Bad Chargers (2023 Update)

Glad I drive a Tesla.

Everyone around here charges at home, half the non-Tesla public chargers are broken because nobody besides weirdos like Ed Lee uses them anyway. But there's no shortage of EVs operating day in day out just fine.

"But it's impossible to divorce oneself from the cultural context of the car, now tightly bound to the American sense of identity following decades of post-war construction that reshaped our built environment to prioritize the individual driver against all others. A car means freedom—being able to travel from coast to coast on a whim"

You know when the author starts blathering on about the car's "cultural context" they don't have very much real. Just rent a gas car if you go driving around on long trips through some shithole state that never had very good infrastructure of any type to begin with, damn.

But the boomers and boomers-at-heart will still be complaining about their precious road trips to the end of their days, who cares.

Incidentally spending a huge lot of government money to put charging stations on every corner just to appease some historical American automobile-freedom cult is a huge waste of money, too.

Stop subsidizing the petroleum industry and they'll sell just fine divorced from "cultural context" or not.

Wyoming? Colorado? Horrible places. They had no public transit "to begin with, damn." I blame the natives.

Not many people drive coast to coast on a whim. Or ever.

Renting for vacation trips is annoying but practical, but hopping to work or Safeway or the dentist usually isn't. San Francisco has lots of public transit. I can drive to work in 8 minutes or use transit that takes about an hour and involves hiking two hills in the cold rain.

One function of cars (and electricity, and running water) is to save peoples' time, so they are both more productive and have leisure to enjoy life.

The quickest way to your destination might be to jump from the airplane. It saves time compared to letting it land first. Not recommended because of the side effects. Same with driving petroleum powered smog makers.

Whether they should spend all these money on connectors is a different story. But if they do spend the money, spend it on good connectors, not on CCS shit.

Yeah, but it's a malfunction in some places (like downtown, where 40% of the cars on the road have already got to their destination, but haven't found a place to park).

Transit solves the parking problem, AND the fuel problem, AND the maintenance problem, and covers insurance and license fees, and drivers' license, and... hiking a couple of hills in the cold rain is good exercise. Get a good Irish wool hat.

It's peoples' choice where they want to live. I know people who like a high-rise apartment in a very dense city core and don't own a car. I like less civilization so a car suits me.

I can always park at home and at work and at the cabin. By choice.

I have a good hat but I don't want to waste 2 hours a day on a slow, smelly bus and BART car. I do park uphill from work - when I feel like it - precisely for the exercize.

Do you own a car?

It isn't waste if you take a book. Since such time isn't wasted, the 'slow' attribute doesn't signify. When all three of bicycle, transit, and auto are available, I'll choose... whatever seems most pleasant. I've tried walking, but usually that's inconvenient, as is a rowboat.

Contrast spending hours each week reading books while commuting with charging a BEV at home each night or spending the odd half hour charging on trips.

My morning commute is about 15 minutes, and most of that is spent in the bathroom.

I can't read, or design electronics, while I'm hiking or walking or bicycling or standing on a BART platform or hiking a hill. Some forms of transit, like Lyft, are door-to-door. Public transit isn't.

Public transport is inefficient of peoples' time.

Do you own a car?

Commuting by car from the Boston suburbs to Providence RI or vice versa is only hands-down time-efficient if you do it on weekend mornings or 2 AM on a weekday, say. At other times it can _sometimes_ be comparably time efficient to commuter rail to drive it, but driving it is rarely the most sanity-efficient choice then.

Congestion-clogged roads are fatiguing to deal with even if the traffic is moving along at the speed limit; after the better part of an hour of that at age 43 I mostly tend to want to take a nap, not meet with clients or do much work.

But someone's got to take on the mental responsibility of not causing a deadly crash today, as many US drivers (well, Massachusetts and Rhode Island drivers, anyway) seem to coast on thoughts and prayers and don't care too much if they or anyone else get where they're going alive.

Now that I'm a "man of means" I sometimes skip both the commuter rail and and car and take Amtrak to Rhode Island, 50 miles in 19 minutes at a top speed of 150 mph and a cost of about 60 cents a mile IMO sometimes isn't a bad value from my personal "what is my time worth"-perspective these days.

Ever ride the bullet train? It's super clean and super quiet... you don't even feel it accelerate or brake. People with carts of tea and sushi enter a car, bow, offer their stuff, bow again, and move on.

Never had the pleasure of visiting Japan, maybe someday.

Doing 150 over the 100+ year old right-of-way in the Northeast is definitely a different experience than on a laser-straight route. The tilting action of the Acela keeps your sense of the gravity vector generally pointed in the normal direction at 150 mph, but it's pretty aggressive at that speed and you can feel the train clunking from side-to-side like a ship on the water, I think I'd get seasick if I had to endure that for much longer than the 15 minutes or so its speed tops out.

But the trainsets were the better part of 20 years old when I first rode them, they're being replaced now so I'll see how the new ones are.

The old Amfleet coaches from the 80s will do a bit over 100 over on the same route, and they do push them that hard, but after going on 30-40 years of refurbs if you ride near the front of a coach you can tell they're not really happy about it.

The old Metroliner on the NE corridor, now _that_ was a train. They finally scrapped it in the late '90s sometime, but until then it was definitely the way to get from NYC to DC.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We visited the Hamamatsu factory, where they make PMTs and streak tubes and such. We were there to sell to them, but they paid for our hotel, took us touring, paid for every meal. They loved to take us to dinner because "we can't afford this ourselves." Imagine unagi, bbq eel, the size of beefsteaks.

The production looked like a factory in Hell, gas flames shooting up from most every workbench.

The train ride from Ngoya was beautiful, all green along the coast.

I guess the prediction of demise of CCS was premature (by a year). CCS days are numbered.

It will be a lot more than a year and only CCS1. You need to distinguish the two. The EU is firmly CCS2 and the US may end up with the NACS.