Its almost like the answer isn't some whimsical butler just for you, but fucking public transportation. Build fucking trains.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Agreed. I love trains and it frustrates me to see them bungling the implementation. When they try, they always seem to make the same mistakes trying to bring it to my area.
To see meaningful ridership out here, the train needs to go fast enough to negate the penalty you get at the other end when you have to go from the station to your destination. They wanted to run them at ~55-70mph here, with a few stops between major cities, to parallel a freeway that is 65-75mph. Drive 1 hour (1:10 with parking) or spend 2 hours going to the station, riding a slow train, then going from the station to where you are going? I hate cars, but as someone who only gets a handful of hours to myself after sleep, work, and chores, I'm going to save my time and pick the car. If they ever build the train, as it is planned right now, it'll just be another commuter train that's only really used at rush hour when the roads are jammed rather than an all day all week car replacement solution that I can ride to Sunday night dinner at a friends house as easily as a 6am meeting.
/un-requested rant
@njordomir @Sanctus The safe money is it will also run too infrequently to be a good replacement. Adding 'time waiting for train' to the picture for trips outside of 6~9am or 3~7pm and officials wonder why services aren't well used.
Interestingly, a similar problem as with bike infrastructure. The infrastructure isn't useful until a lot of it is built and it connects everywhere (and timetables get shorter for trains). The infrastructure won't pass public opinion until it's proven to be useful to people. I will always vote yes on funding these projects even if I think they will bomb because it puts us a little closer to the peak of that hill. Its still frustrating though. We could easily do like we did with the freeways if we just decided it was worth building.
@njordomir But all of it is network effect in action: the incremental value of each piece is related to how many pieces already exist.
The worse part is, what infrastructure does get built isn't used because it's mostly useless, and people use this lack of use as justification for not building more.
My current push is bike infra for kids to get to school, parks, community centers and libraries. Roads aren't a safe for them and they can't drive themselves.
My city has been pushing through improving the biking infrastructure for a decade now.
People have been bitching about it from day one. They bitched even more as the first lanes were going in, as they were "useless" and went "nowhere"
They've continued to bitch about it every year, every construction project.
But now, we have a highly interconnected network of bike lanes (most protected) all around town and they're getting heavily used.
People still find reasons to bitch about it like it's slowing down traffic by narrowing roads or lost parking spots or whatever, but the "it's not useful" stuff has stopped.
Trams are the future!
Maybe build ebikes instead of EVs? Then you'd need about 1/50th to 1/100th the copper.
Yes, and also build trains instead of EVs
Trains don't even need batteries
Don't forget tramlines.
Metal Theft sector booming. Meth stocks are up.
They'll start mining landfill for metals and probably plastic soon enough. Air it out, wash it, get the metal and plastic, don't worry about that other in the air/water, that's a future poor person's problem.
metals, sure. The problem with plastics is that plastic is not plastic, it's a plethora of different chemical structures. Very difficult to recycle some of them, even if sorted.
"Recycling the plastic" in my tip-mine dystopia fantasy would be what they called burning plastic to fire the smelt to get the metals out. They're gonna burn rubbish for metal and market it as a good thing, someone will get paid a lot of money to think of a word like reclamation.
If it’s incinerated properly, burning the old plastic shouldn’t be much different from burning other hydrocarbons.
I’d rather they burned up plastics from landfills than coal, and probably oil and gas too really.
So it's time to a coup d'etat on Chile AGAIN!
Or more child slavery, maybe? Sorry, that is for batteries.
for god "Capital"
I always find it ironic that people with the most money are always the hungriest for it. Their entire lives revolve around it, and they are willing to pay any other price for it. They will kill ecosystems, pollute everything and even destroy societies for it.
Power does not corrupt, it only attracts the corrupted
No one uses pennies anymore… Just sayin’.
This can be improved if all vehicles moved to a full 48v architecture. Substantially less copper that way.
@NotMyOldRedditName @Hypx I'm not against it, but I didn't think most of the copper in a modern car / EV was in the LV supply wiring, so such a change would be more in the range of a 10% reduction?
It's somewhere between 100 and 150lbs saved per car.
There's a lot of copper in the wiring harness and it's most of the weight. It's also a reduction in the plastic around the wires, the other weight contributor.
Edit: For EVs anyway, my bad. Probably less copper in non evs, but still a lot.
@NotMyOldRedditName Are power carrying wires the bulk of the wires in a car?
And by power I mean more than 5W where wire gauges start to get serious at 12V. An indicator LED is technically needing power, but not enough that wire gauge bulks up.
Wiring harnesses from traditional automotive companies are quite long. This is quote from Ford's CEO
"“We didn’t know that our wiring harness for Mach-E was 1.6 kilometers longer than it needed to be. We didn’t know it’s 70 pounds heavier and that that’s [cost an extra] $300 a battery,”"
4km is normal
https://q5d.com/escalating-function-dilemma/
"Some modern vehicles contain close to 40 different harnesses, comprised of roughly 700 connectors and over 3000 wires. If taken apart and put into a continuous line, these wires would exceed a length of 2.5mi (4km) and weigh approximately 132lbs (60kg). Five years ago, vehicles had 25% less circuits than today’s cars. Five years from now, that number will increase by more than 30%. "
@NotMyOldRedditName yes, but that is tangential to my point (and your original point). The total length of wires doesn't tell you if they are power or data.
Fair, but you can't do 12v ethernet like they've done with 48v. The cables would be too big
So unlocking 48v allowed the change which allowed lesser cabling.
Tesla claims it's 77% cable reduction and 50% copper.
Edit: also Teslas wiring harnesses have been smaller than industry standard for years. If others made the switch and moved to an etherloop as well, the copper savings would be even bigger than what Tesla experienced.
Also just for reference, this is what Tesla's double redundant 48v etherloop cable looks like, instead of those chonky wiring harnesses
Edit: Just to clarify here, I think I made an assumption about the double redundancy. The cable runs in a loop around the car, and if any cable gets cut, it can still reach the component via the other direction (A<->B<->C<->A). I think I just assumed the 2 wires in the image were redundant. It could be that different data is flowing over both strands and those are not for redundancy. Maybe those are for each direction as well? One cable sends data around the car clockwise, the other counter clockwise?
Deploy the crackheads!