Road Charging and Electric Vehicles...

[Nearholmer]

A big rope, a big wheel, and an HGV going down the same hill?

 

Hmmm ....... I now have in mind an infinite series of Heath-Robinson balanced inclines.

 

Which is, of course what railways get as close as physics permits to by regen.

[Guest]

29 minutes ago, Reorte said:

Half the time I can get my car powered by absolutely free energy.

 

Just need to work out how to get it to work on the uphill half

 

Railways have managed it after all. Admittedly only in a few limited situations!

 

Fill the back with a load of rocks for the downhill part.

This truck uses a negative amount of fuel.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a28748306/worlds-largest-electric-vehicle-dump-truck/

[Grovenor]

Doesn't work so well on the more usual mines where the rocks have to be carried uphill.

[62613]

On 19/11/2020 at 17:23, Neil said:

As we've moved onto commercial vehicles this Flickr album might be of interest, I'm particularly intrigued by the bin wagon.

 

Tameside MBC trialled an electric (battery powered) bin wagon 35 years ago. It obviously wasn't a success

 

[Reorte]

14 hours ago, Grovenor said:

Doesn't work so well on the more usual mines where the rocks have to be carried uphill.

Depends on the mine, although large modern ones are more likely to go down a long way (almost all of them I'd guess TBH). There have been numerous ones that go in to the side of a hill. There's an underground gravity incline in Honister that they were hoping to get working again several years ago, I don't know if they ever did.

 

Then moving away from mines there's the odd cliff railway, which is what I was thinking about earlier rather than regen, although of course regen counts.

[jchinuk]

On 17/11/2020 at 12:49, woodenhead said:

Clogging in the current sense raises pollution levels but if all the cars are electric then the penalty is on the driver having to sit in the traffic not on the people around the vehicle as now.

 

That is an excellent point, while the cars on the roads that move the least get charged the most?

 

jch

[jchinuk]

On 19/11/2020 at 14:15, Nick C said:

The German idea I've seen had an HGV with a pair of pantographs on the cab roof, and a pair of conductors over lane one. When it wanted to either overtake or to leave the motorway, it switched to batteries and lowered the pans.

 

Trolleybuses in Gdynia have batteries, used for diversions etc, with motored winches on the trolley poles so the driver can raise or lower them from his seat.

 

Kraków has battery electric buses charged from overhead charging stations at key stops, where the bus waits for time or for the driver's PNB.

 

Not as new as the Germans might hope,

 

In Soviet Russia,

 

 

Using the existing tram / trolleybus lines.

 

jch

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, jchinuk said:

That is an excellent point, while the cars on the roads that move the least get charged the most?

 

Always the same when you have competition for limited capacity. Like when you go on holiday when the schools are out. It costs you twice as much and you have a miserable time because everywhere is rammed.

[jchinuk]

On 17/11/2020 at 10:13, Reorte said:

Any method which involves any sort of tracking I find pretty appalling. If it's done simply by looking at the difference in mileage every year then OK. If it's variable by road or time but by merely accumulating a total that's checked every year then possibly OK (needs to know position and time but doesn't store or transmit it). If it involves live tracking then it's another step to dystopia.

 

The concept of tracking is already here, most people have mobile phones so can be tracked anyway.  ANPR means road vehicles are effectively tracked already.

 

I'm not saying it's a good thing, just that it has crept up already.

 

jch

[Reorte]

14 minutes ago, jchinuk said:

 

The concept of tracking is already here, most people have mobile phones so can be tracked anyway.  ANPR means road vehicles are effectively tracked already.

 

I'm not saying it's a good thing, just that it has crept up already.

Oh I know it has, and I find it rather disturbing how so many people don't seem the slightest bit bothered about their phone tracking them, but at least you can turn the phone off (don't have one at all personally, although not because of this, I just simply haven't found the need or desire to).

[Guest]

18 minutes ago, jchinuk said:

 

The concept of tracking is already here, most people have mobile phones so can be tracked anyway.  ANPR means road vehicles are effectively tracked already.

 

Not to mention your plate is logged each time you fill up with dino juice just in case you try to nick it.

[Nearholmer]

35 minutes ago, jchinuk said:

Not as new as the Germans might hope,

 

Credit where credit is due: Siemens did originate the idea, running a demonstration in 1882, so they can claim to be returning to it.

[boxbrownie]

1 hour ago, 30801 said:

 

Not to mention your plate is logged each time you fill up with dino juice just in case you try to nick it.

But not linked into a central network, just stored on the stations CCTV system until it cycles over the old recordings.

 

I personally have absolutely no issue at all with vehicle tracking/phone or whatever, regardless of some of the seemingly conspiracy theorists fears. 

[Reorte]

15 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

But not linked into a central network, just stored on the stations CCTV system until it cycles over the old recordings.

 

I personally have absolutely no issue at all with vehicle tracking/phone or whatever, regardless of some of the seemingly conspiracy theorists fears. 

I don't dislike it out of conspiracy fears. I just find it very objectionable full stop, even if there's no danger of misuse.

[boxbrownie]

1 minute ago, Reorte said:

I don't dislike it out of conspiracy fears. I just find it very objectionable full stop, even if there's no danger of misuse.

And that’s the bit I don’t understand.......

[Reorte]

3 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

And that’s the bit I don’t understand.......

 

I know that you don't feel that way, fair enough, we're all different, but it shouldn't be too hard to understand people who have different feelings about things than you do even if you completely disagree.  No different to different tastes in music or food etc.

 

It's also pretty important to be able to at least make some effort to see the world from someone else's point of view. Without being able to do so the grounds for criticising them are pretty weak (extreme cases notwithstanding).

 

In general there's no "explanation" required - we like the things we like because we like them, and dislike the things we dislike because we dislike them. All explanations usually do is draw parallels - they boil down to "I like this because it's similar to something else I like." Sometimes you'll encounter something you happen to like with no parallels, and all you can say at that point is that you just happen to like it. I could draw some parallels with the monitoring thing - I don't like someone looking over my shoulder all the time, I've a strong sense of privacy and "mind your own business," but they all really stem from the same source rather than one being derived from the other.

 

So it's all incredibly subjective and opinionated, yet has a very significant impact on quality of life.

[Nearholmer]

There is something in all this about which way the presumption should go:

 

- should the presumption be that data about us can be gathered, and used, to the heart's content of the gatherer/user, and that if any of us individually wants it not to be, we then have to assert a right of privacy; or,

 

- should the presumption be as above without even a right of privacy on request; or,

 

- should the presumption be that each of us individually owns data about ourselves and our actions, and has to actively consent to it be gathered, stored, or used (which I think is supposed to be how UK law works for the gathering of data for purely commercial purposes); or,

 

- should the presumption be as the foregoing, but modified to allow gathering and storage without explicit permission for "stated legitimate purposes and only for those purposes" (which I think is close to the legal position now in the UK for something like CCTV which has a wider public interest).

 

Any of these carries with it the possibility of data-misuse, but if the presumption is of one of the latter two kinds, and can be effectively policed, it is reduced (not to zero, though, as "candid" shots from CCTV making their way onto YouTube prove at a trivial level). Once data have been gathered and stored, a "baddie" of one of several sorts (criminal; dodgy policitian; over-zealous copper; accidentally mutated bot; your seriously annoyed ex-lover; the list is endless)  could theoretically gain control of them and misuse them. Question is, how likely is that? Is it a risk that we wish to run in return for the benefits of data being gathered?

 

The challenge with the third option is that if it were applied to things of public interest, crime deterence or detection for instance, it would effectively make quite a few of the benefits of data-gathering, of which there are plenty, impossible to achieve ....... so the individual who values privacy hugely has their need fulfilled, at the price of the rest of society being deprived of the receipt of benefits.

 

Back to the usual conflict between individual and collective interests?

 

 

Edited November 24, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Reorte]

26 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The challenge with the third option is that if it were applied to things of public interest, crime deterence or detection for instance, it would effectively make quite a few of the benefits of data-gathering, of which there are plenty, impossible to achieve ....... so the individual who values privacy hugely has their need fulfilled, at the price of the rest of society being deprived of the receipt of benefits.

 

Back to the usual conflict between individual and collective interests?

 

Well I'm rather sceptical about the benefits anyway...

 

I think it's also important to distinguish between completely anonymous data (e.g. counting the number of cars going along a road or the number of people boarding a train at a given station), aggregated data (e.g. total annual mileage), and individual detailed data (e.g. where I've been, even if the purpose is to add it up to a total annual mileage), and between constant individual data and sufficient snapshots (e.g. I don't regard constant tracking and occasionally being asked where I'm going as the equivalent)..

 

Collective interests are only relevant when they ultimately boil down to a sufficient number of individual interests. Or to look at it from the another direction it's not an individual vs the collective interests, it's different competing collective interests. Or which satisfies the greater number of individual interests, with allowance for the degrees of positives and negatives (50 - 50 between very beneficial and slightly negative is quite different than 50 - 50 very beneficial and very negative).

[Nearholmer]

I get that “collective” is shorthand for “aggregate of individual”, but that doesn’t alter my point.

 

Which of the presumptions that I’ve set out do you think should apply to, say, CCTV in a railway station, the best of which can very much identify individuals?

[Reorte]

7 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I get that “collective” is shorthand for “aggregate of individual”, but that doesn’t alter my point.

 

Which of the presumptions that I’ve set out do you think should apply to, say, CCTV in a railway station, the best of which can very much identify individuals?

Personally speaking I'd say it very much depends upon the station in question, whether or not it's one with a history of problems - I'd go in general with your third point as the presumption, but that doesn't rule out permitting greater data gathering if a sufficient case can be made for it (the general principle for that exists in law, otherwise people under suspicion couldn't be investigated).

[Nearholmer]

The problem with the third option and cctv is that unless everyone consents, which is impractical let alone unlikely even if it were practical, then nobody can benefit (and people rate cctv on stations very much as benefit), which is where the fourth option comes into play.

 

FWIW, I’m not too worried about ‘public sector’ data gathering (although ‘Brazil’ is one of my favourite films!), but I do find commercially-motivated data-harvesting really intrusive/annoying, because the harvest generally gets fed to a load of bots that have been taught to deploy it to really pestilential ends.

 

I made the stupid mistake of joining Facebook during lockdown, to keep in touch with cycling club developments ....... boy has that got some aggressive little bots working for it!

[Reorte]

7 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The problem with the third option and cctv is that unless everyone consents, which is impractical let alone unlikely even if it were practical, then nobody can benefit (and people rate cctv on stations very much as benefit), which is where the fourth option comes into play.

That's why my position is that the third one should be the default but specific circumstances, such as a history of problems, should be able to over-rule it an allow CCTV in such places without everyone consenting.

 

I do find it quite sad that general CCTV coverage is regarded as a positive. More than just about anywhere else in the world and are we that much better off than everywhere else as a result of it?

[Nearholmer]

2 minutes ago, Gibbo675 said:

universal basic income which is being trialled through the furlough payment system.

 

This is well off-topic, but I still wonder if the present Government's lasting legacy will prove to be UBI, stumbled-into by default over the next few months. All the stars are aligned for it.

[boxbrownie]

5 hours ago, Reorte said:

 

I know that you don't feel that way, fair enough, we're all different, but it shouldn't be too hard to understand people who have different feelings about things than you do even if you completely disagree.  No different to different tastes in music or food etc.

 

It's also pretty important to be able to at least make some effort to see the world from someone else's point of view. Without being able to do so the grounds for criticising them are pretty weak (extreme cases notwithstanding).

I didn’t say you were wrong feeling the way you do, I merely said I do not understand they way you feel, simple.

 

There was no criticism involved.

[Reorte]

6 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

I didn’t say you were wrong feeling the way you do, I merely said I do not understand they way you feel, simple.

 

There was no criticism involved.

Likewise - apologies if my post came across as having a dig in return, all I was intending to do is to illustrate as well as I can why I feel the way I do - just the same as anyone feels about anything, so it's the same way as being able to understand why someone loves music that you hate. I usually find there's a point at which people agree, even if it's a ludicrous far-fetched extreme, then work back from there.