A concerned citizen files a 311 complaint about the way one resident of Lawrence Street in the South End is recharging his or her Honda Clarity:
So we are running electric cords across sidewalks to charge electric vehicles. And that's ok?
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Like the job UHub is doing? Consider a contribution. Thanks!
Ad:
Comments
Put an orange cone there.
By anon
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 12:48pm
Mark as resolved.
Hear, hear, sidewalk spot
By anon
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 7:37pm
Hear, hear, sidewalk spot savers. How dare you walk on this section of sidewalk when I've cleared it for my cord.
I'll take "White People's Problems" for 400, Alex
By Smart Arse
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 1:06pm
Just unplug the thing and move the cord aside, if it's a real problem to you.
Limited Mobility
By anon
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 4:55pm
You're forgetting that people with limited mobility need to use the sidewalk with walkers.
To be fair this sidewalk on
By anon
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 10:08am
To be fair this sidewalk on Lawrence is so ridiculously small and the brick is a mess with roots there's no way someone with limited mobility can get down it anyways. I usually walk in the street when I come down this street because the sidewalk is a joke.
Actually I did consider that...
By Smart Arse
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 8:42pm
...which is one reason why my suggestion that the person making the complaint take 2 seconds to fix the problem on their own, rather than go to their phone to whine about it.
This is as entitled -- and as
By bannedinboston
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 7:48pm
This is as entitled -- and as unacceptable -- as dropping an orange cone or an old toilet in the space. The owner should be cited.
I'll take "Known Hazards Prohibited On Worksites" for 200
By SwirlyGrrl
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 8:01pm
n/t
Um... okay, racist much? POC
By anon
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 8:37pm
Um... okay, racist much? POC own electric cars and have nice homes in the South End too.
Lol uh oh
By thomas
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 2:44pm
Lol uh oh
Oh isn't that cute!
By Smart Arse
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 8:40pm
This may come as a shock to you, but I am white. So you assuming otherwise makes YOU the racist.
Also, you spelled "AOC" wrong.
Dont give the city any ideas
By StillFromDorchester
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 1:16pm
They will insist you hire a police detal at 4hr minimum and time and a half pay if you charge your car on a city street.
They will sit in their car and close the sidewalk.
If only
By perruptor
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 1:22pm
If only Nikolai Tesla was able to get continued funding back in 1905, that Honda could recharge itself from the air, we would not be at war in Asia, and the atmosphere would be a hell of a lot cleaner.
Magical thinking
By MMaggard
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 1:45pm
Because in 114 years nobody has been able to achieve what he deluded himself. Physics - bummer.
Really?
By perruptor
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 4:46pm
You're going to deny that an acknowledged genius knew what he was doing, because lesser people have been unable to reproduce his real results?
Edit: A negative that changed my meaning removed.
Tesla has become a kind of stoner super-hero of late.
By section77
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 2:35pm
I myself am a big fan and don't deny his genius. However his legend has grown into this narrative of him creating a perfect world with no polution and no wars. A bit much but everyone needs an altar to kneel before. (Get yer Tesla t-shirts heah! Show everyone how smart you are by wearing a Tesla shirt!) Some people can only imagine simple answers to complex problems.
No, not that...
By 02132
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 3:30pm
He's merely pointing out that no matter how much of a "genius" Tesla was, even he is subject to the laws of physics that prevent this particular idea from ever feasibly working. All the funding in the world wouldn't fix the fact that his ideas about the transfer of energy and the loss involved in it just weren't/aren't possible, and things like the Wardenclyffe Tower could never possibly work as intended.
Yes, I agree with that guy, it's the other one that
By section77
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 3:59pm
Wants to replace the laws of physics with a MCU movie plot line.
Edison
By DotRat4Eva
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 6:15pm
Out maneuvered Tesla politically and financially. Too much profit in the hardware and distribution to let Tesla and the betterment of human kind succeed.
He outmaneuvered Tesla, but ...
By adamg
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 6:26pm
He ultimately lost, because Tesla's AC (which Westinghouse managed to get from him) ultimately proved far more useful than Edison's DC (mainly because it could be more readily transmitted over long distances by wire at high voltages than Edison's DC).
Some BU dorms used DC into the 1970s
By perruptor
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 6:19am
Does anyone know when they were finally all converted to AC?
It's not like he's the only
By anon
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 3:38pm
It's not like he's the only genius who's tried to figure this out over the past 114 years. So far the best they can do is charge a cellphone, slowly, from a centimeter or two away.
Inferior geniuses
By perruptor
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 7:30am
Can you name any of the geniuses you refer to? Would any of us recognize their names as having discovered something important, on the scale of, say, alternating current, or radio?
Tesla-ed
By anon
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 2:11pm
In London the gobnimint has installed chargers on the lamp posts.
plug-in hybrid
By onelith
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 5:30pm
Running the cord up and over the fence would be the right way to go. Maybe around the light pole?
Yeah
By Charles Bahne
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 7:53pm
We had a resident in our Cambridge neighborhood who did just that for a couple of years, stretching the cord over a very busy sidewalk (Huron Avenue near all the stores). He/she has since moved.
That's a great idea. Maybe
By anon
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 5:09pm
That's a great idea. Maybe make use of the horizontal bars on the lamp post, since the lamplighter guy doesn't lean his ladder against them any more.
Clean coal and natural gas powering the electric cars
By O-FISH-L
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 7:40pm
Great to see cars that provide a psychological boost to the owner, even if they are powered by the same coal and natural gas that energizes over half of the US power grid. It must feel good to bypass the gas station and plug in when nobody's looking, especially when the emissions are moved from the owner's neighborhood to those in the path of the power plants.
No such thing as clean coal
By SwirlyGrrl
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 8:16pm
Not a SINGLE electron transferred to that car came from coal fired power plants.
Geezer fuckwits be alzheimering again.
Hey Flushall - maybe store your "thoughts" in the cloud?
[img]https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/0...
Meanwhile, for those who want facts to understand rather than memes to believe in:
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=MA
The EIA is right
By Waquiot
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 11:02pm
But while is is good that we are replacing coal with relatively cleaner natural gas, let's not forget that we are also using natural gas to replace nuclear power, which is carbon neutral.
And you'd have to admit, in a lot of other states, his claim of electric cars being coal powered would hold a lot of salt.
Nuclear power may be carbon neutral
By roadman
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 6:21pm
But the waste it generates more than offsets that benefit.
Depends
By Waquiot
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 7:57pm
If one’s objective is to reduce greenhouse emissions, the benefits outweigh the problems with the waste.
Geezer fuckwits be alzheimering again.
By Beanzzz
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 4:36pm
My mother just died of Alzheimers, you nasty bitch.
My grandfather died in 1988 of Alzheimer's
By Will LaTulippe
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 7:13am
I wasn't remotely offended by Swirly's comment.
Nothing is perfect but some things are better
By Cute Username
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 9:09pm
A gasoline-powered car gets 100% of its energy from burning fossil fuels, an electric car gets a mix of fossil fuels and other energy sources. The latter is a significant improvement, and if over time the energy grid gets more of its energy from renewable sources it gets even better without having to do a thing to the car. I don't think electric cars are the perfect solution, but they're certainly a big help. (And arguably methane is better than gasoline, although that's much more debatable and even more marginal.)
Energy source used to power EVs
By Jizmo
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 6:07pm
While much of the electricity we use does come from coal-burning plants, as well as natural gas, there is the option to buy your electricity from such providers as CleanChoice Energy.
I personally have solar panels on the roof of my home, but am still grid-tied for my nighttime electricity use. Here's the beauty. I signed up for CleanChoice energy, so my grid electricity is sourced from solar farms. They also offer electricity sourced from wind turbine farms.
So, my plug-in hybrid car gets all of it's electricity for charging directly from the energy through the solar panels on my own home and then at night from the electricity from solar farms.
I call my car 100% solar powered.
Just trying to do my small part.
Clean coal is one of Trumps
By Kinopio
Sat, 05/18/2019 - 10:31pm
Clean coal is one of Trumps "alternative facts". It's a lie. But then again you were dumb enough to vote for someone who has been caught lying 10,000 times, so what else is new.
"Clean coal" is part of a
By Rob
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 8:04pm
"Clean coal" is part of a family of environmental feel-good word twisting that goes back before Trump - see things like "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle".
Many people understood "cleaner coal" - specifying slightly better grades, performance modifications on plants, etc... to improve the point-source emissions - as part of a reasonable economic/environmental/social policy. Acts to promote energy diversity, energy independence, not throwing blocks of people out of work, not tossing infrastructure to the wayside, not having huge startup costs...
Nope. Fish shoots well wide of the net.
By anon
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 5:48am
Weekend load with moderate temperatures in New England? The amount of coal on the ISO-New England grid was ZERO. It peaks at 3-5% anyway.
Natural gas? About 50% of the mix. The rest was nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind. Wholesale prices were too low to support biomass.
The emissions of EVs are dramatically less than gasoline or diesel vehicles. Traditional air pollution like particulates falls to nearly zero*, and carbon pollution falls dramatically. Don't hate on it just because you don't understand it Fish, and don't hate on it just because Al Gore suggested it was a good idea nearly 20 years ago.
* Tires degrade putting tiny bits of debris in the air, plus they kick up more, so even EVs have some impact on air quality.
For Massachusetts
By Waquiot
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 2:56pm
Natural gas is more than 50% of the mix. It's used to widely that ISO-NE is worried about that.
Check out Swirly's link above.
idlers, fowlers, and EVs
By ponkapoag
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 7:47am
You'll find it in the original Boston Charter: "idlers" are banned, including "common coasters, unprofitable fowlers, and tobacco takers" as well as "carriages power'd not by beast but thru tubes of aether Charg'd with Mr. Franklin's Electrick miasma."
I'm impressed by the
By Rob
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 8:11pm
I'm impressed by the restraint (and lack of imagination) shown by both sides.
If this idiot was creating a tripping hazard on my sidewalk... I'd be bringing out whatever rechargeable tools and appliances I have, unplugging their car, and charging my stuff on their dime.
If I was the idiot, I wouldn't be spending my own dime - I'd be unscrewing baseplates on streetlights to splice a (very unsafe) outlet in order to steal city power.
The best way for the city to handle this situation is to
By mplo
Sun, 05/19/2019 - 9:14pm
install a certain number of charger/plug-in outlets for electrical cars, then.
Who Pays?
By cybah
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 7:53am
Who pays for the electricity?
While I support alternative means of transportation, the energy to charge your car needs to be paid for. I see too much "Free energy", and I rarely see any of it 100% powered by renewable energy (I.e. nearby solar panels). So who pays. Someone is paying the 30cents a/kwh? Probably the tax payers.
And while I get the argument of "they are choosing an environmentally friendly car".. if it was 2002, you'd have a point. But now that everyone has one (and everyone can get one), we're just giving away energy at this point.
Everyone would be up in arms if we gave away free gas.. electricity is no different really, and should be treated as much. You want to drive a car, even if its an electric one. You need to pay for it.
Card Readers
By ElizaLeila
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 10:49am
Charging stations can be set up with a card reader that then gets invoiced to the user. Or tied to their electric bill. Or even set up like a parking meter or gas station dispenser: insert credit/debit card to start the dispensing of electricity. When it's full, charge the card. If the cord is ever unplugged, the card is charged at the point, and the system resets itself, preventing someone from charging another vehicle on the first person's dime.
Honestly?
By Kaz
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 2:35pm
The amount the city would pay in additional electricity at whatever discounted rate they get would more than outweigh all the benefits to healthcare and so on from charging an electric car instead of burning gasoline.
The same person or
By anon
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 5:02pm
The same person or organization who pays for electricity at the thousands of chargers that already exist. You know, this is already a thing.
Some charging stations are free to the user. Others make you pay. The sponsoring organization decides if they want to provide a subsidy.
https://chargehub.com/en/countries/united-states/m...
Not without a driveway
By Jizmo
Mon, 05/20/2019 - 5:57pm
I drive a plug-in hybrid and I have a garage. If you don't at least have a driveway where you can run your cord from your home to the driveway, and out of anybody's way, you have no business having a plug-in car.
Also, as well as the possibility of a lawsuit from someone tripping over your cord, I wouldn't trust some vandal to damage my cord. Those cords cost around $400.
One has to bear in mind, however, that
By mplo
Tue, 05/21/2019 - 11:28am
Electric cars may be the wave of the future at some point.
Add comment