Peter Ladner writes in Business In Vancouver on the new mega-buck mega-bridge the Provincial Gov’t is about to install to replace the Massey Tunnel.
So here’s the thinking: traffic will grow in direct relation to population growth; people will continue to drive one-to-a-car; shared and self-driving cars are not a factor; building more capacity will solve congestion, and tolls won’t dent demand.
All of those statements are wrong.
Mr. Ladner’s arguement seems persuasive to me.
https://www.biv.com/article/2016/1/transportation-tunnel-vision-needs-21st-century-co/
This project was always about politics and nothing to do with anything based on logic outside of politics.
Well, it is political and ideological logic. ‘The province needs growth in the resource sector. Growth in the resource sector needs a big bridge. The province needs a big bridge’. The fact that the bridge is overdesigned is just a matter of it not being able to achieve a business case otherwise.
But even more fundamentally, the premier is indifferent to the well-being of the Lower Mainland or the long-term costs of greater sprawl and auto-dependency. She does care a great deal about the short-term returns to the resource sector in northern BC.
So when you consider these things, the Massey Bridge is a perfectly logical and rational decision on her part. And almost solely on her part.
True in her twisted logic, I guess it is logical
Driverless vehicles are a foregone conclusion in my mind. When the technology matures to the point that each vehicle can communicate with each other, the capacity gains on freeways and city streets will be huge. Just a doubling of capacity would render Vancouver’s Skytrain useless – even inbound into the downtown core where mode share between private vehicle and transit is split evenly.
Maybe people look at driverless technology the same way they look at global warming, they just can’t believe it’s happening… “it’s just God huggin’ us a little tighter”. So we’ll ignore driverless technology for now and spend billions on LRT and 10 lane bridges.
The good news in all this is that there will be lots of room for bike lanes.
“Just a doubling of [driverless car] capacity will render SkyTrain obsolete.”
Perhaps that’s a bit premature. The 40% of downtown residents who do not drive and walk to work / shop / services / amenities will not be rushing out to buy an autonomous vehicle or to share one. In this case, walking renders SkyTrain obsolete in downtown.
Energy and emissions must be accounted for. Today’s fleet of 1.4 million vehicles in the Metro burn around 6 million litres of petrol a day and emit 14 million kg of CO2. To convert the fossil fleet to EVs (whether autonomous or not) would require 5.8 megawatts of new electrical generation capacity a day. That’s another Site C.
The cost of road space must also be accounted for. Most commuters are the sole occupants of their vehicles, and there is no evidence that will change with driverless cars. Crowding SOVs into the existing road space by decreasing the space in between only preserves today’s ~250 square km of land devoted to public roads in the Metro. Car sharing autonomous vehicles to a greater degree may be possible, but by how much more? Ten percent? Fifteen? Thirty? No one has provided the research.
The best way to address decreasing road space expenses and emissions and increasing energy efficiency is to foster walkable communities. But that will not remove the need for decent transit between communities.
@MB – “Energy and emissions must be accounted for. Today’s fleet of 1.4 million vehicles in the Metro burn around 6 million litres of petrol a day and emit 14 million kg of CO2. To convert the fossil fleet to EVs (whether autonomous or not) would require 5.8 megawatts of new electrical generation capacity a day. That’s another Site C.”
When you give ev’s a fuel economy rating, they are rated at over 100 miles per gallon, or about 4 x better fuel economy than internal combustion vehicles. Have you taken that into account or can we divide that 6 million litres by 4, and divide the electrical grid consumption by 4?
The 666 megawatt figure I provided is comparing my existing PHEV running off of gas or electricity. A pure EV will be within 5% electrical efficiency.
The car gets 6.7l/100km on gas and 10kWh goes 56km when run as an EV. So, 10kWh is replacing 3.7l.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s enough electricity right now to recharge even 1.4 million electric cars. It’s the car chargers we have to look at. The information I could find on line are that they are 1300 watts (microwave 1000 watts, TV 100 watts, etc.). If you multiply 1300 watts per vehicle x 1.4 million vehicles all plugged in at the same time (which they never would be) = 1820 megawatts. I estimated from this CBC story…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-hydro-expects-near-record-electricity-demand-due-to-cold-snap-1.2856669
… that BC Hydro has the capacity to provide Metro Vancouver in excess of 5000 megawatts of electricity during peak demand periods during the day. If the city is drawing 5000 megawatts during the day, surely there is enough capacity overnight for the 1800 megawatts electric vehicles will require.
Except of course that you’re ignoring the difference between peak and average power output.
BC imports more power (at night) than we export (during the day) currently. Because power during the day is worth a lot more than at night, Hydro still makes money off it. There is plenty of capacity to transmit power at night to get electricity from somewhere to the charger, because no matter what the peak load needs to be the one that the transmission lines are built for.
The key here is the average power output. Since we’re already importing electricity (net), there isn’t more power out there unless we import it from Alberta, the US, or fire up the Burrard Thermal plant.
You can build as big of a generating station as you want, providing a huge peak power output. If that river system doesn’t have enough water to run the generators flat out all the time, then its going to have a significantly lower average output.
The average output of our dams are between 30-55% the peak output.
I also forgot to mention, car chargers can vary from 1kW (called Level 1 – meaning 120V) to 120kW (Level 3 rapid chargers).
6.6kW – 220V chargers are probably going to be the most common home chargers. That’s about the same as a stove or clothes dryer.
If everyone plugged in a Level 2 charger at the same time, brownouts would likely happen. So it’s likely that at some point Hydro will want to control car chargers.
To me it looks as if the grid could possibly manage to handle 1.4 million cars charging overnight, but that scenario is far from what realistically will happen.
The Chevy Bolt will go on sale in 2017 ($30 000 US after credits) and it will have a 320 km range. That’s about a weeks worth of driving, so a more likely scenario is that people will charge their car every 5 or 6 days or for a very short period every night. We will not even come close to everybody charging at the same time. If we have 20% of those 1.4 million cars charging simultaneously, that’s 280 000 x 3000 watts = 840 megawatts. If we’re averaging 2500 megawatts during the day, mustering up 840 overnight should be pretty easy. This is using a Chevy Bolt that is going to look like a crude piece of machinery in 20 years.
Keep in mind rising electricity rates, as we see for example in Ontario (more than twice as high as in BC) or in Germany (quintuple compared to here in BC, yes 5x) due to “green” energy schemes. That will dampen e-car demand even as they become more common, say 10-25% of new car sales in BC (or less than 10% in cold weather climates) due to lower prices and more efficient production and battery technilogy. Today they are barely 1%, despite hefty subsidies.
More on this here: http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/the-electric-car-is-dead-executed-by-al-gore-and-his-environmental-allies
A second reason is that both Toyota and Honda are working on fuel cell technologies that eliminate some of the major drawbacks of e-cars, namely range constraint due to excessive battery weight and technological limitations of energy density as well as long charge times.
More on fuel cell cars here, for example: http://news.yahoo.com/toyota-aims-nearly-eliminate-gasoline-cars-2050-073143003.html
So the e-car will not be the #1 selling vehicle type even in 2050.
I think Thomas you may be too bitten by very selective and ideological op-eds.
If you had done research on renewables like solar and wind you’d see how radically their cost has come down to the point where they are starting to compete with hydro and coal. Further, R&D has improved the technology (e.g. gearless wind turbines that take advantage of lower wind speeds). And renewables do not have to account for decades of fuel purchases at volatile prices.
Feed-in tariffs are highly political and some jurisdictions get them wrong. That doesn’t mean we’ll get $100 blueberries.
This from Alberta’s wind capital: http://lethbridgeherald.com/news/local-news/2016/01/18/wind-energy-has-issues/ .. i.e. we need base loads that even green countries like Denmark and Germany have in spades .. thus lots of additional costs to go “green” (unless you’re a bird of course, then red)
The Tesla’s nor the Chevy Volts nor the Nissan Leafs aren’t exactly flying off the shelf in cold nor warm weather climates for a reason. As usual, it usefulness is way WAY overblown, and its cost and disadvantageous downplayed. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-24/electric-car-sales-plunge-4-year-lows
Hybrids are the way to go (I drive one, by the way, uses 50% of the gasoline of our BMW we sold).
Self-driving: sign me up. I hate driving in traffic. Maybe by 2025 we have reliable options – by pressing a button in an average human-driven car – for the average human outside of California is a real world environment where it rains, is foggy, where it snows, with humans and bike on clogged intersections ..
The hydrogen economy is a dud in any place with enough electricity. It’s almost same as the electric economy but with the added step of having to generate hydrogen, store it, then convert it back into electricity. Every step loses efficiency.
For hydrogen cars to replace the equivalent electrical load in BC, you’d need another 50% more electricity on top of what the EV would use.
If you want a hydrogen fuel station, it costs millions. It’s explosive as hell, needs storage at immense pressure, it slowly leaks out of any container and interactions with hydrogen and steel cause steel embrittlement which is bad news all around. Trucks have to carry the stuff around to fuel stations, but at lower energy density than gasoline there would be way more of them. Most hydrogen is also formed from Natural Gas currently, so it’s also got a carbon emission aspect that EVs don’t.
If you want a EV charger, it’s $400-$1000. I could install one in a couple hours without breaking a sweat.
A bit more math.
One SkyTrain or Canada Line train can move about 300 people in vehicles that are less than 80m long. One “driverless train” of autonomous compact cars with one passenger and one metre spacing occupy 2,100m of road lane. Even with two passengers you are looking at a km of cars.
That road space is subsidized. Emissions are significant. Facts are important.
“Energy and emissions must be accounted for. Today’s fleet of 1.4 million vehicles in the Metro burn around 6 million litres of petrol a day and emit 14 million kg of CO2. To convert the fossil fleet to EVs (whether autonomous or not) would require 5.8 megawatts of new electrical generation capacity a day. That’s another Site C.”
Maybe put your math in easier terms. If every car in Metro Vancouver were converted to electrical, as a percentage, how much more electricity would Metro Vancouver consume?
Also keep in mind that the vast majority of charging would be done overnight when consumption is low.
Around Toronto the roads and the highways are crowded all day long. The massive trucks run all day and much of the night too. There are also hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks. This is also where many of these vehicles are made. The little cars will become electric first, then the trucks and later the massive ones. As this happens the consumption will be highest at night, when solar is dead.
It’s also one thing to tool around in a micro made for two, then another in a tractor trailer hauling tons of goods.
The Massey Bridge will be getting old before these fantasies become reality.
Meanwhile, the ALR in South Vancouver, Richmond and Delta will be saved as people are able to find homes beyond the restricted areas.
His math is wrong. Average power use to replace that much gas is 666 MW. Thats a bit more than Site C is project to use.
If you add that load to night time hours, say spread over 12 hours, that 1332 MW. More than the peak output of Site C.
6 MW is the peak output of 2-3 wind turbines.
“One SkyTrain or Canada Line train can move about 300 people in vehicles that are less than 80m long. One “driverless train” of autonomous compact cars with one passenger and one metre spacing occupy 2,100m of road lane. Even with two passengers you are looking at a km of cars.”
If we had only 69 km’s of road lane (the way Skytrain has 69 km’s of guideway), then we would have a problem. But we have 100’s of km’s of road lanes that driverless cars would use far more efficiently. Have a look at any intersection and you will see 1 car get through about every 2 seconds (per lane), and a lot of the time 1 car not paying attention holds up a slew of cars behind it. Driverless cars will react faster to the car in front of it, and as the technology matures, cars will move like a train. At least 6 x more vehicles will clear an intersection. Driverless vehicles need only be 2 x more efficient to eliminate public transit altogether.
You’ve made my point. Public transit requires orders of magnitude LESS public resources, including land. Added to that is an unmatched per capita efficiency in cost and energy.
The infrastructure is already in place. We won’t need more roads. In fact we will likely be able to reclaim roads for other uses, as well as acres and acres of parking lot.
I’m all for reclaiming a portion of the land currently devoted to roads, but the geometry of personal transport in any form is fundamentally different than for public transit and walking / cycling.
And such huge reductions in overall car travel projected for autonomous vehicles have yet to encounter human behaviour and employment realities head on. Most people who travel by car do not share with strangers. Most people who own cars will not sell and will not consider renting or sharing driverless Uber cars until their personal cars rust out. Most contractors driving cars and light trucks cannot share because of the conditions of their jobs.
You’ve also got some big commuting and transportation preference differences in small towns compared to the big city. And suburb-to-city differences in demand.
The geometry of commuting to the diffused destinations in lower density communities will place a larger demand on each autonomous car and make matching commutes harder. But yes, parking lots could disappear in significant quantities, and those who share regardless of technology will have far lower transportation expenses.
I can’t help but compare all this to my own experience when my commute was three minutes on foot door-to-desk. The money we saved over those three years was incredible and I had so much more spare time than most others in the large architecture firm …. when I wasn’t doing OT.
While I remain a supporter of driverless cars based simply on the reduction in fatalities and injuries we are likely to experience, I think a just-as-likely scenario with them is not more going through the same intersection, but rather the vehicles talking to each other and each one choosing a different street to travel on when that’s the faster solution to getting from point A to point B. One unintended consequence may well be higher volumes of vehicles on side streets (albeit abiding by speed limits unlike the present). So there may be a real impact on neighbourhoods.
I think the other issues we may well face is that they will actually promote suburban lifestyles, and employers will start to consider the commute as time when we should be working.
I think they (autonomous vehicles) are a net good, but there are definitely going to be some issues to address, esp. if the middle-class and above abandon any pretence of funding public transport because Johnny-Cab (de rigeur Total Recall reference) solves their individual commuting issues.
Good point re: charging times. Nonetheless, it’s still almost 6 MW of electricity used a day that is not currently being used. Even if you charge 2/3rds of the 1.4 million cars at night, that’s still 4 MW not being currently drawn at that time, and such an increase in demand may cause Hydro to raise the rates and propose new generating and transmission capacity.
This is touching on the subject of Net Energy. Fossil fuels give us a one-time endowment. When a litre of petrol is burned, it is gone forever. Cheap conventional oil peaked a decade ago, and today’s oil has a growing mixture of expensive oil (tar sands, shale, deep sea) that consumes far more energy (and finances) to exploit, and therein less energy is available to do the same work. This will be exacerbated when companies specializing in expensive unconventionals go bankrupt in today’s low price glut and the supply starts to crimp again in a few years. Substituting oil with renewables is very important, but some energy analysts believe highly versatile fossil fuels cannot be replaced 1:1 with diffuse electricity sources without major expenditures on new capacity. Some therefore talk of the potential for an energy deficit.
Enter conservation.
Here’s where I wish there was an editing function in this comments section.
Granted, charging EVs uses less energy than driving, and charging takes place over several hours, but I don’t have the differential number at hand. However, the 6 million MW of new electrical generating capacity still applies, as it is the sum of the energy used for charging and driving.
I think it’s reasonable to speculate that when companies like Uber switch over to driverless technology, car ownership will be pointless for most people (because the cost of Uber like services will be lower than the cost of car ownership), so the likely scenario is that the number of cars registered will fall dramatically. A few studies have shown that 1 driverless shared car can take the place of up to 10 vehicles. That would mean as little as 140 000 vehicles charging overnight. Even a reduction of only 50% would be significant.
Perhaps by 2050, 35 years from now. A car if acquired today will last 20 or more years, some 50 years, and we cannot expect they will all disappear and replaced with self driving e-cars in a few years. E-cars have been around 5+ years and only 1% of cars sold today are electric. yes, 1% ! See here, for example: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/why-cheap-gasoline-is-a-setback-for-going-green/article28225306/ Why is that if they are so great. Less in cold climates.
I can just see the debate over “how long a wait time do we allow for free on XYZ street, or on choke points like airports or major office towers?”.
How do you find the car once you exit the subway at, say Broadway @ Cambie or the last stop at 10 pm in Surrey and 25 people wish to get their driverless car ? 25 cars wait where ? For free ? or at 5 cents a minute ? Not as easily solvable ! Will we have first class waiting areas, with red carpets, for a $4 surcharge, covered and heated in cold climates ?
Like most new technologies, say the cell phone, it will take 40-50 years for widespread use by common folk. The cell phone in principle existed in the 1970s ! Some business people used them in the 1980s, over 30 (!!) years ago, and only in the late 1990s were they truly affordable, but text based, replacing pagers. Smart phones haven’t been around even a decade yet. I used to develop SW for the PalmPilot. Where is that ?
I think we might even see MORE cars as we enable a whole new group of folks to use a car: the disabled, seniors and those under 18. Mix in a few 1965 vintage Fords and Mercedes cars and the spacing at intersection won’t be quite so tight as we could if they were all 2030s technology. The future will be exciting, but it ain’t change overnight. Bit by bit. That is why we need new road and bridge/tunnel infrastructure now. Massey replacement is the right move for the next 20-30 years.
Perhaps by 2030 they will have a dedicated self-driving high-speed lane @ 180 km/h while the mere mortals can go only 80 km/h. We shall see.
That is not what the experts are predicting. Self driving car adoption will be a lot faster than cell phone adoption.
I don’t know if you take advantage of car sharing services currently available Mr Beyer, but I can tell you from personal experience that I find there is almost always one available to me when I need it, and that likelihood increases in the late evening and early morning. Peak times are the hardest to find one. When almost all cars are part of that sharing landscape, I imagine there will almost always be one near to a Skytrain station or other high demand locale.
I pass by Joyce Station roughly 5 days a week and there is generally always one or more Car2Gos/Evo cars available. I see the same availability generally at the nodes at Stadium Skytrain, Granville Island, and even in my car-focused neighbourhood of Renfrew/Collingwood.
Even at this early stage of adoption it seems a pretty robust system, although Car2Go did announce today they were backing away from having a Richmond home area, ironically for this conversation because they were sitting unused too much.
Indeed I use Car2Go a fair bit, and now Evo as the Car2Go experience is one of pure utilitarian simpleness, golf cart like. People actually buy this kind of “car” ? Yes it gets you from A to B but that’s about it. No joy, no Fahrvergnügen. Evo’s Prius is more fun to drive, but indeed there are far fewer of them. Whenever both are close by I use Evo now. Same price, more joy, more Fahrvergnügen.
What I was actually referring to was the issue that many people, say 25 exited the subway station wanting to use a self-driving vehicle, and 20 drive up. Which one is mine ? How long are they allowed to wait at the curb, for free ? What is the curb allows only 7 vehicles, where do the other 18 idle, and then pull in, in what order ?
Life and driving a car is so much more than getting from A to B. The process of it, the joy, the excitement of it, matters.
Public Transit, and now Car2Go, reminds of communism: one size fits all. Grey coats. Who needs colour ?
Regarding queuing and short supply, patterns and trends will emerge, the system can adapt. As an example, if 25 people reserve for a location and only 20 cars are available, driverless cars can shuttle themselves to where they are needed. Regarding the joy of the open road excitment, that’s not an urban experience. The guy who yelled “F*cking Moron!!!” at the car in front of him for not getting through left turn on yellow, then had to sheepishly raise a hand in the unverisal signal of apology and ‘don’t worry I’m not psycho’ to me as I walked in front of his car at King Ed and Fraser on Sunday night isn’t have a good time behind the wheel. Life is too short to pin happiness on a car. That’s a marketing trope, not reality. For real joy while travelling we will always have the bicycle 🙂
@ Chris Keam
“Life is too short to pin happiness on a car.”
LOL!
@ Chris Keam
“Life is too short to pin happiness on a car.”
Thats fantastic!
Your math is less than useless. You need to learn the difference between kW and kWh to talk about power. kW is like horsepower it’s instantaneous, kWh is an amount of energy.
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Answer:
Based on the power usage from my electric car (2012 Volt) 6,000,000L/day (your figure) of gas needs 15.98 GWh/day to replace it. That’s a steady load of 666 MW. Site C will make 571MW average, 1100MW peak.
Electric cars for Vancouver therefore = about 1 Site C. Demand will vary over the time of day, averages are far more useful.
For reference, your figure of 6 MW is two wind turbines worth of power.
Of note, EVs will replace less efficient vehicles, so this figure may be a bit less. My comparison was my Volt against itself running on gas.
Ok, so my math on electricity is off. That will be corrected soon enough. Still, even you admit the theoretical conversion of the Metro’s 1.4 million unit fossil fleet to renewable power will cost one additional Site C dam (or equivalent). I have not seen any interest from BC Hydro to build their own wind and solar farms, and there is not a lot of chatter about providing feed-in tariffs for grid-connected intermittent sources like independent wind and solar at either the large farm scale or on individual rooftops.
The issue of maintaining such a vast, public road network for private transport remains, as does the cost of accidents and healthcare. At a minimum, our road networks occupy 30% of a city’s land area, often 40+% in the suburbs. I am admittedly better at land planning than calculating electrical demand, and devoting around 300 square km of taxpayer-owned and maintained land in the Metro to low value asphalt does seem just a tiny bit wasteful. Commercial and public transport need only a fraction of that road space.
Perhaps driverless EVs will help address this distinctly 20th Century paradigm, but I don’t see them mobilizing even a fraction of the per capita efficiencies of transit, or driving, so to speak, away from designing our cities for cars instead of for human beings.
For now…
BC Hydro should be able to wind better than almost any other big utilty around on the sole virtue of being able to turn the hydro dams on and off to suit demand.
They say Site C is their last big project unless they move up to the Liard. They’ll be looking for stuff to do after Site C is done. I’d suggest geothermal under Mt. Meagre.
The area near Vancouver is just about the last place that solar or wind will be economical. It’s not windy, it’s not sunny and power is very cheap.
Forgot to mention, driverless cars will use similar, if not higher levels of power. If they’re fully automated they will deadhead, which means they’ll drive farther.
Oh gawd, please don’t dam the Liard too!
I agree that geothermal could have very significant potential in BC, perhaps to a high enough level that Hydro needn’t consider any more dams or forking out higher prices for private run-of-river. Then there is the wind potential off northern Vancouver Island and pretty much anywhere land meets the ocean, considering the advances in technology that enable tapping lower wind speeds and decreasing maintenance with gearless drives. Of course there is also tidal. And 90% solar during summer and 50% in winter.
Considering the potential, why we remain so addicted to fossil fuels is a mystery. Buying political policy does have something to do with it, I’m sure.
Just like the Port Mann bridge the new Massey Bridge is vital national infrastructure for Hwy 1 and/or Hwy 99/US Interstate-5 across the nation, east-west or in Massey’s case, north-south. The tunnel, as the PM bridge, are not just for people but also for major goods movement to interior BC, Alberta and further east, and to/from the US, from 30+ ports in MetroVan and an area where 2/3s of BC lives or soon will live. Connecting to the far too small South Fraser Perimeter Road is vital, too.
While 10 lanes today is certainly overkill, in 25 years it will be heralded as visionary, and in 2020 SFPR as too small. SFPR already has traffic jams on its intersections. Massey bridge is a project just like XL, Kinder Morgan twinning, Northern Gateway or Energy East oil pipeline: a no-brainer. Common sense vital for national and international commerce and growth.
Yes, we need more bike lanes and more public transit in MetroVan, especially RAPID transit, but we also need car and truck corridors in a region that is Canada’s ONLY major Pacific port and where today 3M and soon 5M people will live.
Yes, driverless cars will come, perhaps as optional features in 2020, like air conditioning in the 1980s or NAV systems in the 2000s, then more commonplace, then mandatory, say by 2040. A car acquired today will last at least 20 years. As we see from the very tepid e-car purchase of not even 1% of new sales, we can’t argue just because technology is “here” it will be widespread. Yes, landlines declined in use, but still people have them despite cell phones being ubiquitous. Many people have LED TV screens but other technologies from the 1970s are still used today.
Just like the horse in the 1800s or earlier, individual transportation options will always be sought by those that want independence and can afford it. The individual car will not go away. Yes, it might be electric or hybrid (I drive, btw) or self-driving even, but not everyone wishes to share a ride with strangers or share a car.
Perhaps this on top (or hanging below) would have been really visionary, an elevated magnetic levitation rapid transit system, green & fast: http://www.skytran.us but a retrofit is an option as it is light-weight !
As a side note, the 10 lanes is really 8 lanes, as 2 of the lanes are climbing lanes for trucks (i.e. the bridge is a big hill) and most drivers will refuse to drive behind slow moving trucks.
If the situation of the Pattullo is any guide, you won’t see many trucks on the new bridge due to tolls. That’s why I don’t understand the argument about “moving goods faster”. So many big trucks idle away happily waiting to get on the Pattullo bridge, rather than paying the toll. Likewise, most trucks will divert to the Alex Fraser.
Toll them all, problem solved.
Politically that will never happen as much as informed people from the left and right want it.
How many electric cars in cold Canada? ie, east of Coquitlam to St. John’s. Almost none!
If this new government has the success of the Obama administration, it’s worth considering the success of this president that considers moving to renewable energy essential in saving the planet itself. Under President Obama the automobile industry has hired 600,000 new workers and 2015 was the highest sales year ever for cars and light trucks.
Here’s some advice. Get rich and buy a Tesla. The rebates are no brainers. Or, buy that car or truck you’ve always wanted. Nothing is going to change much for decades. Cruising over the Massey Bridge in a convertible on a great warm day will be one of those awesome west coast experiences.
Simple. Vehicle sales and km travelled were going down when the price of oil was higher. They are increasing as the price of oil decreases. Oil has only been low enough to make a difference for a year. The price will go up again soon enough. It always does. And sales + VKT will plummet again.
Looking at the historic price swings for this commodity makes one dizzy.
There aren’t any Nissan Leafs or even Teslas in Ontario. It’s too cold for the batteries.
These dreams are fourth or fifth years away.
There’s nearly 3000 battery electric vehicles in Ontario according to these numbers.
“Quebec continues to be the dominant province for plug-ins, with 45% of all plug-ins in Canada residing in La Belle Province. 19 out of every 20 plug-ins in Canada are in either Quebec, Ontario, or British Columbia. Plug-ins have now been registered in every province or territory with the exception of Nunavut. Nunavut has a few hybrids, so we expect some vehicle with a plug to land there shortly.”
I’m under the impression Quebec is not noticeably warmer than Ontario. Can I ask where you got your information?
http://www.fleetcarma.com/electric-vehicle-sales-canada-june-2015/
Well yes Chris. Just drive around for a day or two and keep your eyes open. Duh!
I think you may have misspelled ‘I regret the error’
With over 32 Million vehicles, just cars and light trucks, in Canada, we clearly see that, even though the poor subsidize the rich that can afford a pricey electric vehicle, they are still less than .001 %.
it’s the price of battery packs that are holding electric cars back, but prices have dropped quite a bit in the last few years. Reportedly, in 2020 – 21, the price of batteries will be at the tipping point for mass acceptance of electric cars.
It is also about sheer physics. Gasoline or similar oil based products like diesel or kerosene have very high energy density, i.e. energy per kg of weight, quintuple to 20 fold that of batteries. That is why e-car use will be constrained for short urban trips. Also, like VW’s allegedly clean diesel, much cheating on distance is done by e-car manufacturers as the distance shown is for a lightweight passenger, in ideal weather. Turn on A/C in hot weather or the electric heater in cold climates, plus luggage or 2-3 passengers and distance drops 70%.
Will we see more, smaller e-cars in cities: absolutely, but often as a second vehicle for those that want to buy themselves a greener conscience, i.e. those that can afford two ( or often three) cars. The soccer mom with teenage kids, the folks who regularly drive to Kelowna to visit family, the truckers or bus drivers with e-vehicles will be a long long time away, if ever due to sheer physics, and cost.
E-ships and e-planes: likely never.
“Likely never” pronouncements are disproven so regularly that such assertions can only reduce your credibility Mr Beyer.
“Norway is moving ahead with plans to construct a fleet of plug-in hybrid ships to service its marine industries. In a joint program with the Norwegian government, Oslo-based DNV GL recently launched the Green Coastal Shipping Program, which aims to create the most environmentally friendly vessels in the world. The ships will use LNG and batteries as energy sources.”
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/10/26/norway-plans-to-construct-a-fleet-of-plug-in-hybrid-ships/
One doubts this is the ne plus ultra in their exploration of the possibilities, and the history of technology is one of unforeseen advances become commonplace.
Just a reminder… the Chevy Volt was built and tested in Michigan. It works just fine there. Sometimes the gas engine turns on it my car for a couple minutes to warm up the batteries, but if an EV is plugged in it generally “conditions” the battery by keeping it warm for use.
Thomas: “It is also about sheer physics….”
Surely you didn’t miss the recent conference in Paris, where a decision was reached to start the move away from fossil fuels. You seem to be saying it is impossible because it is all just too hard. Or that we could give up on all forms of powered transportation. The alternative is to start figuring out how to actually accomplish this move, and it starts with recognizing that we have a lot of the pieces of the puzzle already.
You say that e buses will be a long ways away, conveniently ignoring the fleet of 250 or so electric trolley buses operating in Vancouver. And why couldn’t that technology be applied to trucks for longer distances? With battery power for end of trip manoeuvering?
You have a similar lack of acknowledgement of solutions to cold weather operation of battery powered vehicles. Heat the batteries in winter, cool them in summer, to maintain range. Don’t try and heat the air in the cabin so much, heat the seats. Tesla figured this out with their sub zero option package. Owners in Norway report it works great.
I don’t think it is about sheet physics, it is about resistance to change.
Indeed. Grid-powered trains exist in every Canadian city, and freight rail in Europe largely runs off catenaries. There is no reason grid-powered trucks couldn’t too eventually.
This was discussed in a book that came out a few years back called “Transport Revolutions” that was co-authored by SFU’s Anthony Perl.
Thomas: “E-ships and e-planes: likely never.”
Electric flight comes to Neverland in 2015:
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/electric-planes-usher-second-great-age-aviation/
Electric ships? Somebody better tell all those submarine captains and navies around the world that their boats aren’t actually electric powered.
It seems that the people working on introducing electric pleasure craft based on Tesla battery packs didn’t get the “no e boats” memo either.
Electric ships are here already. And a BC company is behind it no less.
… too bad they’re going to be used in Norway.
http://www.timescolonist.com/news/b-c/electric-ferry-jolts-discussion-over-powering-ships-in-b-c-1.1782869
Awesome. I learned something. Like e-cars, ideal for short distances, like Norway’s fjord crossing. So perhaps useful for the Campbell River-Quadra Island, or Horseshoe Bay – Bowen Island or Gibson run.
I was thinking more long distance cargo ships, as depicted here, for example. Zoom into Baltic Sea or traffic in North Sea to UK from Mainland Europe or to any port in Asia: http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:30/centery:3/zoom:3 I am wondering how many of these tens of thousands of larger boats will be electric in 10 years ? 0.1% ? in 20 ? 1% perhaps ? in 30 ? 2% ? in 50 ? 5% ? in 100 ? 15? The Paris hot air talkfest will not change that.
E-Buses, e-trucks, e-trains, yes that is all feasible and done or can be be done with an overhead wire. One wonders about cost as in Vancouver I do not see very many routes. Whistler recently shutdown their hydrogen fuel bus experiment due to cost. Would citizens accept the $5 bus fare if they were all electric ? Would Europe convert all their highways so trucks and buses can tap into an overhead wire ? Technically likely feasible, but at what cost ?
Think energy density for long distance trucks, cars, buses, ships, planes, … motorcycles and mopeds even. Sheer physics indeed. Many articles on this topic of energy density, for example here http://www.science20.com/science_20/energy_density_why_gasoline_here_stay-91403
Hybrids make far more sense, and that is why I drive one because I am a practical environmentalist, not a fanatic like so many.
Of all the arguments about helmet use discouraging, the idea that the sight of a helmet scares potential riders is the most ludicrous. Do these same people quiver in fear when they board BC Ferries and see lifeboats and life vests? Do they squeal in terror when they board a plane and hear the safety announcement (oxygen mask-get me outta here, this thing’s a death trap)?
um, have you heard of fear of flying? Yes, I think many do.
Its not like the fear argument comes out of the blue, they actually have done studies of what people think vs anecdotal opinion of what seems ludicrous.
Just like it seems ridiculous that drivers would pass closer to helmeted riders, or give people appearing to be female more room … and yet, they do.
Real life is so much more complicated than idea life eh?
Also have you ever tried to convince your significant other who is female to put on a helmet after they just have done their hair?
its hard enough to convince myself after I’ve done my hair! 🙂
Statistically speaking, a full face helmet is the appropriate headgear for motor vehicles. Given the prevalence of neck and spine injuries a horse collar such as worn by race drivers and downhill mountain bikers et al would also be a sensible precaution. Since one is suiting up, a Nomex fire-protection suit might as well go in the mix. If motorists actually had to wear the appropriate clothing for worst case scenarios (as is expected for cyclists and pedestrians) I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if many people came to realize the potential dangers and had it colour their thinking.
Will driver-less cars be used to get out of Metro Vancouver, to the BC Interior or even just the backcountry beyond Chilliwack or Pemberton? Can they handle logging roads?
Tesla cars can remotely come to you on your private road, and I am sure a lot of private roads are not paved. So the answer is they probably already can, and if not they will soon.