Detroit is now home to the country's first chunk of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it's parked or moving.
Why it matters: Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly.
Not wireless. Overhead contact lines are wires they just skim along them.
Comparison for this would be a metal brush dragging the ground over electrical contacts to maintain connection. Which would be a third rail on roads, very dangerous.
Electric trains gather energy by running a conductive element along suspended wires. No connection made.
Wireless chargers charge devices through induction, in which a coil of wire produces a magnetic field, inducing a current in the wire coil in your device. Both have wires, neither make connections, we call both wireless.
Trains are amazing for small countries, or between cities. The problem comes when you take into consideration how spread out the US is. You will always have cases where a car is needed, it’s unavoidable.
EVs are not a perfect solution, by a long shot. And ideally we would move away from cars being ubiquitous in America, but that is many, many years off. It’s better to work towards that slowly than it is to say “well it’s not perfect so let’s just not.”
No, trains famously bad at “last mile” travel, except that in America it can be “last dozen miles” between a city big enough to have a station, and the place the person is going.
There are many benefits to trains, but when you have 100 people in a 1000 square mile area, is anyone, including government, going to be willing to run the rail, build the station, and send trains there multiple times a day? I highly doubt it.
I travel a lot, and the US is the only country so far where traveling to different areas is a pain in the ass because they never bothered with transportation infrastructure, so I’m very dedicated to the US catching up with the rest of the world in terms of transportation.
Like you don’t have to plan road trips in China, you just hop on a train or bus and you are there. Wherever you want to go, national parks, mountains, it’s all just taken care of, and there are meals and snacks to buy, sleeper cars, electric charging.
You can decide to take your family to the equivalent of Yellowstone if you lived in California and get in a train to go there without any hassle or planning, and it’ll be within your budget.
Nationwide, sure. But localized I wish we would do better, given the population densities. California has a population density of ~100 people/km2. Not far off France at ~120/km2. Yet we still are mainly reliant on cars to get around.
California and France aren’t that far off from total area from each other. Most of California’s population is in a hand full of counties. As an example, LA has a population density 3 times that of Paris.
“Build them for cars” cities aren’t built anymore. They were built a long time ago. Modifying existing cities for trains would be nearly impossible. Yes it’s a 4:1 ratio of urban to rural areas. But remember the majority of the population lives in like 4-5 counties in the US. That’s a lot of area that is empty.
It’s a good point that cities aren’t built anymore, and that’s part of the problem. Our population has grown drastically, but we don’t build hardly any new infrastructure for them outside of roads. So traffic is terrible despite enormous amounts of money from both government and people.
Cities aren’t supposed to be static, they’re supposed to grow and adapt to the needs of those that live there. There is a large need for non-car transport that is either ignored or sidelined for cars.
I’m not talking about 90% empty land, that’s not where people are.
When the car was invented, governments had little issue buildozing entire neighborhoods for highways, but now that some places are realizing that’s a bad decision, its really hard to undo.
The stupid thing is that fixing it isn’t even that hard.
Step one Get rid stupid zoning laws like single family housing and reduce parking minimums.
Step 2 Modify existing roads piece by piece to include alternative transit methods. Add bike lanes, if you can’t slow down roads and people will bike.
Actually run decent buses where peoole want to go, not oversized 50 person buses on 3 routes that nobody uses becasue it doesn’t go anywhere, and has an hour between the next bus.
That’s it, the market will build more housing in areas that need it if its profitable, then use that new tax money to drive transit infrastructure.
There’s a lot of fine details, but we’re bankrupting cities with cars right now.
A lot of the world had to rebuild after WW1and WW2 and that allowed for building around newer technologies. The US never had that. We’re expanding and you can’t just build in infrastructure like that.
The newer technology at that time was cars and roads, and many European countries did try the American system of roads and suburbs.
Its just that most of them realized it wad a bad idea around 20 years ago and started rethinking their cities.
Many city centers were even turned into parking lots like American ones.
Again cities arent supposed to be static, and normally they grow denser, rather than sprawling.
The problem with American cities is partly zoning, and partly nimbyism, where people don’t want their places to change.
And sprawl sucks for pretty much everyone. Less arable land for farming, poorer anmeties, longer travel times, and finally huge transportation costs. Cars are by far the most costly method of travel, both personally and for governments.
You will always have cases where a car is needed, it’s unavoidable. That’s because it’s designed for cars. We have huge parking lots designed for cars but nothing for public transport. Whenever I travel to NYC or Chicago, I can go anywhere in trains and buses. In my city, I can’t even get milk without driving to a store.
Because your store probably doesn’t serve thousands of people to validate the cost of the infrastructure. My city has busses, but it also has corn fields and open lots and a lot of spread. It’s just not viable to walk all your groceries a mile to and from the bus stop both ways for a bus that comes every hour. It’s different when every train and bus is full and the need is well met.
Ask for more taxes and more spending on this infrastructure, or use your car.
The infrastructure is developed around cars so obviously using cars makes sense. We could have smaller grocery stores and have it closer to neighborhoods so people can walk to it but we have buses which only come once an hour which takes 30 minutes to drive 2 miles and your grocery trip will take 3 hours so you are better off just buying a car!
I don’t think you understand how spread out rural America is. A lot of areas have tiny grocery stores to support a small population spread over a wide area.
The town I grew up in had no grocery stores, there was one small store a 20-min drive away that served all the surrounding towns. There was no work from home and if you had a job you had to have a car to get there.
The population was too small and too spread out to support any public transit. They now have a bus that goes from the center of town to the previously-mentioned grocery store, once a week on Sunday at 7am and then back at noon.
Still, getting to the center of town is quite the hike for many residents so I imagine for most a car is still essential.
And before anyone mentions the “infrastructure” being built for cars: this town was founded before cars were a thing. It was built for horses.
Rural areas can keep their cars. 80% of America’s population is urban, not rural. We do not need to hold back fixing things in cities just because rural America needs cars.
I don’t think you understand how spread out rural America is.
But still that’s not the point.
It has been decided to build infrastructure for cars into the smallest furthest villages and not to build infrastructure for trains into the smallest same villages.
Other countries are no percent of the size of the US. The entire Indian subcontinent can fit on our eastern seaboard with room to spare.
The US is big, and has a lot of cities. We have an enormous amount of existing road infrastructure. We are not going to stop using all of that infrastructure any time soon - that’s just reality.
You’re acting like this change would be “just build trains lol” and that couldn’t be more incorrect.
We built those highways over the last 70 years, with most of the work done in the first decade or two of that timespan. These decisions are not immutable laws of nature. They can be undone if we determine they are bad, and they pretty clearly are.
Too many too adequately cover here, but let’s start with induced demand. You notice your highway is backed up constantly at rush hour. You figure adding a new lane will help, so you do, and it appears to help at first. What happens over the next year or so is that people who were taking other options now use the highway, and it fills up again. That leads to needing another lane, and at some point, you’ve invented the Katy Freeway.
Or how about that we’re subsidizing the trucking industry with our taxes? The wear and tear on our roads goes up exponentially with weight–not by a square factor, not by a cube factor, but by the fourth power. There is no way that the additional amount trucks pay in taxes can be covering that. These trucks could be largely replaced by a better freight rail network (we already have a pretty good one, just needs to be better), which would be far more fuel efficient per ton of goods.
Or how about that highways encourage urban sprawl, which makes all other infrastructure more expensive. Have to run sewer and electricity to all those far flung neighborhoods. Your taxes are higher because of this. Not only that, but the neighborhoods that are subsidizing other neighborhoods might not be what you think (I linked to the pertinent point around the 5 minute mark, but the whole video is worth a watch on this subject) (and the whole channel, for that matter).
You’re not going to teach me to support density and mass transit, because I already do. Passionately. I am incredibly annoying to everyone I know because I beat them over the head with zoning reform rants and the paradox of more lanes.
That’s not what we’re discussing here.
Or how about that we’re subsidizing the trucking industry with our taxes?
There is no viable means of moving goods in this country without trucks. I’ve worked in logistics. There is no intermodal method that can possibly service all of the non-arterial areas of population with only last-mile trucking.
We’d have to forcibly relocate millions of people (as the Chinese did) in order to have this kind of conversion away from single vehicles.
Hey sorry man I edited and added a lot more. I thought of it right after posting. That’s my b.
I appreciate your take and agree with these things, but I view this argument as our over-reliance (I would even say cultural addiction) to highways rather than their existence as a whole.
If we built trains we would start at the most densest areas. Most of these would move people (subways). This builds more railway tracks that could aslo send goods to rural arras as well.
The trains would do 2 things. One would most likely start clustering people together do to the ease of use of having more railways. Second, it creates more economic opprunties for the rural folks (like having a means to work in the city more or just having a way to sell goods) could cause enough economic success for buses.
I’m all about both jacking up density and expanding mass transport any way we can in urban areas. It’s got to creep out from there though. We can’t just wipe the slate clean and start over in a decade.
I’m constantly proselytizing to people locally to vote for and be interested in changing zoning and regulations policies. I’m super annoying about it if I’m drunk lol
That’s nice. It’s a small percentage of the population, and getting smaller. They can keep using cars if they want. We don’t need to hold back all other progress on their account.
To be honest, I do see where you are coming from. If we had public transportation as good as our network of roads, people would have incentives to cluster up in the first place.
Shape defines function and function defines form. In this case that means the public transit would be built near the denser populations which will then cause people to move closer to the transport I on for ease of moving goods. It’s why these other countries look the way they do, they didn’t plan these out 3000 years in advance.
… you’ve never heard of bikes, or legs, or car sharing if you need to transport stuff? you don’t need to own a car, it’s unnecessarily expensive and bad for literally everything
the only reason one would need to own a car is if it’s tied to their job
even if you disagree with this assessment, the technology in this post would almost certainly only be applied in cities, it would likely be restricted to a portion of where trains would be except be far less useful, while taking up tax money that could be used for actually important things
also the US has a higher percentage of the population in urban areas than Europe (82% vs 74%) – the US has a lot less small & isolated villages/towns and historically immigrants to the US always came to large urban areas – and US states are comparable in size, population, economy, and arguably self-governing capacity to European countries (the EU can practically be treated as a soveirgn state itself, in most cases), it’s reasonable to say that something that can be implemented in Europe can usually be implemented in the US with a similar level of success, in theory.
Just north of the us is a mainly freight railway system that spans the width of the continent…
Then there is this image in an article about that on Wikipedia https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/8951874e-31a8-4e58-a671-c143c53a0e55.jpegThe spread out reasoning just seems silly to me on the basis of that literally being what trains were even for in the first place, going distances not suitable for horses. If it connects cities, that is also a start that shouldn’t be passed on for being imperfect.
The only reason a car would be needed at all in north America is because of all the poorly designed car centric infrastructure that ends up not even being good for cars as demonstrated by the absolutely heinous traffic that only seems to get worse with every road “upgrade” I have ever seen the before and after of.
Then there is this image in an article about that on Wikipedia
I’m confused, are you trying to say cars are not needed because there’s a railway every 100+ miles north or south of any point? Should people walk 100 miles to the rail station on their way to work?
The US/North America is huge, it’s not like just providing public transit for all of Europe or something, covering all of America would be an orders of magnitude larger project
No I’m saying the us being too big for trains is a dumb statement because there already are trains all over north America.
Cars are only needed because the infrastructure is designed that way. It also features idiotic setups like 4-6 lanes on the main road and single lane when parked up side streets that are a bitch to make a left from because the lights never line up to give a break in the traffic. I hate these and they shouldn’t exist because they are bad for literally everyone. There are so many road setups that aren’t even good for cars, yet cause them to be necessary, which just worsens traffic guaranteed.
I don’t understand your Europe comparison. It’s not like a blanket needs to cover the entire country. You only need transportation where people live to where they work. Anything else can come later if it turns out to be needed. Do people daily commute across the whole country or something? If they do there is way more necessary work reform than I could have imagined.
Realistically though if the us can send money to Ukraine and Israel yet still not rebuild hawaii, the country is fucked.
Oh pish posh. China is exactly as big as the US and you can get pretty much everywhere for a few bucks in high speed trains.
Trains are fantastic and the US should definitely be investing in them, it’s a huge disadvantage and a national embarrassment that we don’t have affordable and effective mass transportation.
Yes, so the trains make sense in certain areas. The US has a similar problem, with the majority of the population in a few specific areas which are already served well by trains. But you then have extremely sparse population spread out through the rest of the country. Trains just don’t work there.
US cities are definitively not already served well by trains. Trains are prohibitively expensive, literally falling apart and very rare, even in larger population centers in the US.
Trains would work very well in this country as they work in literally every country that invests in transportation infrastructure.
There is no concentration of US citizens like this. We are more like the left side of the map than the right. There is no way to service the number of scattered towns we have with one rail line without a truly massive expenditure of resources and I just do not see the point in locking resources into that instead of maintaining current infrastructure for far less
Far better to focus these energies on mass transit within cities themselves without rebuilding from scratch for no reason.
When you talk about maintaining the current infrastructure, you’re talking about completely replacing it anyway at a higher cost since it’s falling apart must be meticulously replaced with crappier materials. Why replace the same slow, century old infrastructure when you can replace it with high speed trains and rail that costs far less?
There are so many obvious reasons to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of transportation.
Because the current infrastructure doesn’t connect the country.
Because that inadequate infrastructure is literally falling apart.
Because poor Americans can’t easily move to places with better opportunity.
Because rail can be enacted extremely quickly and positively impact the lives of 300 plus million people.
Also, you’re completely wrong about the concentration of US population, which is very much concentrated on the east and west coasts.
Affordable transportation benefits a country nationally and individuals immeasurably at a very low cost.
Every country with trains has proven that, even the ones as large as the US.
Not nationally, only for a Denver metro track some council person told me about that they ended up spending more money and extra years refurbishing one line than it would have cost to replace multiple lines.
Refurbishing lines in the US, where the tracks are so old we’re replacing them anyway works too, however we can expand and modernize our ancient, prohibitively expensive transportation infrastructure is not as important as doing it.
I just think “cars bad trains good tear it all up” to be a gross oversimplification that isn’t helpful discourse.
Like I’ve said elsewhere in this chain, I am extremely pro-mass-transit - whatever form it takes. Any increase in mass transit is better than not, imo.
No, that’s completely wrong. The US concentrates a lot of population on the eastern seaboard, still has a lot of people as you move towards the Mississippi, but then quickly falls off to nothing as you hit the plains and Rocky Mountains. Picks up again right along the western seaboard.
Yes, we do have a concentration of population a lot like this. Or more accurately, two separate concentration regions with mountains in between.
Trains are amazing for small countries, or between cities.
Trains have their bigger advantages on long distances. You get tired in a car, you can’t go pp or take a nap. Your costs rises proportionally with the distance etc.
There are tons of areas of the US that have the population density to support it, but still have horrible train service. We made deliberate decisions to favor highways over trains, and we can undo those decisions.
Why would highways be less susceptible to the “spread out” effect than trains?
There’s public transport in large and dense cities. It doesn’t work to move around the country very well. These people that think something that works in a country that’s smaller than an individual state in the US should work fine are “special”.
Yeah, area wise Japan is about 60% the size of Texas. With Japan having more than twice the GDP. Seems pretty straight forward why infrastructure should be better there. Japan has 4x the populous as well. Makes a lot more motivation to focus on public transport.
I would love to have both. Especially trains! The trains here are so bad though. They cost more than flying and are such a hassle to deal with. The train stations are sometimes far away from the city in some cases too. So you need a ride from the station.
I would support building that out if it was offered.
The roads are there. They ain’t moving skyscrapers in major cities! For better or worse, American travel is very road-based, and we’ll never have as many diverse options as some other countries…
Or just build trains. Which move tons of people, every day, for cheaper, safer, faster and overall more efficient ways. Don’t have space for a train track? Make it a tram. Problem solved by changing up a road for cars into a road for cars and trains.
Or do what has been done for over a century now and just build the train line underground if there’s no room above. It’s more expensive, but in moderately dense cities that can still be worth it.
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