No petrol/diesel cars post 2035 !

[asperity]

Bill, the timetable screens at each bus stop was a good idea, but poorly implemented and badly maintained. Useless in other words.

[Davy51]

I think the live data finishes at the borough boundaries. Where i get on in Crow Lane we are on Merseytravel bus shelters where you are lucky if no one has either pinched or smashed the glass & there is no electronic wizardry. I think what cocks the 22/22a up now though is that it runs through to Ashton in Makerfield then ,at 7 pm turns into a Wigan/Warrington service. I think i'll take the car next time.

[Bill]

Those electronic devices at the bus stops were always going to be a prime target for the vandals so it makes sense to use an Uber style mobile app where the only hardware used is the customers own mobile phone. The way I see it is that a bus is not that much different to a taxi so I can’t understand why the council don’t just use an off the shelf taxi system that will probably give them everything they need.

I think the council run about a hundred busses?? The total initial cost for a taxi company with a hundred cars, including the custom app design would be about £15k worst case. After that, the airtime and service charges would be about £700 a month, again worst case. We’ve produced these systems here in Warrington for twenty odd years and they’re good.

I’m not trying to sell anything here BTW I’m just trying to show what’s possible using proven technology especially when it’s priced to sell in a none publicly funded market.  

 

Bill

[Evil Sid]

If they went that way bill they would have to tender and knowing warrington council they would go for the most expensive bespoke option that would fail after three weeks and then spend more money trying to cobble together a fix for the next two years before giving up....🤭

You also have to consider Luddites like me who do not have a smart phone.

I personally have no use for a smart phone and given the problems that some people i know go through with them, do not want one until it is absolutely necessary for me to get one and even then i would want a dual sim one, which you can get but not that many at present.

 

[asperity]

There are timetables at most bus stops anyway. Yhe advantage of an app is that you can find out the expected time of the next bus without having to walk to the bus stop only to find you missed your bus by 2 minutes.

[Confused52]

Gents, there is a new regulation requiring that all bus companies provide real time location data. I think that it mandates the use of a European standard which many companies including Arriva I think use. There was a very similar system run by Traveline, which is part funded by WBC and uses standard specified by the DfT. You can see this at traveline.info looking at live times. WBT do provide data for this service bu not all the buses are fitted.

The GPS system on buses appears to be linked to the ticket machines and there are replacement cycles associated not just with GPS but also the ticket prices since they automatically change the Fare Stage during the journey. This makes replacing earlier than needed very expensive and may not be economic. I know that TfL buses uses sms to give out their location but I suspect that others including WBT may use their PMR system instead. The location data from the server side can feed the web servers and the local displays at bus stops and that is already done. If WBT do use PMR it might be that they cannot track their bus outside the coverage area.

Anyway it is a bit more complicated than the excellent despatcher/location systems used on taxis even though there are many similarities.

[Bill]

Sid. That’s true, and ironically in this case the tender process would probably cost a lot more than the total system. Given our taxi systems work with between 1 to 1000 vehicles, the council could just take one unit on a try before you buy basis so there’s no financial risk. I doubt any of the companies offering mega expensive tailor-made solutions could do this. To test the system, all that’s needed is to simply put a single modified mobile phone in a bus.

As for not having smart phone, well you can’t win them all. I suppose It could be done by text or IVR but without GPS location, the customers would have to enter a bus stop number, then the system could either text or speak back the waiting time. We process hundreds of thousands of these types of calls every single week in the taxi trade, so this isn’t pie in the sky stuff.

 

Bill

 

[Bill]

Confused.

There are many similarities, but I believe that the taxi trade is far more demanding in what they expect a system to be able to do and how much they should pay for it.

We started off manufacturing PMR based data terminals back in the early nineties but now it’s 100% internet based which has made life so much easier for us. No more scuffed knees and bleeding knuckles from installing hardware into to impossible locations, we simply give the driver a pre-programmed dual sim smartphone that talks to peripherals via Bluetooth. The smart-phone performs meter functions, accept payments and print out receipts etc as well as being a communication device.

Over the years, we’ve been approached by multiple businesses, each with their own slightly unique needs however, experience has taught us that getting involved usually ends up with projects that start off simple then end up growing like Topsy. So by not spreading the net too wide and focusing on a specific task we become better at doing  what we do.

While I reckon that letting the people of Warrington know when the next bus is going to turn up would be a piece of cake, I doubt that I or my work colleagues would really want the hassle of dealing with endless committees, each of which making up it's own rules as it goes along. 

Food for thought though.

 

Bill

[asperity]

When you find a bus stop with an electronic timetable that's actually working, there's nothing so frustrating as to watch the bus you're waiting for disappear off the list when the arrival time comes and goes but the bus doesn't.

[Observer II]

Self isolate - use the car !

[Davy51]

I war reading an article a couple of days ago that suggested motorways & electric cars are not really compatible. It said electric cars tend to just stop & have no freewheeling ability to get out of traffic & sometimes can't be pushed or towed.

[Evil Sid]

Can't be jump started either if the battery flat....🤣

Can't even be moved by rescue services after an accident until a skilled technician has declared the car safe from shock hazards or leaking batteries and all the electrics have been isolated.

Don't know how you would go if it caught fire, dry powder or CO2 extinguisher i suppose. Water would definitely be a no no.......🌊..⚡⚡⚡...☠️

[Bill]

Well at least with no petrol there’s no chance of a petrol tank explosion so not quite as big an issue.  As for the breaking down, well there’s no complex engine to go wrong so in theory they shouldn’t conk out anywhere near as much as a conventional car.

Looks like the AA who rely on breakdowns will need to change their plans.

 

Bill

[Davy51]

4 hours ago, Evil Sid said:

Can't be jump started either if the battery flat....🤣

Can't even be moved by rescue services after an accident until a skilled technician has declared the car safe from shock hazards or leaking batteries and all the electrics have been isolated.

Don't know how you would go if it caught fire, dry powder or CO2 extinguisher i suppose. Water would definitely be a no no.......🌊..⚡⚡⚡...☠️

You could always self extinguish the fire Sid & get an Afro at the same time.

You would imagine though that recovery could cause major hold ups on motorways & busy roads.

[Evil Sid]

If the car is on fire i exit via the quickest route and stand and watch. it is insured after all.

It does because of the fact that an electric car has to be made safe by a competent person.

watched an episode of the the A1/m1 and they came across an electric car that had been in a shunt. it took four hours to get somebody down to check it over before they could move it.

Not easy to get somebody to leave a warm dry bed and drive several miles in the cold wet and dark conditions to isolate car electrics.

[Bill]

I’m pretty sure that electric cars would have an automatic cut off device like that of a conventional car that in the event of an accident would automatically disconnect all the higher voltages.  But as you can’t see electricity, anyone dealing with a crash situation would need to understand the risks involved and take the necessary safety measures. More and more cars are going this way so the emergency services and breakdown people will obviously need to be trained to deal with this rather than calling out an expert every time.

 

Bill

[Confused52]

1 hour ago, Bill said:

I’m pretty sure that electric cars would have an automatic cut off device like that of a conventional car that in the event of an accident would automatically disconnect all the higher voltages.  But as you can’t see electricity, anyone dealing with a crash situation would need to understand the risks involved and take the necessary safety measures. More and more cars are going this way so the emergency services and breakdown people will obviously need to be trained to deal with this rather than calling out an expert every time.

 

Bill

Bill,

It seems to be a design problem. Electrical hazards should be designed with an electrical isolation switch which the Fire Service can activate in a mechanical, and hence guaranteed, manner, if necessary with the aid of a Fire Axe. It needs to be the same on every car and its location approved and signed, then it might work. I would be surprised if the EU has not already proposed such a thing to the UN car standards body.

[Bill]

That’d make sense, a big on/off switch a bit like the emergency cut off switches you see on busses.

I think the batteries at several hundred volts would still be risky so maybe the battery manufacturers need to do something similar to reduces the voltage down in an emergency. From what I’ve read, the batteries in formula 1 cars run at 1Kv+ which is about four times the voltage of a standard road car and it’s expected that in future most cars will follow this trend.

I think the logic is that higher voltages don't need expensive, heavy lossy conductors thereby increasing overall efficiency.

Maybe they could make the voltages more extreme and that way we could power the car from static electricity! 

 

Bill

[Evil Sid]

As long as the car has non conductive construction then it will be safe-ish. (apart from being hit with a fireman's metal axe that is.)

However, any bit of metal that shorts the batteries out could be fatal or lead to a fire.

Not so bad with just one battery as on petrol and diesel cars which have a small 12v battery but an electric vehicle must have a lot more oomph in the battery pack. all electric having around 400v to 800v batteries..

Having had a jolt or two from a 12 volt i would not even like to contemplate getting one from one of those 400 or 800 volt ones. even motorbike batteries can give you a nasty kick if you happen to short one out on the frame whilst trying to disconnect it..........⚡..🤬

[Observer II]

Where's all this "electricity" coming from to power this carbon free future ?

[Davy51]

I was listening to a political programme at dinner time & apparently computer technology takes care of 10 to 15% of carbon emissions & this could easily rise to 20%.

[Observer II]

That was the piece that prompted my question Dave - if we tot up all the things we use energy for, especially in the carbon free future, where's all this energy going to come from, cos frankly I can't see renewables doing it.

[Bazj]

The last I heard, the classic car industry is worth over £6 billion to the UK economy, and probably ten times that to the US economy, so hardly an amount of money to let drift away with these nonsensical electric cars.

For a start, as someone said, there aren't enough charging points. There isn't enough capacity to cope with an equivalent number of electric cars to the fuelled ones we have now, not by a long long stretch.... People won't use buses, especially if Warringtons are anything to go by, 10 times over priced and just not convenient and they are unreliable 

 

If the governments around the world are really going to get people to switch or change habits, the car companies are going to have to come up with a large family car that can fully charge in less than half an hour and have a range of about 500 miles per charge... otherwise the technology is doomed to abject failure

[Evil Sid]

Have they got round to making electric tractors and combine harvesters yet?

[asperity]

2 hours ago, Evil Sid said:

Have they got round to making electric tractors and combine harvesters yet?

I don't know about that, but I believe that electric diggers as used on building sites have been developed. The battery charge lasts for 2 hours after which they need to be recharged for 8 hours using the onsite diesel driven battery charger.