Fine addition to the cityscape…
Taking up a half parking space a piece. Where is the chipwraper with its rigorous defence of the publics right to park, the kind of heroic defence it made for Lanark Road.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Cycling News
"Are Electric Cars the future of Low Carbon Transport?"
(677 posts)- Started 14 years ago by chdot
- Latest reply from Baldcyclist
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Posted 1 year ago #
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Gas stations are environmental liabilities and hugely expensive to remediate. Electric cars are making gas stations obsolete
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/21/gas-stations-us-cities-fuel-prices
Posted 1 year ago # -
This the future?
How much consultation went on before 1/2 a doz parking spaces were ‘lost’??
Posted 1 year ago # -
Ummm. Where else are you going to put them?
Posted 1 year ago # -
I think the point is more the hypocrisy - take away half a dozen parking spots to make parklets, or bike parking, or for extended pavements, or for street seating(hell, put street seating in period, look at that Cockburn Street nimby twitter cacking themselves in rage that people would *dare* to exist in the middle of a city past their 10pm bedtime) with less than five rounds of consultations with a functional "local street for local people" veto and certain politicos would be raising merry hell, but for this nary a peep.
It's certainly a good thing that they're on the street itself rather than cluttering the pavement though.
Posted 1 year ago # -
“Where else are you going to put them?“
Well I’m still trying to understand why CEC is facilitating (paying for??) pseudo petrol pumps while Shell is advertising on telly charging points on kerbside streetlamps - as seen in London for several years.
Posted 1 year ago # -
“I think the point is more the hypocrisy“
Not sure hypocrisy is the right word, but yes to the rest.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Not sure hypocrisy is the right word,
"Double standards"?
Posted 1 year ago # -
TYRE DUST: THE ‘STEALTH POLLUTANT’ THAT’S BECOMING A HUGE THREAT TO OCEAN LIFE
Runoff collected from roads kills salmon. Investigators test car tyre particles and find they killed fish.
Tyre-wear particles – a mixture of tyre fragments, including synthetic rubbers, fillers and softeners and road surface particles – are considered by environmental scientists to be one of the most significant sources of microplastics in the ocean.Created during acceleration and braking, they are dispersed from road surfaces by rainfall and wind. The main environmental pathway is from road run-off into storm drains, where they empty into rivers and the sea…
In 2017, a global model by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated tyre wear to be the second largest source of primary microplastics in the ocean, at 28%, after synthetic textile fibres, at 35%.
And, in 2019, a report by scientists across Europe concluded abrasion from car tyres was a large source of microplastics and possibly nanoplastics. While there remains a lack of data on risks to the environment and human health, the scientists concluded that if future emissions remain constant or increase “the ecological risks could be widespread within a century”…
Tyre-wear particles are ubiquitous. The average tyre loses 4kg over its lifetime. About 6m tonnes of tyre particles are emitted annually and have been found everywhere from the deep sea, to the atmosphere, even in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
And it is only going to get worse. Electric cars will lower tailpipe emissions, but tyre wear is projected to rise, due to heavier vehicles and torque (the rotational force of a car engine). The UK’s air quality group warned in 2019 that dust from tyres and car brakes would continue to pollute the air, rivers and ultimately the sea, even when the fleet has gone electric…
Siobhan Anderson, the co-founder and chief scientific officer of the Tyre Collective, a group of masters students who designed a device to collect microplastics directly from tyres, calls tyre dust “a stealth pollutant” because few people know about it. “There is very little public awareness,” said Anderson, whose organisation is in talks with Volvo and Seft about development of its device.
“Tyre wear is unique in that it can count as microplastic but it is also air pollution because it’s so small,” she said. “Anything that is 10 microns can be inhaled in our lungs and anything that is 2.5 microns has the potential to pass the membrane barrier,” Anderson said…
…[E]xperts are calling for more transparency from the tyre companies. It took decades for scientists to narrow down which chemical was causing the mass die-offs of coho salmon in Washington state.
“Very few people, except manufacturers, know what is in the tyres,”... “There are thousands upon thousands of chemicals. What happens if two of them get together? When it comes to microplastic, we don’t know what a safe level is and we may have already passed it.”
Posted 1 year ago # -
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July was a tougher month for electric cars. Sales of battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) across the UK grew 9.9% to 12,243, and accounted for 10.9% of overall car sales for the month. While this is the weakest monthly uplift in electric car sales since the pandemic, overall growth so far this year has reached 49.9%, equal to a 13.9% market share, illustrating the volatility in the supply chain.
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Posted 1 year ago # -
The problem with high efficiency (low internal resistance) cells is that the instantaneous short circuit/fault currents do not have the same limiting properties as the old lead-acid ones
A rechargable D cell can have a short circuit spike of at least 2000 Amps, and if cells are assembled in a battery, great care to prevent internal imbalanced circulation currents triggering heat & worse
The Yutong buses we have in Glasgow have the batteries in a sealed steel box pre-charged with nitrogen as a fire suppressing feature
Recent self immolation of Teslas, and Jaguars indicates that some mass produced products are less rigorously designed, and the Boeing 777 debacle (weight reduction option also reduced the battery containment & cooling - which had to be restored)
I'm just waiting for the reprise of the South Mimms bus depot fire that destroyed 8 buses, when a bus on charge went 'rogue' perhaps in a nearby basement car park where the developer has encroached on the access lane, making it impossible to get along it with a fire applianmce! (and with the oil-filled transformers of an 11KV substation compound in the car park as well)
Posted 1 year ago # -
A rechargable D cell can have a short circuit spike of at least 2000 Amps, and if cells are assembled in a battery, great care to prevent internal imbalanced circulation currents triggering heat & worse
A friend of mine once had a newly charged 7.2V battery for his R/C car self-destruct while it was in his pocket. I recall the yelp of surprise and the haste with which he extracted it and threw it on the ground. At the time these were the latest Sanyo NiCd sub-C cells which had high current deliverability, and you soldered them together yourself. He was highly adept at soldering, but the cells weren't necessarily matched during charging process (because those kind of chargers were really, really expensive) and if you were unlucky, polarity reversal occasionally occurred.
Posted 1 year ago # -
That madam is exactly what goes wrong!
Posted 1 year ago # -
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To be clear, despite the complexities, problems & grey areas that make electric vehicles much more complicated than the “silver bullets” many claim them to be, I DO support the replacement of ICE vehicles with EVs. It will take longer and be more complicated than boosters think.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1516824065121472514
Posted 1 year ago # -
Posted 1 year ago #
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Just listened to BBC morning phone-in on the topic of EV charging points. According to a BBC Scotland Disclosure survey 25% of chargers are not working here. (Official figure 2%).
I think but was mainly a chance for those with EVs to tell of their travails as they plan routes. Sometimes journeys north can take as long as public transport! Plus Perth and Kinross might stop giving free electricity at their charge points soon.
It's a disgrace! :-)
I did post on FB saying the real issue is how to get a 30% traffic reduction in cities and that using e-cargo bikes could work for EV owners that only do 30 miles a week. Debate is on Twitter too.
The host Kaye Adams was quite pro cycling once.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Of course (part of) the problem is that ‘we all’ ‘expect’ binaries
Cars v bikes
Bikes v pedestrians
Everyone v disabled
Etc v etc
AND expect these ‘divides’ to be equals requiring equal weighting and consequent ‘balance’.
But not before CONSULTATION - with ‘equal consideration’ given to all views…
Posted 1 year ago # -
BBC 1 8pm tonight
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Electric Cars - Ready for the Charge?
DisclosureSeries 5Electric cars are key to winning the fight against climate change. By 2030, there will be up to a million of them on Scotland’s roads - but can the current infrastructure cope with the demand?
Kevin Keane speaks to drivers across Scotland, struggling with an often broken and ageing system, and travels to Norway to speak to Morten Harket of A-ha to talk about how acts of civil disobedience led to Norway becoming the world leader in electric cars.
Release date: 02 November 2022
11 months left to watch
29 minutes“
Posted 1 year ago # -
Electric cars are key to keeping the automotive industry in business. They don't fix any of the other car-related problems...
Nope, not even pollution
Fixed that for you, BBC
(Also, God help us if people believe that "Electric cars are key to winning the fight against climate change")
Posted 1 year ago # -
I dare the BBC, STV or any other network to actually have a debate between the mobility tribes rather than a debate between those that have an EV or vested interest.
I accept that many will buy as these are marketed hard. Also accept that producing Urban Arrows etc has an environmental debt - we really need less of everything and make the most of what we've got.As noted this is all about the comfort of the few (globally).
Electric cars are key to winning the fight against climate change.
Does not apply to places in the world where infrastructure (such as it is) is being hit by floods and extreme heat (ie almost anywhere now) Norway does not welcome cars into its cities afaik. Also has superb public transport with rail fares cheaper than Scotland (Wouldn't be hard)
These debates are all silo 'thinking'. Cities should prioritise the hell out of public transport instead of spending millions beefing up the grid to make car use easier.
The 'folk' tales of how Morten Harket took his Electric Fiat Panda into Oslo without paying tolls are all very nice.
Those were the days when an EV didn't have to carry a household amount of power to move around!Posted 1 year ago # -
Electric vehicles will no longer be exempt from vehicle excise duty from April 2025, to make the motoring tax system “fairer”.
Interesting. There were rumours of road pricing too.
Posted 1 year ago # -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63660321
Spot all the references to 'road tax' paying for the upkeep of the roads.Posted 1 year ago #
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