8 ms·
EV self-driving shuttles you can take on demand so nobody needs to keep a car
by frankest 9mo ago
EV self-driving shuttles you can take on demand so nobody needs to keep a car
- milesskorpen 9mo agoEVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"
- amanaplanacanal 9mo agoHow do EVs help with congestion? They take up the same amount of space as an ICE car.
- crazygringo 9mo agoEV shuttles will come in lots of capacities. Vans, buses. But you won't need to worry about schedules or preset routes because it's all dynamic. Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.
- amanaplanacanal 9mo agoNone of what you are saying has anything to do with being an EV vehicle.
- crazygringo 9mo agoDerp. Quite right. For some reason I was thinking about self-driving instead...
- dzhiurgis 9mo agoThey can go into cheap, boring tunnels (little ventilation requirements)
- bmicraft 9mo agoThey can't (fire safety requirements make all tunnels expensive)
- milesskorpen 9mo agoI was thinking autonomy, but you're right for EV alone.
- d_sem 9mo agoelectric bicycles have significantly less tire waste.
- Ar-Curunir 9mo agoHow do EVs help with congestion
- Aloisius 9mo agoI thought the tire wear particulates being a huge source of particulate air emissions was an overestimate due to misunderstanding and misquotation of primary literature by secondary literature used by regulatory agencies. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792
- milesskorpen 9mo ago1/6 is a lot lower (good!) but is that sufficient to say they're not a large source of particulate air emissions?
- Aloisius 9mo agoWell, scanning an article on it for Manhattan, the fraction of "road dust" PM2.5 looks like somewhere around 2-5% depending on time of year, which is a bit below contributions by sea salt. From my limited reading, what fraction of road dust is from tire tread is unclear. The models trying to estimate it give anywhere numbers from 4 to 48%, but may be incorrect due to the citation problem above. Experiments seem to show 4-9%, but they have trouble excluding resuspended dust. I'd also point out that if we're worried about air quality in NYC between modes of transport, then one should look at subways since PM2.5 in stations/tubes is many times that of the street and far exceeds EPA limits.
- rcpt 9mo agoBraking dust is worse than tires, and EVs don't use brake pads nearly as much because they rely on regenerative braking.
- dangus 9mo agoOr, how about this, connect them together and put them on rails to reduce friction. You could even run them separate from the street with raised platforms for accessibility and sometimes even run them underground. We could call this something like “underway” or “steel beam connect-o-cars”
- rayiner 9mo agoNo, individualized point to point travel is better. I just got back from Tokyo and Taipei, which have transit systems better than any European country. And it was still faster to Uber everywhere.
- dangus 9mo agoAnd how much did that cost? You can get around Tokyo on the subway system for $5 for an entire day, and it's a profitable system that largely does not rely on taxpayer subsidy. And how fast would it be if Tokyo and Taipei's trains weren't handling 80% and 40% of trips, respectively? If you reduce Tokyo's 80% trip usage rate down to 5% like many American cities, that means for every other car on the road in Tokyo you'd now see 5 cars instead. How's that Uber ride looking now?
- amanaplanacanal 9mo agoOnly because most people were taking the train. If everybody was taking a car you would be at a stand still.
- rayiner 9mo agoOnly if you build the city like Tokyo instead of like Dallas. Average commute in Tokyo is 45 minutes to an hour one way: https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/2014/08/05/231455 https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/2014/08/05/231455. Average commute time in Dallas is 26 minutes one way: https://dallas.culturemap.com/news/city-life/dallas-suburb-stalled-by-3rd-worst-commute-in-the-u-s-report-says/ https://dallas.culturemap.com/news/city-life/dallas-suburb-s... I’m not aware of any transit-oriented city where average commute times are as low in absolute terms as in sprawling, car-dependent American cities. You just don’t like the aesthetics of that approach. I don’t either. But it’s an aesthetic critique at bottom.
- mmooss 9mo agoEV human-driven shuttles can do the same. Why do we need a robot for that?
- stouset 9mo agoEVs are just going to further escalate the race to the bottom with traffic that we’re already seeing with services like DoorDash. Driving down the marginal cost per hour to operate a vehicle on the road and removing humans who are averse to sitting in endless traffic is not going to result in the utopia people think it will.
- kmeisthax 9mo agoThis is a bad way to provide functioning public transit and a good way to enshittify car ownership. All the externalities of private vehicles with all the downsides of not owning your own mode of transportation.