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Yes, I remember when only a handful of people had the iPhone too. Why do we have these silly discussions? Six years ago Tesla was going out of business and th

Yes, I remember when only a handful of people had the iPhone too. Why do we have these silly discussions? Six years ago Tesla was going out of business and the stock price was going to tank. When that didn’t happen, we started having other silly conversations. If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air. Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States. https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-over-70000-electric-buses-almost-all-in-china/ https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-ov...

dr-detroit 4y ago
cnntth 4y ago
Transit companies get shafted in municipal budgets politically. Increasing ridership by increasing frequency (more drivers / more cheap diesel or lng buses) is a better investment of limited budgets than electrification. But also sometimes transit agencies just do dumb things (see, Boston de-electrifying a few bus lines).
- ryantgtg 4y ago
  > Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States. It's mostly because it takes 10-20 years to transition a transit agency to ZEBs. Many agencies in the US are in the process of doing this. The timeline is due to things like: - FTA monies used to purchase existing ICEBs require vehicles to be retained for their "useful life", which is often 12 years/500k miles; - Retrofits or rebuilds of bus garages take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The timeline is dependent on design + construction + utility requests (which alone can sometimes take 2-3 years); - Budgets! Along with that comes refactoring service, due to so many vehicle service blocks not being compatible with the ranges of current batter-electric bus technology.
vanilla_nut 4y ago
Half the people in New York City don't have a car at all. Adding more cars in dense downtowns is not a solution; cars on streets just don't scale to that density. New York City needs fewer cars, not more. Given the longevity of the modern ICE car (15-20 years) it's going to take a long time to replace existing ICE cars in NYC. In rural places, replacing ICE with electric is surely a good thing. In cities, we need to scale down car use significantly, while scaling up walkability, bikeability, and public transit. Even if we switched every car and every gas station over to electric today, we'd still have to burn insane amounts of coal and natural gas to power those cars -- not to mention the microplastic pollution generated by tires and roads that is actually made worse by the increased weight of electric vehicles. The solution is fewer cars, and those cars that can't be replaced by other modes of transit ought to be electrified.
- melling 4y ago
  You probably aren’t gonna believe this, but I never said, for the people that don’t have cars to go buy electric cars I simply meant replace all gas cars with electric, and we’d have cleaner air
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    Quote: > If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air. Apologies if I misunderstood you. But surely you can understand how this statement sounds as if you're talking about every person in those cities, not just the current ICE drivers.
    - melling 4y ago
      English can be ambiguous, especially when written quickly online. To pass the Turing test, a computer has to infer the missing context. For example, “is this human really saying the solution is for every human being to buy an electric car ” or is he implying that people should trade in their gasoline cars for electric ones? Statistically speaking, how often do people say everyone should buy an electric car, even if they don’t own or need a car?
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Agreed. I had email around 1991 (before we had DNS - we had some different weird address format ;-) when no-one knew what "the internet" is. People I told back than didn't understand the coming changes.
- jotm 4y ago
  I was an early adopter of "the Internet" in the 00s. Nowadays I'm "too old to know/use X/Y/Z". Damn kids, I helped build this sheet! :D

dr-detroit 4y ago

cnntth 4y ago

Transit companies get shafted in municipal budgets politically. Increasing ridership by increasing frequency (more drivers / more cheap diesel or lng buses) is a better investment of limited budgets than electrification. But also sometimes transit agencies just do dumb things (see, Boston de-electrifying a few bus lines).

ryantgtg 4y ago
> Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States. It's mostly because it takes 10-20 years to transition a transit agency to ZEBs. Many agencies in the US are in the process of doing this. The timeline is due to things like: - FTA monies used to purchase existing ICEBs require vehicles to be retained for their "useful life", which is often 12 years/500k miles; - Retrofits or rebuilds of bus garages take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The timeline is dependent on design + construction + utility requests (which alone can sometimes take 2-3 years); - Budgets! Along with that comes refactoring service, due to so many vehicle service blocks not being compatible with the ranges of current batter-electric bus technology.

vanilla_nut 4y ago

Half the people in New York City don't have a car at all. Adding more cars in dense downtowns is not a solution; cars on streets just don't scale to that density. New York City needs fewer cars, not more. Given the longevity of the modern ICE car (15-20 years) it's going to take a long time to replace existing ICE cars in NYC. In rural places, replacing ICE with electric is surely a good thing. In cities, we need to scale down car use significantly, while scaling up walkability, bikeability, and public transit. Even if we switched every car and every gas station over to electric today, we'd still have to burn insane amounts of coal and natural gas to power those cars -- not to mention the microplastic pollution generated by tires and roads that is actually made worse by the increased weight of electric vehicles. The solution is fewer cars, and those cars that can't be replaced by other modes of transit ought to be electrified.

melling 4y ago
You probably aren’t gonna believe this, but I never said, for the people that don’t have cars to go buy electric cars I simply meant replace all gas cars with electric, and we’d have cleaner air
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Quote: > If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air. Apologies if I misunderstood you. But surely you can understand how this statement sounds as if you're talking about every person in those cities, not just the current ICE drivers.
  - melling 4y ago
    English can be ambiguous, especially when written quickly online. To pass the Turing test, a computer has to infer the missing context. For example, “is this human really saying the solution is for every human being to buy an electric car ” or is he implying that people should trade in their gasoline cars for electric ones? Statistically speaking, how often do people say everyone should buy an electric car, even if they don’t own or need a car?

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Agreed. I had email around 1991 (before we had DNS - we had some different weird address format ;-) when no-one knew what "the internet" is. People I told back than didn't understand the coming changes.

jotm 4y ago
I was an early adopter of "the Internet" in the 00s. Nowadays I'm "too old to know/use X/Y/Z". Damn kids, I helped build this sheet! :D