4 ms·

Overhead wires take a lot of maintenance - point of reference, Vancouver BC's transit authority reported maintenance costs per km were actually higher for their

Overhead wires take a lot of maintenance - point of reference, Vancouver BC's transit authority reported maintenance costs per km were actually higher for their electric trolleys than both their diesel and CNG buses. And having lived with them, being effectively restricted to being 'on rails' leads to challenges in traffic or road closures where traditional buses would re-route down a different street. I think battery-buses are the future - the ability to roll and change routes without capital infrastructure set up will be king https://www.translink.ca/-/media/translink/documents/about-translink/corporate-reports/efficiency_review_march_2012.pdf https://www.translink.ca/-/media/translink/documents/about-t... (page 77, PDF page 90)

kkfx 4y ago
Thanks for the report, not so easy to source valuable information! I nevertheless object with a side reasoning: costs are complex beast, in an age of scarcity, where oil is pushed aside no matter if for good or bad reasons, how costs can change? I mean: maintaining an aerial network and relevant trolleys is surely expensive, but expensive in what? In natural resources or in worked hours q and hour of vehicle mandatory stops? If it's just in worked hours/maintenance time than in the aforementioned age of scarcity such cost does not matter much. Few marginal notes: - at page 77 the graph 5-35 show a curious cost per km change in late 2008, why? Is this due to aging or to purely economical factors like supply chain changes for spare parts, safety norms changes etc? - the ability to roll and change routes without capital infrastructure set up will be king is another complex beast: on scale that's the reason many researchers try to push naval and very-short-range aviation, from flying taxis to city-to-nearby-city small scale logistics: STOL/VTOL have almost the same industrial cost (beware, industrial not price tag on sale) than modern cars and vans, they cost more in opex but new physical road/rail infra development and regular maintenance/changes cost skyrocketing high capex for an uncertain future since they demand 10+y just to be finished on scale and they need 30-50+y to be paid back enough. At city scale though maintaining a complete coverage of a municipal aerial electrical grid for vehicles especially if we ALSO open if to future other transports (like food distribution logistic till even private cars) might be sustainable. Not in today economy, but in the new world one. In the end actual cities are not sustainable already, we figure out new smaller cities that look like much to small factories with workers inside also for this issue... - with actual battery chemistry we simply can't sustain a real BEV fleet, we can't produce enough batteries for a new FIRST generation of vehicles nor we know how to recycle them to having enough resources for the next generation in just 5-8 years. BEVs can be done for a small scale of private vehicles, mostly targeting wealthy people + some "glorified golf cart" [1] for specific short range usage... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-golf-carts-for-all https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-go...
- Galxeagle 4y ago
  I'm not a transit or budget costing expert, but I understand that trending increase around 2008 to be around warranty ("All vehicles... were off warranty coverage by 2010, explaining why costs rose over the five years"). re: your point on infrastructure, I think my argument would be that anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail, leaving electric buses like this relegated to distributed suburban areas. I actually think the future is the marriage of ride-hailing and public transit - fixed, schedule transit routes are from the 60's. I'm really excited by some of the experiments that dispatch buses based on app requests [1] It's a fair point around battery production - to complement your point, it's a well-known issue that Tesla remains primarily battery bottlenecked over anything else. I guess we're in an interesting conflict between what's best for society/environment (electrify asap) vs cities (best possible public transport), but personally I'd put stock in battery production scaling up faster than expected. https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/Conferences/2019/DRT/KenKoh.pdf https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/Conferences/2019/DRT/K...
  - kkfx 4y ago
    Warranty period might be a nice catch, thanks :-) > [...] anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail [...] Honestly I'm against public transport, ad I'm against actual/modern cities: yes, in actual cities we absolutely need public transport, especially in dense EU cities where moving by car is a nightmare, BUT if we see in the world the various "economic environments": - low density/low demographic areas are in mean underdeveloped and not very nice to live in, they tend to be poor areas for humans; - high density areas tend to be nightmares where some start fleeing not knowing much where to flee and with density issues that have surpassed the advantage of density economic booster and being dense haven't much room to evolve; - mid-density areas are middle ground, some are bad places some good ones, so looking at them I see a variety pattern: - areas dedicated to something in general do see a quick flourishing period than agony; - areas with a variety of activities and residential tend to prosper better than actual cities until density start to be high (in Riviera's terms). As a result I see the Riviera model the best we have at today technological level: TLCs and logistics make possible to be "near enough" to have the density economic advantage without being a city, so without the downsides of cities. Surely we can't develop anything with this model, mining, heavy mechanics, metallurgic industries etc can't exists in such models, they need to be districts, but also cities nor other solution work form them and pure districts, like suburbs does not work because they have no variety. We can sustain a failure of a dedicated-to-something district if the rest of the country is resilient and agile enough to evolve, like a riviera, we can't evolve cities, so we are not resilient nor agile with them... Long-story short in this present time I can't identify something stable enough for land-based networks, nor rails nor roads. Surely what's already build and still in a good shape can be used, but no investments in such infra seems to be a good enough one to my eyes... That's why I'm a partisan of aviation and naval, they still need infra, but such investments are cheaper if we remain at a certain scale so changes can happen with contained losses.

kkfx 4y ago

Thanks for the report, not so easy to source valuable information! I nevertheless object with a side reasoning: costs are complex beast, in an age of scarcity, where oil is pushed aside no matter if for good or bad reasons, how costs can change? I mean: maintaining an aerial network and relevant trolleys is surely expensive, but expensive in what? In natural resources or in worked hours q and hour of vehicle mandatory stops? If it's just in worked hours/maintenance time than in the aforementioned age of scarcity such cost does not matter much. Few marginal notes: - at page 77 the graph 5-35 show a curious cost per km change in late 2008, why? Is this due to aging or to purely economical factors like supply chain changes for spare parts, safety norms changes etc? - the ability to roll and change routes without capital infrastructure set up will be king is another complex beast: on scale that's the reason many researchers try to push naval and very-short-range aviation, from flying taxis to city-to-nearby-city small scale logistics: STOL/VTOL have almost the same industrial cost (beware, industrial not price tag on sale) than modern cars and vans, they cost more in opex but new physical road/rail infra development and regular maintenance/changes cost skyrocketing high capex for an uncertain future since they demand 10+y just to be finished on scale and they need 30-50+y to be paid back enough. At city scale though maintaining a complete coverage of a municipal aerial electrical grid for vehicles especially if we ALSO open if to future other transports (like food distribution logistic till even private cars) might be sustainable. Not in today economy, but in the new world one. In the end actual cities are not sustainable already, we figure out new smaller cities that look like much to small factories with workers inside also for this issue... - with actual battery chemistry we simply can't sustain a real BEV fleet, we can't produce enough batteries for a new FIRST generation of vehicles nor we know how to recycle them to having enough resources for the next generation in just 5-8 years. BEVs can be done for a small scale of private vehicles, mostly targeting wealthy people + some "glorified golf cart" [1] for specific short range usage... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-golf-carts-for-all https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-go...

Galxeagle 4y ago
I'm not a transit or budget costing expert, but I understand that trending increase around 2008 to be around warranty ("All vehicles... were off warranty coverage by 2010, explaining why costs rose over the five years"). re: your point on infrastructure, I think my argument would be that anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail, leaving electric buses like this relegated to distributed suburban areas. I actually think the future is the marriage of ride-hailing and public transit - fixed, schedule transit routes are from the 60's. I'm really excited by some of the experiments that dispatch buses based on app requests [1] It's a fair point around battery production - to complement your point, it's a well-known issue that Tesla remains primarily battery bottlenecked over anything else. I guess we're in an interesting conflict between what's best for society/environment (electrify asap) vs cities (best possible public transport), but personally I'd put stock in battery production scaling up faster than expected. https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/Conferences/2019/DRT/KenKoh.pdf https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/Conferences/2019/DRT/K...
- kkfx 4y ago
  Warranty period might be a nice catch, thanks :-) > [...] anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail [...] Honestly I'm against public transport, ad I'm against actual/modern cities: yes, in actual cities we absolutely need public transport, especially in dense EU cities where moving by car is a nightmare, BUT if we see in the world the various "economic environments": - low density/low demographic areas are in mean underdeveloped and not very nice to live in, they tend to be poor areas for humans; - high density areas tend to be nightmares where some start fleeing not knowing much where to flee and with density issues that have surpassed the advantage of density economic booster and being dense haven't much room to evolve; - mid-density areas are middle ground, some are bad places some good ones, so looking at them I see a variety pattern: - areas dedicated to something in general do see a quick flourishing period than agony; - areas with a variety of activities and residential tend to prosper better than actual cities until density start to be high (in Riviera's terms). As a result I see the Riviera model the best we have at today technological level: TLCs and logistics make possible to be "near enough" to have the density economic advantage without being a city, so without the downsides of cities. Surely we can't develop anything with this model, mining, heavy mechanics, metallurgic industries etc can't exists in such models, they need to be districts, but also cities nor other solution work form them and pure districts, like suburbs does not work because they have no variety. We can sustain a failure of a dedicated-to-something district if the rest of the country is resilient and agile enough to evolve, like a riviera, we can't evolve cities, so we are not resilient nor agile with them... Long-story short in this present time I can't identify something stable enough for land-based networks, nor rails nor roads. Surely what's already build and still in a good shape can be used, but no investments in such infra seems to be a good enough one to my eyes... That's why I'm a partisan of aviation and naval, they still need infra, but such investments are cheaper if we remain at a certain scale so changes can happen with contained losses.