buses all have the "powered by Biodiesel" stickers on them, but a local article revealed that the requirement to be able to wear the sticker was that some very tiny percentage of your total fuel (less than 20%) be biodiesel. That was disappointing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Dual mode busses are a great solution. They run on overhead wires where feasible, saving their battery charge (or running on diesel) for parts of the route where it's not worth it to run wires.
We also need the US to stop using Coal to produce electricity, seriously, this ain't the 19 hundred anymore.
Done
Have gnu, will travel.
There's probably just as much easily obtained lithium in California than in Afganistan, and if that's not enough there's more in Bolivia than anywhere else on the planet in a salt lake that has a railway line running right onto the salt. The lithium in Afganistan thing is more along the lines of "we have this land, what can we do with it?" than it being better to get it from there than anywhere else.
kill the commercial airline industry and make people stay home, and QUIT importing crap from all over the world because those HUGE cargo ships burn some of the nastiest fuel in the world, keep manufacturing in home countries, if Sony wants to sell electronics in the USA they need to build them in the USA, same with all other manufacturing, so reconfigure the global economy so companies have to build what they want to sell in those host countries
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Busses are too few and at this time, generally do not lend themselves well to pure electric approaches.
Far more important are the large number of Commercial vehicles, esp. Semis.
About 3 years, O and the Dems tried to push a tax break that would enable us to move new commercial vehicles off diesel and over the nat gas. Sadly, the neo-cons/tea* fought that because the large oil companies do not want to see the price of oil plummet.
What is really needed is to drop the massive subsidies that we have on oil/nat gas/coal, and the moderate subsidies on hybrids and electric vehicles.
Instead, we should have a set of LIMITED TIME subsidy that solves a few of these issues:
1) for any pure electric car with a range of 100-149 MPC (via epa rating), they get 7.5K. For any pure electric with a range above 150 MPC, give them $15K.
This should drop by $1.5K each year. 2) a subsidy for any commercial vehicle using [LC] Nat Gas. In addition, if this is for a serial hybrid, the subsidy should start at the same amount (i.e. a serial hybrid using Nat Gas will have double subsidy what a simple nat gas truck would have. In addition, the large the vehicle, the more subsidy for it. Finally, the nat gas subsidy should drop by 20%, and the serial hybrid should start dropping after that. So, that means that the nat gas subsidy is gone after 5 years, and the hybrid portion will be a steady rate for the first 5 years, but then drop 20% for the next 5 years, meaning that it will last 10 years.
Commercial vehicles makers are ready to do nat gas. It will be expensive at first, but will drop rather quickly. It is the hybrid portion that is of interest since it allows a company to focus on creating pure electric vehicles down the road.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
To really cut emissions we need emissionless power generation. The closest thing we get to that in reasonable power density is nuclear.
They're called trollybusses and lots of cities used to have them. Apparently hundreds of cities in the US had them but most of them went away in the 1950's and 1960's. Currently they're only in use in Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco (List of US Trollybusses). I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills. I can't speak for why they're still in use in the other cities or why they went out of style in all but 5 cities. Growing up in Dayton I thought they were more common than they are since Dayton isn't that big of a city compared to the others on the list.
First we need batteries that aren't a complete joke.
The energy density and efficiency of batteries versus gas are not comparable.
Here some fool is going to say I'm not taking into the consideration the cost of pulling the fuel out of the ground or the cost to the environment. You're right... I'm not... because that's not what I'm talking about. I'm also not talking about how neither gasoline nor batteries taste like chocolate. The issue is that the gasoline is very energy dense, relatively inexpensive, low maintenance, and thus EFFECTIVE as a fuel source.
Batteries by contrast have so many fucking problems it boggles the mind that anyone could think we could replace gasoline with them without bringing the whole system to its knees.
For one the weight/mass to energy ratio is not comparable. For the same energy batteries must be larger and heavier.
Second, they wear out fairly quickly. Possibly we could mitigate this with flow batteries but I haven't seen anyone actually propose that for automobiles. Regardless, we are comparing a gasoline tank to a battery. Both serve similar functions. How long can a gasoline tank last? How many "power cycles" can it sustain? Compare that to a battery. Is it a fair comparison? It is a realistic one. that is what you are proposing to compete with and its laughable given current technology.
Third, batteries are hardly more environmentally friendly then the petrochemical industry. Ever seen a battery factory? Lead contamination is pretty common... as are a dozen other heavy metals that seep into the ground over the years. Often the land around large battery factories look like the surface of the moon. Lifeless... oh and completely toxic. Go Captain Planet.
Fourth, they're more expensive. It doesn't matter how you add up the numbers. They cost more. Which means transport goes up for everyone and everything which means everything imported goes up in cost. ... I could go on and on... but really... just no.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I understand that these are major polluters.. I've seen pictures in a Britannica "Science and the future" book of bulk transport ships using large servo driven metal sails. I wonder to what extent this technology has been explored. When doing a google search, I found this http://www.cnet.com/news/cargo... ..But it doesn't look like it was actually built.
I've heard anecdotal evidence that a transport ship is equivalent to 50,000 cars.. And this site http://www.viewzone.com/sixtee... claims that it's much higher. I'd be interested in in a reliable source for this. I understand that they use different fuel depending on how close they are to a human settlement, and the cheap stuff is a really big polluter. It's a solid a room temperature and has to be heated up to flow into the engine. At the very least, I'd like to see electrostatic percipitators on the smoke-stacks.
We once had world trade based on sail. Much/ most of that cargo does not need to get to it's destination quickly..
Not in my backyard; starting a new mining operation is almost impossible in the US, and doing anything large enough scale to be economically viable is going to cost an extra billion dollars and two decades.
dumbass, airlines are surprisingly efficient per seat mile, and cargo ships have the lowest CO2 emissions per ton-mile of any shipping.
Buses consume your time, and subject you to scum and bedbugs.
Buses are bomb targets. Cars are dispersed. Lowlife ride buses.
Truth hurts.
A half full bus is dramatically more efficient than each of the passengers driving their own car. Plus there are many alternatives to batteries for relatively few vehicles traveling fixed routes - trains, trolleys, natural gas, biodiesel. The first priority should be getting people to ride public transportation, even legacy one. The second is getting ones that can not into electric cars. This is not even on the radar.
"anile"??????????? ?????????
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
All of the public transit buses in the greater Atlanta area run on either propane or LNG(not sure which) -- I think you will find in most metropolitan areas the same is true.
The batteries could even have small motorized wheels of their own that allow them to automatically detach from the bus and self-navigate to a charging station. Then a new battery could crawl up under the bus and hoist itself into position and lock-in.
They are testing them (ugly as hell), but why not Hybrids? A city bus is the *perfect* use for an hybrid vehicle. They are always stop and go, and have the mass to properly regenerate the batteries, and yet every driver looks at me like I've got two heads whenever I mention Hybrid...
They prefer to go Electric instead of Hybrid (which would be better IMHO)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Every time I hear stars in LA brag about their electric vehicles, I recall the biggest polluters in the western US includes the Intermountain Power Project, which is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, but is located in Utah so that the California customers don't have to deal with the pollution. There are a number of other massive coal plants in Nevada, Utah and Arizona that are similar massive polluters that don't serve the local population, but are power exporters.
People say "Oh, I pay extra for wind power". That means nothing, everything else you touch in your life runs on fossil fuels of one sort or another. Plus, the wind farms are terrible for bird and bat populations.
It's too bad that the environmental movements are full of people with LibEd degrees who don't understand basic science, and put feelings above thoughts. Until we develop something better, Nuclear Power is the only realistic option that makes electric vehicles somewhat green.
I'm tired of the LA pollution being shipped east to the Navajo Nation power plant or the IPP, and LA's yellow nitrous pollution fouling the air in my deserts.
In Toronto we used to have electric trolley buses powered by overhead wires. I'm not sure why they were discontinued in 1993; but it occurs to me that newer buses could use the same basic idea to operate in a 'tethered' mode for some parts of their route, (long straight runs in urban areas for example), while using battery power for other parts. I know it sounds like a bit of a throwback, but it could offer some real advantages as far as vehicle range and battery longevity are concerned.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Except for the battery, a street car was often an electric "bus". It drew the power from overhead lines. These were common until we were forced into automobiles by a combination of post-war cultural attitudes and downright bamboozling by the likes of GM.
So yes. Switch back. There. FTFY.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Remember, when all buses were once electric? And the gas companies conspired to do away with all of them? And then got busted? And were fined a dollar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
In the USA, at least, cars are a status/phallic symbol and thus are larger and/or more powerful than they need to be in a practical sense.
You can apply that same "phallic symbol" to anything; I think of it when I see people showing off all their Apple crap every time they sit down. Saying things like that is an easy way to get people all worked up ("America Sucks, It's all their fault"), but that's all.
I drive a small car (average 33-35MPG) for my daily commute, but I need a larger car to move things and construction materials to work on my house. Why should I be punished for that?
I use it for work as well, but who is going to decide what is an allowable exemption? You? How much use does it take to be legitimate business use? Why should large families have an exemption, they are a big part of the problem. We know what causes pregnancy now-a-days. Frankly, we should tax large families because they take so many more resources.
My large SUV gets 21MPG highway, though I average about 17 with city driving. That's better than a Volkswagen bus, should they not be taxed even more for wasting more gas? Or is it all about the appearance of the vehicle, like when I traded a Chevrolet vehicle for a Toyota and was congratulated by friends, despite the fact that (1) the mileage was about the same, (2) the Toyota had to be made in Japan and then shipped over with considerable fuel use. They did not care; American brands were bad for the environment, Japanese were good. Logic does not come into it.
And why should people be able to buy gas-wasting AWD Subarus? Most days of the year, even in snow country, you don't need AWD, yet it wastes a lot of gas. They should be taxed for buying a feature they don't need. And bike racks on the cars, they really increase wind resistance and lower mileage, that should be taxed. How about people who drive miles every weekend to participate in marathons and other runs? They don't need to do that, they could sit at home or take a bus. They should be taxed for wasting fuel. A lot of pollution is generated by ski resorts, we should tax them for wasting energy, tax them even more if they care caught running lifts that are not 100% full (they should stop the lift unless the seat is taken). And nobody needs to ski, we should tax all of those people for wasting gas to drive there, and triple-tax them if they fly!
Where does it end? And who makes the decision? The power to tax is the power to destroy.
Oh, and high-end sports cars already pay a "gas guzzler tax".
A bus holds so many people that their waste is undone by the fleet of cars they replace. You would do better to digitize management of the bus system where the routes differ on demand and add call boxes at bus stops etc. Ideas like that, including robot bus drivers. That would save more than replacing them. One could do something similar for taxi... but just look how the beginnings of that are turning out... can't wait to see the fight the robot google taxi causes...
How about automated trains where the robo taxi syncs up for going longer distances? lots of options possible. If you chuck public road funding completely you have a TON of money to invest in just about any kind of system; likely all of them are cheaper than what we do now in the USA. Just think of the insurance... oh, never mind, insurance will lobby away any possibilities.
If congress wasn't so corrupt, we could have had the USPS go electric in a big way and jump start the industry. City delivery is a perfect place for electric; more so than a bus-- especially when most stop every 30 feet and never go faster than 40mph peak.
Nuclear has emissions, of a different kind. + a disaster every decade. Fusion... is always 5 years away. More work on storage is needed.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
.. to provide batteries at 1/3rd their current cost.. then the bus will have ~100 mile range while costing the same. (Space/weight isn't an issue, since a regular diesel bus already weighs around 75,000 lbs.)
Better yet, have batteries slotted into the bus like a giant laptop battery. A robotic arm can swap them out in seconds.
We need to get away from vehicles altogether, and switch over to R.A.H's rolling roads. Portable power supplies? Don't need them.
Seriously? Do you really believe a bunch of hippies put the breaks on something as profitable as Nuclear power?
Coal and oil lobbies, the folks paid to store nuclear waste instead of processing it into new power. Look at those folks. Follow the money. When anything of importance happens it's always money.
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This shouldn't be a surprise to people. We should make every vehicle electric if we can.
captcha: warfare
Funny because it's true. Sad because it's true.
Your odds of getting killed in a car are far higher than when riding a bus. And you have to share the roads with similar scumbags that are behind of the wheel of an oversized SUV that is compensating for their penis size.
Buildings are bomb targets too, so hopefully you don't work in or shop at any of those either.
Truth may hurt, but I see none of it in your post.
A 30 mile range? What kind junk are the buying?
A BYD electric bus has a nominal range of 155 miles. It sounds much more reasonable to me.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Sure, a city bus might get 5 miles per gallon. But it's also carrying up to 80 people. If each of those people were driving a car, it'd be the equivalent of each person getting 400 miles per gallon.
There are probably only a few thousand busses in any given city, and they're carrying a whole bunch of people. Replacing busses with cars isn't going to make any real impact on the environment. Replacing the hundreds of thousands of cars in that city, though...
http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_40.html
US passenger-miles (Millions)
Highway Total: 4,273,876
Light duty vehicle, short wheel base (aka "Cars"): 2,866,797
Bus: 312,797
Transit total: 55,169
Bus: 20,060
(Rail makes up most of the rest)
From these, we can see that:
Cars make up 2/3 of the total US passenger highway miles
Highway busses only have 7.32% (1/13.66) of the highway miles of cars.
Transit busses only have 0.47% (1/213) of the highway miles of cars.
Now let's think about how to improve US overall fuel consumption...
First, if a 4-5mpg bus has at least 10 passengers, then it's already more efficient than driving cars. (Hint: let those 10 people go ride in 35mpg cars).
Second, let's get realistic. Even if you could operate a bus on zero energy, it would only make less than an 8.5% change in domestic fuel economy. Except zero energy is impossible, and highway busses make up most of the miles. Let's assume you can double the efficiency of city busses and add 25% to highway busses. Congratulations. You just raised efficiency by 2.1%. WAT? How did 25% only turn into 2%? It's because busses aren't driving anywhere near as many miles as cars.
On the other hand, you can get a 2% improvement by raising the average fuel economy of cars by 1 mpg...
When you're trying to optimize something, focus first on the places where you can get large gains. In this case: cars.
San Francisco still has trolley buses. They're powered from a pair of overhead wires. The current generation of buses also has some battery backup, so if they lose their trolley connection while turning, the bus can get back under the wires on battery power and reconnect.
They're a pain. Too much overhead wire, and limited routes. NYC got rid of overhead wire a century ago, which was a really good move. SF has these mostly because, at the beginning of the bus era when other cities were converting from trolleys to buses, Diesel buses lacked enough engine power to climb the hills.
I grew up using Wellington's electric buses my entire life. ...
And now the council is going to scrap the lot of them - how fitting that slashdot should run an article
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10202967/Wellingtons-trolley-buses-to-go
Politicians in the pockets of industry again...
I think it's very safe to assume that nearly every single person reading this site or writing comments here has ridden on a bus.
Yes, I'd prefer driving a Ferrari along a deserted Autobahn at top speed to riding a bus. Stuck in traffic and looking for ages for an ultimately expensive parking spot - that bus is looking good. Trains look even better especially with WiFi.
Another problem is that these busses often have very high voltage on their batteries requiring special certifications to work on them.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
> buses have no choice but to recharge in the middle of the day
Not true. I give you an example. I have rechargeable batteries, 2 of them for our toy train. When one battery runs out of juice, I replace it with another one and the train can continue its travel right away. The empty battery is then recharged during the night. You only need to automate this and a bus can run non-stop and you can recharge batteries when ever you want.
Diesel-electric hybrids. The main benefit from either hybrids or electric vehicles comes from regenerative braking. With a hybrid system, you can benefit from this efficiency boost without sacrificing range.
I mentioned in another post that there's a chemical in oranges that can be used - a plane has already flown with a mix of half of that and half conventional fuel. Of course that fuel was not actually extracted from oranges but was instead made using yeast modified with some genes from oranges.
Wouldn't it make sense for fleet vehicles, like buses, to be designed with interchangeable power/battery packs? The batteries can be charged when electricity is cheapest, and, during the day, the vehicles can change battery packs without having to wait for the drained batteries to be charged.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech...
We've had electric buses for a while in Milton Keynes. That 30 mile range can be dramatically increased with small top up charges at the end of the routes. Drive 5 miles, top up 4 miles, Drive 5 miles, top up 4 miles etc... Then have a big charge overnight.
Seriously? Do you really believe a bunch of hippies put the breaks on something as profitable as Nuclear power?
Coal and oil lobbies, the folks paid to store nuclear waste instead of processing it into new power. Look at those folks. Follow the money. When anything of importance happens it's always money.
Companies like Bechtel, Westinghouse, and GE got special access to governments wherever they wanted, due partly to their oligopoly on big-project experience. Coal plants and refineries didn't damage the "we are the future" mojo of the big contractors who were just biding time.
They were paralyzed by their own analysis of the economics of fission-generated electricity:
1. All the efficiency is in breeder reactors. Nothing else comes close, so don't exclude them from the discussion. All the other options sound like a steam-powered motorcycle.
2. The only problem is that breeder reactors are vulnerable to being weaponized and would inevitably become vectors for the proliferation of fissionable explosives. But killing that research deflated the righteous and greedy zest to shove political decisions on a government -- but only in regard to nuclear energy, and only for the moment.
3. Fusion. Just wait. It's okay, it's not like you can't take take over the world with just oil-field services.
Just start small with hybrid motors in the buses, enough to get them rolling again from their frequent stops (and red lights of course). If you just improved the fuel mileage a couple of miles per gallon, it would make a huge impact overall.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
because electric vehicles don't cause emission from powerplants.
no, I don't have a sig
Why not a diesel generator on board to charge the batteries? 30 miles doesn't seem adequate for most bus lines around here -- I figure most local busses run a route end-end of about 12 miles in about 2 hours, so a single bus could likely run the route 4 times in a shift.
The busses could be charged at the bus garage overnight and a generator consuming way less fuel than an engine could be used to extend the battery runtime. Kohler says their 20kw diesel generator uses about 2 gph at 100% load.
Very practical. Thanks.
What you describe is with the current situation, which is currently crashing all around us. Bus usership is skyrocketing in the city where I am (Hampton Roads). If that trend continues ... and I admit that I do NOT see national statistical evidence that bears me out, but if it continues, then the automobile may be less relevant.
Now, that said, I think there is something far more important than electric buses, and that would be electric metro trains that can dock at speed.
First, because electric is best suited to short stretches without power, and buses and autos fail at that.
Second, because if you can use a system in which every trip is nonstop, one way, and moderately fast, it will clean out the short-hop airline industry AND some of your more extensive auto use.
Third, because if a reasonable public transit system is offered for medium- and long- trips, then short-hop electric becomes more viable.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016.
In Arlington, VA, the local ART (Arlington Transit) buses run on natural gas. Quoted from the website, "ART is environmentally friendly, operating on clean-burning compressed natural gas (CNG)."
http://www.arlingtontransit.co...
I see them all the time around town. Not only do they smell better than their diesel brethren, they are MUCH quieter. Almost silent.
Item one: the trolleybus, which has already been mentioned.
Item two: the tram. Although that requires some more construction work.
Charging between runs ?? Buses need to keep moving to be practical.
Having to go back to a 'depot' to have a sled of recharged batteries changed after only a short run is pretty much as bad.
Theyve HAD electric buses for like a century already -- using an overhead wire and a trolley/pantograph - used on heavy traffic routes because of the cost of the poles and wires required above the street.
According to the IPCC personal vehicles contribute about 5% if the worlds CO2 emissions. Since most electricity is produced using non-renewable fuel, they pollute somewhere in the same range as gasoline cars. What does this mean? It means that anyone who talks about personal vehicles and any change to their use whatsoever as a solution to climate change is a moron. Most environuts I have met are morons. Please note, before you get your panties in a bunch, I am not a climate change denier, I am just pointing out that anyone talking about cars as a solution to any problem related to climate change is a moron. Even if we all stopped driving tomorrow and decided to bike to work, it would have an entirely insignificant impact on CO2 emissions.
Changing from gasoline cars to electrical cars will have almost zero effect on CO2 emissions when you consider that walking instead of driving will have a theoretical maximum effect of 5%.
The largest CO2 emitters are electricity production, the agricultural sector etc. This is where we need to start. Starting at a place with a maximum 5% effect is simply retarded. Here is a tip to the environuts: Stop yapping about cars, cars do not emit CO2 in any statistically significant manner.
As for buses, it's basically the same, though the total CO2 emissions are even lower. Again, according to the IPCC the entire transport sector accounts for about 15% of the CO2 emissions, so any discussion involving changes to transportation as a means to solve the CO2 emission problem is retarded.
Late astronaut Wubbo Ockels proposed this a few years ago already - more info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbus_%28transport%29 ; a superbus that electrically travels up to 250Kmph with 23 passengers.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
has anything really changed re: tesla on the actual net pollution front? last i checked in, while electric cars 'burn clean', so long as the power that comes to the car from the 'wall socket' is still generated by either burning coal or natural gas which was most likely produced by fracking (which releases escape methane and is 10s of times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2).
is there any legitimate data on the net benefits (if any) of switching to electric cars taking into account the methane impacts of fracking on the greenhouse situation? without that, the whole electric cars as a solution seems like more PR and hype (granted, hype that will no doubt make a lot of people very rich) than something that gives people (san franciscan's in particular according to south park) a reason to feel smug.
or is it more about reducing dependence on cheap oil, and thus, to theoretically at least give america less of a reason for meddling in the ME?
IDK why a little Insight or Prius was the first Hybrid. A small car with $10,000 added for a few more mpg while going slow. It would take a long time to get that to pay off. 50k miles go from 50 to 60 mpg at $3 per gallon is only $500 per year. 20 years to pay off $10k premium.
It adds 50% to price of the car. Take a school bus, add $10,000 to the approx. $90k and it is not a big percentage. Raise mpg from 5 to 6 mpg and save major money on 50,000 miles per year. At $3 per gallon that is $5000 per year. 2 years to pay off $10k premium.
Add to that, the battery drive is when the bus is closest to the children, it is a BIG WIN.
Fully electric buses esp, long haul greyhounds are a long way off. Frequent charge capacitors and charging stations make it way more expensive.
The buses need to be running almost 24/7 so there is no 8 hour time chunk for charging. Perhaps easy change battery packs with fork lift rails.
Get hybrid school buses first.
Warning before buying electric buses in your city :
Toxic gas released from electric bus : http://www.lapresse.ca/le-sole...
City retire all electric buses : says technology is not ready : http://www.lapresse.ca/le-sole...
We got MANY problems with thoses... MANY!!
I can't call that English
Actually, the use of more public transit vs cars will cut emissions regardless of whether the public transit is electric or not. Likewise, shipping more freight by rail instead of highway will, too. Of course industrial emissions far outweigh vehicular emissions but that's a whole different topic.
Alas, there isn't a will to do that, so the alternative is looking for less efficient ways to cut emissions, such as electric passenger cars. While better than nothing, the impact is infinitesimally small.
And where does the electricity come from? Coal-fired power plants probably
Are you really comparing the emissions from a power station (outside of the city) to thousands of cars/vans/buses in the middle of the city? You do realise that it's far easier to clean pollution at a power station than it is at every single exhaust pipe, right? Do you want anyone to take you seriously?
Actually, that would be an interesting study. Obviously increasing the use of electric vehicles is going to put more demands on the power grid and require increased production at the plants. Most likely the demand to recharge will be a night, so solar is probably not an option, which leaves coal and natural gas (given the hydro-electric and nuclear is relatively fixed by external factors).
So the question to be solved is whether a large conversion from combustion engine vehicles (gas and diesel) to electric reduces emissions enough to offset the increased emissions from power generation? I would guess that the balance is in favor of electric, but to the best of my knowledge, that question has not answered by the scientific community.
What we REALLY need is to source the vehicles' electricity from a renewable power source. Otherwise you're just burning the fuel 10 miles down the road and buying an overpriced car or bus.
Back in 2010 RIPTA got money to buy a number of Hybrid Gillig buses. So 5MPG becomes 10MPG and so on.
But bus service in RI mostly focuses on the urban side - with routes of 2 to 5 miles. So they'd benefit from going all electric.
Having lived in the SFBA without a car, I say with confidence that Americans who can afford cars will never use buses in great numbers until someone finds a good way to make the buses less disgusting. Kick out the lowlives who drop food on the floor or spit on it, the ones who clip their toenails in public, the ones who haven't bathed in three days, the ones who play the music they like with no thought of whether others want to hear it, and I'll gladly use them.
Public transit works in Japan because Japanese people are polite and consider others. It will never work in the US until Americans learn to do the same.
I'm starting seeing them driving around Amsterdam. And yes, in case of UPS, it's their classical boxy brown delivery vehicles well known in the USA, converted to electro.
Our area just picked up a few Proterra electric buses for use in the Catbus system, which serves Clemson University and the surrounding areas. There were some huge federal grants involved, and they have been riddled with problems, but have finally started running and carrying passengers. We're mostly a rural area and the bus system is free for all to use - paid for by Clemson University student fees and some taxpayer money from surrounding municipalities (Cities of Clemson, Seneca, Pendleton, and Central, afaik).
The buses are neat. They use overhead inductive chargers that are located at various places around town. I haven't ridden one yet (I prefer to get around by bicycle), but I hear they're pretty nice.
I am sure the impact on air quality is almost unmeasurable in our vast expanse of rural countryside, but in cities the impact could be huge.
I wonder how much tidal energy could be harvested to charge a ship while at rest/dock if the appropriate hardware were installed.
As always, storage becomes the issue in general though.
City and school buses are the perfect target for hybrid ICE/Electric propulsion (along with FedEx and UPS delivery trucks). They accelerate and decelerate a huge mass every block or so. Recapture as much of the energy as you can while slowing to speed up again. The power of the ICE needn't be anywhere close to what it is currently. Maybe not even electric—some mechanical means of storing energy for short periods would be helpful, and probably a lot cheaper. Just DO SOMETHING to avoid throwing away all that energy put into accelerating every block.
Since there's already a lot of experience using CNG for buses, use that and avoid much of the complicated emissions-control equipment. Buses are so big that putting a reformer on board and fueling them with methane but powering them with fuel cells might be feasible.
http://www.hybridcars.com/all-...
they are ridiculously expensive, but, they are not mass produced, yet.
Ok. So you cut the emissions from the bus fleet and cars. Instead of dealing with pollution from those sources you are now dealing with emissions from power plants that have to increase their production to keep power in the grid. The price of electricity then rises for EVERYONE and the cost of running your microwave and charging your phone goes up too.
I really appreciate what the environazi's are trying to do. I just wish they weren't all so damn stupid and fell for all the pseudoscience without looking at the whole picture. Where does your power come from? It's not this amazing free source of energy. If electric cars go mainstream tomorrow you are going to end up paying for that energy. It's not this "amazing free" technology that you think it is.
The power grid pollutes a LOT. All you are doing is moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. The pollution is still there. It's just from another source. Don't be such mindless sheep. You know who's pushing electric cars? The automakers. They want to make all cars obsolete so they can start another build boom to replace all of the gas powered cars out there. They don't really care much about the pollution. They just want to sell and profit from your lack of forward thinking.
Remove that form the equation, and buses start looking very attractive. And that doesn't just apply to big cities. I live in a small but pretty dense town, parking is a huge issue. Bus service is pretty crappy. Something needs to be done, whatever it is will be expensive.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
in a lot of cities (philadelphia, in particular) have over-head lines for trolleys... there's no reason a bus couldn't tap into that where it's available (like all over south philly) and thus, could extend it's range... also, they're like all roof. solar assist, anyone?
http://www.waveipt.com/
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Not the latest 'electric' technology (overhead lines which did limit routes/speeds - gotta slowdown when the vibrations could knock the spring-loaded trolley poles out of their connection to the overhead power lines); but Edmonton still dumped it all in favour of 'green' (?!!) diesel buses. Sticking a metal green bas-relief leaf on a bus doesn't make it GREEN.
Instead of band-aid's and pointless get rich quick schemes, population control is the ultimate problem. It isn't what people are doing, it's how many people are doing it that is the real issue. Failure to see this fact and to belittle or marginalize it are anti-productive.
I've thought for about ten years now that what trolly bus's need is an automatic trolly pole, one that connects when an overhead line is present, and disconnects and stows at the end of the overhead. Combined with batteries for traveling when the overhead power isn't available.
The advantage is, you no longer need a continuous line, only a number of short sections. That should make a system much cheaper and easier to roll out.
Diesel generators?
Put railroad wheels on the bottom of cars and build railroad tracks along the highway. It can be done a little bit at a time and it uses normal cars. The problem with buses and trains is that they suck if you're in a city that doesn't have everything in walking distance. If you put railroad wheels on cars and put railroad tracks on the highway, the cars would use waaaay less gas, you could read while you were driving, and you could actually let a computer control starting and stopping. Plus, you'd need a lot of people to build the tracks so that's jobs right there. Then, you could have other businesses pop up that let you rent a car for a day. So like you drive to a place, pick up a car, get it on the track, drive to work, then bring it back at the end of the day. You could even chain the cars together like railroad cars I'd bet.
Feel free to steal this idea!
We don't actually need electric buses - we need large scale electric public transportation.
This could easily be delivered by a fleet of Autonomous Electric Vehicles in a mini-van-like form factor.
Utilize Google's (or whoever's) autonomous vehicular control system.
Utilize a city wide software solution to deliver optimized point-to-point routes for delivering travellers to their destinations.
Because of battery/charge cycles, the fleet of "smart-cars" can monitor their battery use and go off-service and head to a charging depot when needed.
During charge cycles a cleaning crew should also likely attend the vehicle in question (job growth?) to ensure it's acceptable for service runs
Buses only barely make sense when you have a large volume of individuals departing & arrive at the identical locations - with smaller, easily charged, easily maintained, commodity (disposable) vehicles in the appropriate volume you can do a lot better than a bus for large scale public transport.
One only needs to look at a single common economic metric used in industry: utilization.
Utilization is simply the % of time that a capital asset is used. If utilization is low, the asset is not being well used and the investment value must/is devalued by exactly that %.
Your average car is easily under 5% utilization. Most of the time it just sits idle and unused parked. That's an ENORMOUS WASTE of resources. Mind-boggling waste. So larges that in industry, any asset with utilization that low but a cost that high is always fazed out and eliminated.
Buses and other mass transit have far higher utilization. Easily 50%-60%. If you plan correctly, the utilization can get into the 70%-90% range. This requires a lot more planning: e.g. for subway trains and tracks you need downtime to repair so you need some good schedule planning and possibly redundancy to the track design to allow repair and use of the system at the same time you are doing required maintenance.
You can travel places where this has all been figured out: e.g. most of Asia and Europe. It's a joy to choose the alternatives like these.
PACCAR near Seattle makes low emission and hybrid trucks.
There are electric bus lines. In fact, Seattle has some.
There are hybrid bus lines. In fact, Seattle has some.
There are even fuel cell trains. In Canada.
We have the technology, we just need to end all fossil fuel subsidies and tax exemptions and cheap mining/drilling and the invisible hand of the marketplace will make them commonplace.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We can't say that we're polluting less if we're filling up our electric vehicles primarily with coal and each electric vehicle requires input to the home increase and more coal to be burned ....
http://wrightspeed.com/
First analyze your requirements and match them to the power source. Where do electric motors own the field? At the low end. They have max torque at zero RPMs. That means if you have a large vehicle that stops and starts constantly (ie 5 ton garbage trucks are perfect) you will use that max torque and save a ton of fuel. Buses and delivery vehicles would be a distant second as they don't stop and go nearly as much as a garbage truck. Still might be worth doing.
Please stop wrapping everything in the "must reduce CO2" blanket. You just weaken the argument in favor of your idea. CO2 is not a problem, is essential for life and for 250 out of the last 300 million years was between 1000-2000 ppm and life flourished. These ideas can stand on their own merits.
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
All 5 of the major datasets (RSS, UAH, HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC) show no warming for between 14 and almost 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen 8-10%.
Here are 2 predictions. First I predict that CO2 will continue to increase because China and other countries don't care about CO2. They don't even care about real pollutants much less CO2. Second I predict it will get colder over the next 20-30 years. Why? The following scientists use models that do not rely on CO2 and they have been correct. The IPCC models rely on CO2 controlling the climate and they have been wrong.
Dr Libby in the 1970s said that "looking forward it will stay cold until the mid 80s (it did), then it will warm by about 1/4 degree F until the end of the century (it did), then it gets cold". When asked how cold she was predicting a 1-2 degree F drop with an outside chance of a 3-4 degree drop. Pray it is the former.
Dr Easterbrook in 2001 said the PDO was done it's positive warm cycle and that we were in for 25-30 years of cold weather. How cold? We have his good, bad and ugly predictions based on previous negative cold phases of the PDO. Pray it is the first one.
Dr Abdusamatov in 2006 said we are at the top of the temperature sine wave and it will be 200 years of cold weather. Pray he is wrong.
If you would like to be an arm chair scientist, as seems to be the case for a lot of you. Try reading what we prepare for you. Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (SEWTHA). Its free and it will help you understand the issues. Almost all science and no politicking.http://www.withouthotair.com/
"Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another" --Albert Einstein
Casteism
I understand that this concept is nothing for you there in the USA as buses aren't big enough to open carry your beloved RPG-7...
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Tires hitting the road are still going to make your favorite city a polluted mess.
In the USA, at least, cars are a status/phallic symbol and thus are larger and/or more powerful than they need to be in a practical sense
Far from me to belittle your penile obsession, but if you look around you will notice that by and large the SUV market is dominated by women.