8 ms·

> A lot of the Seattle area only has street parking on residential streets. I'm curious how these folks are ever going to go full EV. It is funny how people in

> A lot of the Seattle area only has street parking on residential streets. I'm curious how these folks are ever going to go full EV. It is funny how people in the US expect exactly nothing from their government/city. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there?

aaronbrethorst 6y ago
I take it you have not experienced the consistent lack of vision or competence from the last several Seattle city mayors[1]. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there? I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool progressive: no, no one here thinks that the mayor of Seattle would be able to do this. We have a mayoral election coming up in November. There's an outside chance that things might change for the better, but I'm not really holding my breath. --- [1] Excepting McGinn, who I thought got a really raw deal.
- posguy 6y ago
  McGinn made a few cushy positions for his friends and did not get much done. Very similar to Greg Nickels IMO, who was only ousted after his cronies that ran SDOT totally bodged Snowpocalypse, followed by him coming out and saying he thought they did a B- job despite most of the city being trapped in snow for a week...
devoutsalsa 6y ago
American here. We expect to be milked like dairy cows.
dpoochieni 6y ago
Nah, too busy inefficiently and ineffectually spending on the homeless to care about actual tax payers.
- thomasedwards 6y ago
  From the photos and reports I’ve seen, they’re not giving a dime to anybody that needs a dime.
klyrs 6y ago
As I understand it, level 3 chargers need quite a lot of infrastructure, and maintenance ain't free. Putting one on, say, every residential block would be a huge expense, and there's a chicken/egg problem where the demand doesn't justify such a step yet... but if everybody gets on board, one per block wouldn't be enough. And right now, folks get tax breaks for their EVs instead of getting taxed for necessary infrastructure improvements. This is the sort of infrastructure work that a Green New Deal should support. But that's a political poison pill, as supporting energy sector jobs is "patriotic" if it's carbon based and "communism" otherwise.
- scythe 6y ago
  If the vehicles are parked overnight and mostly driven to work, you don't need anything like a level 3 charger. A 220V/12A outlet is probably enough. That won't give you a full charge, but it's enough for most urban commutes. (And making this infrastructure available should make PHEV owners buy less gasoline, which is good!)
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Yeah, that's a good point. I can only imagine fighting with neighbors over access to that one charger.... maybe banks of L1 would suffice for most daily drivers.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Excellent reminder/point. Thanks!
  - aerostable_slug 6y ago
    And with current technology (pun intended), your battery will last significantly longer.
- perardi 6y ago
  Yeah, building out high-speed chargers on every block cannot possibly be cheap. You could have an extra fee on top of vehicle stickers for EVs…and even as I type that, I can imagine the pitched screaming, from both sides of the aisle. “Why are you suppressing clean vehicles?!” “More big city taxes?!”
sloreti 6y ago
Or you take the view that if a city is investing in transportation infrastructure, it should focus on public transportation instead of building infrastructure for private vehicles that degrade the urban experience.
- scotth 6y ago
  Or maybe do both? I don't see Americans getting rid of their cars, so look at it as harm reduction.
  - jniedrauer 6y ago
    I would. And if I would, so would others.
    - kempbellt 6y ago
      I wouldn't. And I'm sure many others wouldn't either for similar reasons. Public transportation is great and I love using it when it makes sense, but in many cities it does not compete with the convenience and security of having a reliable personal vehicle. The only place I felt public transportation was good enough to go without my own car was NYC - but I lived on a great train line that ran every few minutes reliably. I also didn't have any dependents that I was responsible for. Many people who lived nearby used the train but still had their own cars as a backup. Even with how convenient it was for shuttling myself around, using it when needing to carry anything like groceries becomes difficult, and made me wish I had a car. Especially during rush hour where sitting is almost impossible. I'm all for improving public transportation, but I do not see it being a replacement for personal vehicles in every way.
- criddell 6y ago
  Maybe the street chargers could be run for profit with the proceeds used to subsidize public transportation?
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  The issue is that public transit generally optimizes for throughput, and latency suffers. The wealthier people are, the more latency sensitive they become.
aidenn0 6y ago
> It is funny how people in the US expect exactly nothing from their government/city. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there? We expect them to propose charging infrastructure, think they have a consensus, and then get sued by someone for some stupid reason, and then 10-15 years later break ground on something 1/3 of what people need. California is much worse than the east-coast in this regard, but there's a 12 lane freeway bridge in the DC area that is a draw-bridge because the original plan of a suspension bridge was fought by people who complained that it would be an eyesore.
- VintageCool 6y ago
  For anyone else who didn't believe aidenn0, this is the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. It carries 250,000 cars a day (or it did, pre-pandemic). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson_Bridge
jedberg 6y ago
This is the United States. The best we expect is that the city will contract with an exclusive provider who will be the only ones that can install chargers on every street and then charge us to use them.
- notJim 6y ago
  Also, the provider will collect the money, but not actually install many chargers.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Or maintain them.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  They should charge you to use them. The problem is they will charge you way more than they should because of the exclusive deal they have based on the bribes they paid to the city.
numpad0 6y ago
Bit tangential but I’ve been wondering how street parking thing works, because in my country you can’t register a car without a “declaration of storage space” form and storage address in it has to be a non-bogus private property no more than 2km(1.2mi) away from your home address. To me it’s a no-brainer to have such a regulation, but how do other people/cities/country cope without it? You apply for parking permission for “1234 Hacker Rd. space 3A” or do you just find an open spot and consider it yours, like you do for a chair in a cafe?
- na85 6y ago
  In Vancouver BC for example it's common for residential streets to be "parking for residents only" and bylaw officers will ticket/tow any vehicle that is lacking a pass. The pass comes with your house/apartment.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  In the US, depends on the city and probably on the neighborhood. A lot of my friends in NYC for example don't even have cars. I've lived in Texas a long time and parking space in residential areas was never a problem. Nearly every apartment complex comes with a giant parking lot and private houses either have a garage/driveway or the street is isolated enough to where on street parking isn't an issue, but it's practically impossible or at least extremely inconvenient to live in Texas without a car. There are a few places where parking is tight, like for instance at a university living space,so you either have to pay for a space somewhere or get a house/apt with dedicated parking (a lot of students don't really need cars though) or take the chance that you will have to play the street parking lottery.
  - sithadmin 6y ago
    >I've lived in Texas a long time and parking space in residential areas was never a problem. Nearly every apartment complex comes with a giant parking lot So prevalent in Texas that a now-popular building architype in North American real estate is known as the 'Texas Donut', whereby a midrise apartment building 'wraps' around a parking structure in the middle of the plot.
technofiend 6y ago
I mean on a serious note, yes I personally think it's possible to do. But heavy charging cables have enough copper you're basically leaving a few dollars for every person with a pair of bolt cutters and a shopping cart. Not to mention vandalism or ICEing due to someone wanting to protest electric cars. I'm not saying it's impossible; just you need to design in making them robust and vandalism, theft and denial-of-service resistant. On a more humorous note my first mental image had a cyberpunk vibe: someone walking around the city with an unregulated nuke generator (stolen recycled waste or maybe a stolen weapon) selling electricity by the watt from a repurposed hot dog cart. Or maybe WattWallahs if it turns into a semi informal business. I believe EVs will come into their own as battery technology improves to the point that charging is no longer a multi hour affair. Whether that's the Bill Gates battery, super capacitors, hot swap battery clubs or some combination thereof remains to be seen.
- dontyouknow 6y ago
  Please see this https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/TECHNOLOGY/OVERVIEW/wcs.html https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/TECHNOLOGY/OVERVIEW/wcs.htm...
- jiofih 6y ago
  Charging is already not a multi-hour affair. 30m-45m with current fast chargers. But you don’t need fast charging on public streets, you charge while parked.
  - technofiend 6y ago
    You do if the only place to park is on public streets.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      I think the discussion is about people who park on the street outside their house or apartment. This is very common in some cities. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/electric-car-ways-to-charge https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/electric-car-w...
slg 6y ago
The funniest part is that this is paired with a lack of belief in the free market. Think of all the real estate that is taken up with gas stations. Do we think those are all going to exist forever despite a shrinking customer base? As society transfers to more EVs, gas stations can transition to EV charging stations. Those stations can be denser too since a charger doesn't require much more room than a parking space. Combine that with the trend of faster and faster charging and the need for a dedicated home charger will decrease over time.
- cardiffspaceman 6y ago
  I keep hearing that gas stations aren't great businesses as they are, and if they do make money it is not on fuel. I found one article that is particularly negative, but not necessarily objective [1]. The closest gas station to me, on foot, has converted its mechanics bays to a great taco shop, its "office" to a liquor store with a great selection of spirits, and it has a full-size car wash operation wrapped around it. So it seems like the most likely conversion would be that the gas station would swap gas pumps for chargers, in phases. Of course the best layout for chargers where charging takes the time it currently does is not the same as the best layout for fuel pumps, so it will be interesting to see how the transition goes. So at present all the gas stations that I know of that seem viable are embedded in businesses that take up even more space, and the retail fuel business is just a part of it. [1] https://www.franchise.city/buy-a-gas-station https://www.franchise.city/buy-a-gas-station
  - slg 6y ago
    Many of those side businesses might be even more profitable with EV chargers as the main attraction rather than gas stations. EV charging doesn't require you to stay by the vehicle like gas fueling does (or at least is supposed to). Having a property with a constant flow of people who have 5-15 minutes of free time sounds like a great way to make money for a taco shop, liquor store, general convenience store, or any number of businesses.
    - randcraw 6y ago
cbhl 6y ago
$dayjob does provide shared charging infrastructure, and discovered there wasn't enough amperage going to the office park to run all of the chargers it does have at full speed. (Each charger can charge one car at full speed, but if both cables are plugged in, it will charge each at a reduced speed.) They currently have ~60 chargers on a 5-building campus. Given the square footage of the campus and the parking minimums set by the city, they'd need 25x that in order to convert every single parking spot with a charger. We'd need some pretty serious upgrades to our electrical transmission infrastructure to get L2 charging speeds from "every lamppost" as some would propose.
- adolph 6y ago
  Is there a way of overprovisioning the physical car endpoints compared to the resources available to the group? Within a parking garage is there a method of metering/constraining individual charging nodes so that the overall consumption does not exceed the amps available to the garage? Say for example, all my neighborhood household electric meters have some zigbee coms that allow the electric co to snoop on individual usage closer to realtime. Do EVs not have a method for the charger to understand the EV's % of full charge?
  - cbhl 6y ago
    To an extent, yes -- the current infrastructure is already over-provisioned by a factor of 2. (Each charger has two ports; if one car is plugged in it goes at full speed, if both are plugged in they get half. Each station has 4 parking spots, so that you can move the charging cord over to the next car when you're done charging your car.) But when we start talking about "every parking spot" scale, then two constraints come to mind: (1) the charging rate is too low to be effective (L1 charging over "regular" 110V wall outlets gets you only a few miles of charge an hour), and (2) if you have too much current going through some common section of cable, it will blow a circuit breaker, or worse, overheat and cause an electrical fire (same as if you plug too many things into an extension cord at home or work). Edit: I think the current state of the art for sharing is "push notification to tell the driver to move their car" because there is a non-trivial capital outlay for chargers even if you have enough electricity. So any scheme that involves all the cars being plugged in and some intelligent switching of who should go first still requires considerable capital costs, even before you get to upgrading the big transmission wires.
adolph 6y ago
Given the economics of personal EV cars (they are expensive), wouldn't it be difficult to justify the investment (spending) given a growing wealth divide (spending everybody's money on rich folks to enable buying expensive things)? I acknowledge that EV transport has a chicken/egg problem of standing up a support infrastructure as adoption grows and that there are collective interests in decreasing point of service emissions and shifting energy generation away from sources with harmful emissions. However, the problem can be viewed from perspectives outside the personal car paradigm. Why would a rationally goal-oriented city or similar organization spend money/effort on supporting the personal ownership model instead of improving transportation for all people? For example, the same decrease in emissions might be achieved by improved bus/tram service, or public/private partnership to provide EV charging for car sharing services. What are the cities that have provided street-side charging, what were their goals and by what criteria did they decide to do street-side charging instead of choosing other methods to achieve their goals?
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  Heh, writing about "EV cars* on your personal PC computer". *vehicle cars
  - minhaz23 6y ago
    hi! i hope you dont mind the random solicitation but intense searching for answers led to a comment of yours in a very old thread that struck a chord with me, i hoped to find an email or way to contact you but only found that you are using a throwaway to remain anonymous and that your tone/language/interests/concerns (from the little ive seen) are more relatable than i expected is there a way we can chat today without me imposing on your privacy/anonimity? a secure way to chat for you? if you didnt mind me picking your brain of course. thank you!
- bogidon 6y ago
  EVs are projected to get cheaper than internal combustion by mid-decade [0]. There are lots of American city neighborhoods where EVs will be inaccessible without street-side charging. In response to GP, I definitely expect the US government to take a lead on building charging infrastructure (especially with a federal administration that doesn't actively dismiss climate change). A failure to demonstrate competence building green infrastructure in the next few years will quite possibly lead me to seek greener pastures elsewhere (EU). Thankfully San Francisco included charging infrastructure and street-side charging in its 2019 EV roadmap [1]. That said, public transit is by far the better green tech. But since private vehicles won't be going away overnight, might as well transition them to something cleaner. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/electric-vehicles-close-to-tipping-point-of-mass-adoption https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/electric... [1] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2019/07/evroadmap_final_june2019.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

I take it you have not experienced the consistent lack of vision or competence from the last several Seattle city mayors[1]. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there? I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool progressive: no, no one here thinks that the mayor of Seattle would be able to do this. We have a mayoral election coming up in November. There's an outside chance that things might change for the better, but I'm not really holding my breath. --- [1] Excepting McGinn, who I thought got a really raw deal.

posguy 6y ago
McGinn made a few cushy positions for his friends and did not get much done. Very similar to Greg Nickels IMO, who was only ousted after his cronies that ran SDOT totally bodged Snowpocalypse, followed by him coming out and saying he thought they did a B- job despite most of the city being trapped in snow for a week...

devoutsalsa 6y ago

American here. We expect to be milked like dairy cows.

dpoochieni 6y ago

Nah, too busy inefficiently and ineffectually spending on the homeless to care about actual tax payers.

thomasedwards 6y ago
From the photos and reports I’ve seen, they’re not giving a dime to anybody that needs a dime.

klyrs 6y ago

As I understand it, level 3 chargers need quite a lot of infrastructure, and maintenance ain't free. Putting one on, say, every residential block would be a huge expense, and there's a chicken/egg problem where the demand doesn't justify such a step yet... but if everybody gets on board, one per block wouldn't be enough. And right now, folks get tax breaks for their EVs instead of getting taxed for necessary infrastructure improvements. This is the sort of infrastructure work that a Green New Deal should support. But that's a political poison pill, as supporting energy sector jobs is "patriotic" if it's carbon based and "communism" otherwise.

scythe 6y ago
If the vehicles are parked overnight and mostly driven to work, you don't need anything like a level 3 charger. A 220V/12A outlet is probably enough. That won't give you a full charge, but it's enough for most urban commutes. (And making this infrastructure available should make PHEV owners buy less gasoline, which is good!)
- klyrs 6y ago
  Yeah, that's a good point. I can only imagine fighting with neighbors over access to that one charger.... maybe banks of L1 would suffice for most daily drivers.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Excellent reminder/point. Thanks!
- aerostable_slug 6y ago
  And with current technology (pun intended), your battery will last significantly longer.
perardi 6y ago
Yeah, building out high-speed chargers on every block cannot possibly be cheap. You could have an extra fee on top of vehicle stickers for EVs…and even as I type that, I can imagine the pitched screaming, from both sides of the aisle. “Why are you suppressing clean vehicles?!” “More big city taxes?!”

sloreti 6y ago

Or you take the view that if a city is investing in transportation infrastructure, it should focus on public transportation instead of building infrastructure for private vehicles that degrade the urban experience.

scotth 6y ago
Or maybe do both? I don't see Americans getting rid of their cars, so look at it as harm reduction.
- jniedrauer 6y ago
  I would. And if I would, so would others.
  - kempbellt 6y ago
    I wouldn't. And I'm sure many others wouldn't either for similar reasons. Public transportation is great and I love using it when it makes sense, but in many cities it does not compete with the convenience and security of having a reliable personal vehicle. The only place I felt public transportation was good enough to go without my own car was NYC - but I lived on a great train line that ran every few minutes reliably. I also didn't have any dependents that I was responsible for. Many people who lived nearby used the train but still had their own cars as a backup. Even with how convenient it was for shuttling myself around, using it when needing to carry anything like groceries becomes difficult, and made me wish I had a car. Especially during rush hour where sitting is almost impossible. I'm all for improving public transportation, but I do not see it being a replacement for personal vehicles in every way.
criddell 6y ago
Maybe the street chargers could be run for profit with the proceeds used to subsidize public transportation?
908B64B197 6y ago
The issue is that public transit generally optimizes for throughput, and latency suffers. The wealthier people are, the more latency sensitive they become.

aidenn0 6y ago

> It is funny how people in the US expect exactly nothing from their government/city. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there? We expect them to propose charging infrastructure, think they have a consensus, and then get sued by someone for some stupid reason, and then 10-15 years later break ground on something 1/3 of what people need. California is much worse than the east-coast in this regard, but there's a 12 lane freeway bridge in the DC area that is a draw-bridge because the original plan of a suspension bridge was fought by people who complained that it would be an eyesore.

VintageCool 6y ago
For anyone else who didn't believe aidenn0, this is the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. It carries 250,000 cars a day (or it did, pre-pandemic). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson_Bridge

jedberg 6y ago

This is the United States. The best we expect is that the city will contract with an exclusive provider who will be the only ones that can install chargers on every street and then charge us to use them.

notJim 6y ago
Also, the provider will collect the money, but not actually install many chargers.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Or maintain them.
dexterdog 6y ago
They should charge you to use them. The problem is they will charge you way more than they should because of the exclusive deal they have based on the bribes they paid to the city.

numpad0 6y ago

Bit tangential but I’ve been wondering how street parking thing works, because in my country you can’t register a car without a “declaration of storage space” form and storage address in it has to be a non-bogus private property no more than 2km(1.2mi) away from your home address. To me it’s a no-brainer to have such a regulation, but how do other people/cities/country cope without it? You apply for parking permission for “1234 Hacker Rd. space 3A” or do you just find an open spot and consider it yours, like you do for a chair in a cafe?

na85 6y ago
In Vancouver BC for example it's common for residential streets to be "parking for residents only" and bylaw officers will ticket/tow any vehicle that is lacking a pass. The pass comes with your house/apartment.
ativzzz 6y ago
In the US, depends on the city and probably on the neighborhood. A lot of my friends in NYC for example don't even have cars. I've lived in Texas a long time and parking space in residential areas was never a problem. Nearly every apartment complex comes with a giant parking lot and private houses either have a garage/driveway or the street is isolated enough to where on street parking isn't an issue, but it's practically impossible or at least extremely inconvenient to live in Texas without a car. There are a few places where parking is tight, like for instance at a university living space,so you either have to pay for a space somewhere or get a house/apt with dedicated parking (a lot of students don't really need cars though) or take the chance that you will have to play the street parking lottery.
- sithadmin 6y ago
  >I've lived in Texas a long time and parking space in residential areas was never a problem. Nearly every apartment complex comes with a giant parking lot So prevalent in Texas that a now-popular building architype in North American real estate is known as the 'Texas Donut', whereby a midrise apartment building 'wraps' around a parking structure in the middle of the plot.

technofiend 6y ago

I mean on a serious note, yes I personally think it's possible to do. But heavy charging cables have enough copper you're basically leaving a few dollars for every person with a pair of bolt cutters and a shopping cart. Not to mention vandalism or ICEing due to someone wanting to protest electric cars. I'm not saying it's impossible; just you need to design in making them robust and vandalism, theft and denial-of-service resistant. On a more humorous note my first mental image had a cyberpunk vibe: someone walking around the city with an unregulated nuke generator (stolen recycled waste or maybe a stolen weapon) selling electricity by the watt from a repurposed hot dog cart. Or maybe WattWallahs if it turns into a semi informal business. I believe EVs will come into their own as battery technology improves to the point that charging is no longer a multi hour affair. Whether that's the Bill Gates battery, super capacitors, hot swap battery clubs or some combination thereof remains to be seen.

dontyouknow 6y ago
Please see this https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/TECHNOLOGY/OVERVIEW/wcs.html https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/TECHNOLOGY/OVERVIEW/wcs.htm...
jiofih 6y ago
Charging is already not a multi-hour affair. 30m-45m with current fast chargers. But you don’t need fast charging on public streets, you charge while parked.
- technofiend 6y ago
  You do if the only place to park is on public streets.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    I think the discussion is about people who park on the street outside their house or apartment. This is very common in some cities. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/electric-car-ways-to-charge https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/electric-car-w...

slg 6y ago

The funniest part is that this is paired with a lack of belief in the free market. Think of all the real estate that is taken up with gas stations. Do we think those are all going to exist forever despite a shrinking customer base? As society transfers to more EVs, gas stations can transition to EV charging stations. Those stations can be denser too since a charger doesn't require much more room than a parking space. Combine that with the trend of faster and faster charging and the need for a dedicated home charger will decrease over time.

cardiffspaceman 6y ago
I keep hearing that gas stations aren't great businesses as they are, and if they do make money it is not on fuel. I found one article that is particularly negative, but not necessarily objective [1]. The closest gas station to me, on foot, has converted its mechanics bays to a great taco shop, its "office" to a liquor store with a great selection of spirits, and it has a full-size car wash operation wrapped around it. So it seems like the most likely conversion would be that the gas station would swap gas pumps for chargers, in phases. Of course the best layout for chargers where charging takes the time it currently does is not the same as the best layout for fuel pumps, so it will be interesting to see how the transition goes. So at present all the gas stations that I know of that seem viable are embedded in businesses that take up even more space, and the retail fuel business is just a part of it. [1] https://www.franchise.city/buy-a-gas-station https://www.franchise.city/buy-a-gas-station
- slg 6y ago
  Many of those side businesses might be even more profitable with EV chargers as the main attraction rather than gas stations. EV charging doesn't require you to stay by the vehicle like gas fueling does (or at least is supposed to). Having a property with a constant flow of people who have 5-15 minutes of free time sounds like a great way to make money for a taco shop, liquor store, general convenience store, or any number of businesses.
  - randcraw 6y ago

cbhl 6y ago

$dayjob does provide shared charging infrastructure, and discovered there wasn't enough amperage going to the office park to run all of the chargers it does have at full speed. (Each charger can charge one car at full speed, but if both cables are plugged in, it will charge each at a reduced speed.) They currently have ~60 chargers on a 5-building campus. Given the square footage of the campus and the parking minimums set by the city, they'd need 25x that in order to convert every single parking spot with a charger. We'd need some pretty serious upgrades to our electrical transmission infrastructure to get L2 charging speeds from "every lamppost" as some would propose.

adolph 6y ago
Is there a way of overprovisioning the physical car endpoints compared to the resources available to the group? Within a parking garage is there a method of metering/constraining individual charging nodes so that the overall consumption does not exceed the amps available to the garage? Say for example, all my neighborhood household electric meters have some zigbee coms that allow the electric co to snoop on individual usage closer to realtime. Do EVs not have a method for the charger to understand the EV's % of full charge?
- cbhl 6y ago
  To an extent, yes -- the current infrastructure is already over-provisioned by a factor of 2. (Each charger has two ports; if one car is plugged in it goes at full speed, if both are plugged in they get half. Each station has 4 parking spots, so that you can move the charging cord over to the next car when you're done charging your car.) But when we start talking about "every parking spot" scale, then two constraints come to mind: (1) the charging rate is too low to be effective (L1 charging over "regular" 110V wall outlets gets you only a few miles of charge an hour), and (2) if you have too much current going through some common section of cable, it will blow a circuit breaker, or worse, overheat and cause an electrical fire (same as if you plug too many things into an extension cord at home or work). Edit: I think the current state of the art for sharing is "push notification to tell the driver to move their car" because there is a non-trivial capital outlay for chargers even if you have enough electricity. So any scheme that involves all the cars being plugged in and some intelligent switching of who should go first still requires considerable capital costs, even before you get to upgrading the big transmission wires.

adolph 6y ago

Given the economics of personal EV cars (they are expensive), wouldn't it be difficult to justify the investment (spending) given a growing wealth divide (spending everybody's money on rich folks to enable buying expensive things)? I acknowledge that EV transport has a chicken/egg problem of standing up a support infrastructure as adoption grows and that there are collective interests in decreasing point of service emissions and shifting energy generation away from sources with harmful emissions. However, the problem can be viewed from perspectives outside the personal car paradigm. Why would a rationally goal-oriented city or similar organization spend money/effort on supporting the personal ownership model instead of improving transportation for all people? For example, the same decrease in emissions might be achieved by improved bus/tram service, or public/private partnership to provide EV charging for car sharing services. What are the cities that have provided street-side charging, what were their goals and by what criteria did they decide to do street-side charging instead of choosing other methods to achieve their goals?

throw1234651234 6y ago
Heh, writing about "EV cars* on your personal PC computer". *vehicle cars
- minhaz23 6y ago
  hi! i hope you dont mind the random solicitation but intense searching for answers led to a comment of yours in a very old thread that struck a chord with me, i hoped to find an email or way to contact you but only found that you are using a throwaway to remain anonymous and that your tone/language/interests/concerns (from the little ive seen) are more relatable than i expected is there a way we can chat today without me imposing on your privacy/anonimity? a secure way to chat for you? if you didnt mind me picking your brain of course. thank you!
bogidon 6y ago
EVs are projected to get cheaper than internal combustion by mid-decade [0]. There are lots of American city neighborhoods where EVs will be inaccessible without street-side charging. In response to GP, I definitely expect the US government to take a lead on building charging infrastructure (especially with a federal administration that doesn't actively dismiss climate change). A failure to demonstrate competence building green infrastructure in the next few years will quite possibly lead me to seek greener pastures elsewhere (EU). Thankfully San Francisco included charging infrastructure and street-side charging in its 2019 EV roadmap [1]. That said, public transit is by far the better green tech. But since private vehicles won't be going away overnight, might as well transition them to something cleaner. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/electric-vehicles-close-to-tipping-point-of-mass-adoption https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/electric... [1] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2019/07/evroadmap_final_june2019.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...