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Comment by paledot | Hacker News Reader

They're not parking spots.

Don't park next to a gas pump if you're not putting gas in the car, even if it has an internal combustion engine.

People treat gas pumps as parking spots all the time. It's even more frustrating when you are driving a diesel and the only diesel pump at the station is blocked by a gas car and the owner has wandered off to get a coffee or use the restroom, all while multiple gas pumps sit empty.

Most petrol/gasoline stations make the majority of their money selling other products, particularly in non urban locations. Milk, newspapers, magazines etc. This business model makes refuelling stations a viable business since the margins on fuel costs are so slim.

One of the challenges with the crude political attempts to force EV usage (carrot/subsidies, Stick/fines) is the lack of coherent planning behind it. What happens when/if there are huge numbers of EV's?

It's a similar issue with public transport. My sister, a keen cyclist in London, now has two knee replacements and can't really cycle anymore. Public transport is a huge challenge (stairs etc) and driving in London is made ever harder with more and more bicycle lanes, concrete blocks dumped on roads and massive charges for attempting to use her car.

None of this is thought through. I'd really like to see some sort of vision democratically presented for comment by citizens before these autocratic decrees and changes are introduced, we seem to have more and more ill considered plans that are not joined up imposed on us, making life harder and harder...

Don’t EVs take longer to charge than a gas fill-up? Presumably that would be better for a model where you want people to stick around and buy things, not worse.

At least in the Netherlands, there are basically mini golf carts that are legally bikes for disabled people. https://youtu.be/B9ly7JjqEb0

> Presumably that would be better for a model where you want people to stick around and buy things, not worse.

Gas stations occupy an interesting place in American life: some stations - often those in urban areas - are designed for “get in, grab a pack of peanuts, get out” transactions, but others in rural areas serve as a local gathering area. Pre-Covid (and, let’s be honest, even post-Covid) the gas stations near me are full of people sitting at tables eating hot food and passing time.

What is amusing is that the same gas stations that encourage to have people sit and stay a while tend to be located in areas where EVs are extremely uncommon.

its really weird for someone used to the faster type of gas station. why would people want want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary around petrol fumes...

Because there are no real fumes. No more than anywhere else, and there is more likely to be a gas station with a restaurant (pizza/chicken whatever) in it than a restaurant at all. Small 'town' down the road has one gas station and one cafe. The cafe is only open for lunch. So a lot of the old timers gather at the gas station where they can get a coffee, a snack, or even a chicken dinner, and sit and chat with friends.

I have a hard time imagining this. Is the cafe outdoors or is this something like a mini service area?

The story here is an example of how electric vehicle charging happens. Dedicated charging spaces all over the place instead of service stations.

As long as the percentage of spaces roughly corresponds to the percentage of electric vehicles, it shouldn't be real disruptive.

'all over the place' - what do you mean by 'place'?

If we fast forward to a world where the majority of vehicles are electric, this would mean vast parking areas with a smart grid underneath that meters charges to users. (Once ICE has been vanquished vast tax revenue will be gone, someone has to pay for the power, it will be you).

In an urban environment presumably every lighting pole will have a charging point since they are on the last century grid.

Typically there are approximately 10- 15 cars between posts. For lucky people with a driveway they can install a charger, for everyone else this is a very intractable problem.

In rural areas 'all over the place' could mean anything. Some people drive 200 miles a day just to get to their place of work and back in a heavy duty vehicle, where would they find these 'places'...

Yes, I'm sure it will be very difficult.

The majority of charging will be at residences. People in rural areas will be able to install them no problem.

>> presumably every lighting pole will have a charging point since they are on the last century grid.

The new light poles in my area all have solar panels. The solar+battery kit is cheaper than the cost to run the underground wires. The real jokes is that with the days so short, and the nights so cold, some poles are running out of power just before dawn. There have been experiments with running intersections (traffic lights etc) on solar as that can really reduce installation costs at remote locations.

Roundabouts. If it's that rural, why put in traffic lights?

Because is it rural. Farmers don't like having corners of their fields clipped to facilitate round intersections. And roundabouts have to be made large enough to facilitate multi-trailer trucks, not to mention farm equipment. Plowing them in the winter is also a real hassle/cost as opposed to strait-through square intersections.

Search "mini roundabout" [1], although these are mostly used in urban areas. In Britain, junctions in rural areas usually just have "Give Way" (i.e. yield) signs for the non-major road.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout#Mini-roundabouts

The nearest charging station to me is 45 miles away. I don't have an EV because it doesn't make sense for us living where we live. But I do end up driving by that one from time to time and it is always full.

>> What happens when/if there are huge numbers of EV's?

The strange thing is that there is a model for this already. I live in a rather cold part of Canada. My apartment block has AC outlets for each parking spot. So too does my work, and all local hotels. These are meant to power block heaters, something that doesn't really exist in the UK, but in recent years some people have been using them to charge their EV/hybrids. The charging rates are very low but the ubiquity of the outlets make them relevant. Having very small/cheap charging points on literally every parking spot might be the better approach than a few dedicated high capacity "charge bays". These outlets are dirt cheap to install. No IP issues, no electronics, no networks. Just an outlet and a circuit breaker.

(These are also all free to use. Administering a payment system for each outlet would cost more than the power.)

Are your outlets continuous?

I’ve heard of ones that cycle through different chunks of the lot, so half (or a third or 2/3) are powered at a time.

Some cycle on and off but the ones on my building don't. A 50/50 on/off cycle is still going to keep the engine warm enough.

The truth is that modern engines/oils/batteries do very well in the cold. A battery heater is probably of more use than a block heater. But I like having the conventional outlets whenever I have to work on my car. A Tesla fast charging point cannot power my vacuum cleaner.

This is the solution. Power doesn't have to be free, but it should be everywhere.

It's like all the EV charging networks try to replicate gas stations. It's stupid. Nobody wants to take their car to a charging station, pay by the minute, and park their car somewhere else when it's full.

People just want to park their cars wherever, and plug them in when they know they'll stay there for some time, and just pay per kWh, and they definitely don't want to go park their car somewhere else when it's full.

The nice thing about electric is that you could theoretically charge cars pretty much anywhere, outlets would be cheap to install almost anywhere! And cars are parked somewhere 90% of the day anyway. So you don't need fast charging.

I feel like the guys trying to build infrastructure for EVs in most cities are fucking stupid.

You don't need to build 20 fast charging stations. For the same money you could probably install 2000 standard outlets, controlled with a relay and a phone app for payment.

That's something that would actually drive EV adoption.

Right now the only people who buy EVs are people who have a house where they can install an outlet for charging. People who live in appartments are stuck with ICE cars...

The cycle lane on Kensington High Street (a major London East-to-West route) actually sped up car journeys.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/01/removed-lond...

When it was removed the study "calculated that average trip times eastbound increased from 5min 39sec to 8min 14sec, with those westbound rising from 5min 48sec to 6min 27sec."

Trip times, but how many trips were taken? Make the roads painful/expensive enough and the one car still using them will have a very quick journey. Conversely, filling up the bike lakes with lots of bikes will increase bike trip times. I prefer to measure the efficiency of a road by the number of people it carries across all types of vehicles. Bus lanes over bicycle lanes imho as buses can more more people per hour down a single lane than anything else.

That makes no sense: second hand effects are always weaker than first hand effects. Why would the cars not use the road if the journey is quicker?

... so why the heck did they not un-remove it after that

When a wealthy driver from Kensington or Chelsea sees a person on a bicycle, their face turns red, their heart rate increases, and their body starts to twitch. In extreme situations, they may imagine the letters they'd like to write to the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph complaining about the abomination -- this is most common when they're driving a vehicle designed for off-road expeditions through central London.

There was a similar issue with articulated buses. These were removed by their leader, Boris Johnson, at colossal expense. Some drivers in Chelsea are still suffering the after-effects of seeing these vehicles on the road.

Hah - what a stereotyped world you live in! There are plenty of EV owning cyclists in Kensington & Chelsea.

I suppose a long-term solution is just to have more charge ports. Or to have charge stations with longer cords so they can service more parking spots.

I mean, charge stations are basically just 110 or 220 volt AC electrical outlets with a fancy plug. There isn't any fundamental reason they have to be an expensive, scarce resource. The more difficult scarce resource is the underlying electrical infrastructure. But if a commercial site only has so much power available, it seems better to just have a cap on the number of chargers that can be active at once to stay within the amperage limits of the site rather than to artificially constrain the number of charge stations. Then if someone is using a "charging spot" but isn't actually charging, it's not a problem; they aren't blocking anyone else from charging.

That's a long-term solution, though. For now we just don't have enough charging stations in most places to be able to not care if someone is using one when they shouldn't be.

Well, fast chargers not so much. There you're looking at 50+ kW with liquid-cooled cables. But yes, urban and destination charging stations don't need any fancy infrastructure.

I did exactly that this morning. I put gas in my car, paid at the pump, then walked in to buy a drink. I certainly wouldn't do that if people were waiting for the pump, but the option is there and used by drivers regularly.

Quiet, the UK will start fining for this too if they think of it.

And we should. This is obvious bad behaviour.

Depends on the context. Why waste the fuel to start and move a vehicle if there’s not enough traffic to demand a free pump?

Not sure if your implication is that you could do the same thing on any other spot (e.g. a spot for disabled, a load/unload spot, a spot reserved for police cars), as long as "people are not waiting for it".

In any case, the rule I follow is to move the car where it doesn't block a scarce resource.

But you were a customer of the gas pump during that visit/session, so that example doesn’t apply. It would only apply if you used the pump area for parking, when other non-pump spaces were available, and you did not purchase fuel.

When he went in to buy a drink there was no need for his car to be buy the pump anymore. He had filled up and paid already. He remained only because it was more convinient than moving the car and then getting the drink. Depending on how many people were waiting and how long it took to get the drink, that was probably the right call.

When I Supercharge, I get a push notification that idle fees start ($1/minute) 5 minutes after the charge completes.

Econ 101: Incentives matter

But think of the massive infrastructure that is required to facilitate that interaction. You have to own a phone. The phone has to connect to a network. You have to have a payment plan, presumably with a credit card/bank involved. Your car has to communicate with the charge point. The charge point has to have internet. There are just so many little things that need to be installed and maintained just to deliver a few pennies worth of electricity. An alternative is to install very small/free outlets on literally every spot (something common in cold climates already). That would cover much of daily commuting. The faster charging points could be relegated to highway stations outside of town centres. Then all that complexity, those points of failure, can be abandoned in favour of the simple century-old delivery of electricity over wires.

I do wonder how much electricity is used by these complex charging systems when they are not in use. How much does that charging point draw from the grid just to keep all its wifi/cell/internet systems running 24/7?

No, the vehicle auths with the EV charging station and my credit card is charged when the charge is complete. No phone, rfid tag, or app required.

Yes, 20amp 120V outlets are great for long term parking, like airports. Those can be unmetered. Anything else would be a level 3 fast charger like a supercharger, where you have to pay to cover the demand charges of 120kw-250kw current delivery in a short period of time (15-30 minutes). Remember, most people will charge overnight at home.

The electricity is the cheapest component, as you mention. You’re really just paying for the delivery infra. Regarding the idle electrical costs of signaling systems for charging stations, it’s minimal.

Not sure about these particular charging stations, but the big problem isn't people parking in a spot for 3-5 minutes while they pop into for a side. The problem is people who park in a charging spot and go shopping at the mall or grocery shopping for 45 minutes.

It's no difference from using the only or last pump at the gas station and go spend 15 minutes browsing magazines, you are being an ass.

If there was nobody immediately behind you waiting for the pump, would you wander off to the office to work for a few hours then come back to move your car?

Is this an American thing? To park in a gas pump for minutes after you used it?

Yup. Bear in mind that the gas stations in the US tend towards the mind-bogglingly huge. 12 pumps across the street from 16 pumps is a common sight. (Speaking as a Canadian who used to cross the border a lot when business travel was a thing.)

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