Biking in Boston

HenryAlan said:
This will likely happen here, too, as it becomes more evident that the program is successful.
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A successful marketing effort includes presales. And Boston had the added advantage of being able to point at DC, never mind the dozens of other cities around the world.
 
JonFrum said:
Actually, it's closer to 100 years. The automobile brought a huge improvement in the lives of the working class. ...The Model T let them actually go to the country, or the seashore as they saw fit. The automobile let them live beyond walking distance of a factory, and to find new work elsewhere when they saw fit. The misery of isolated farm life became more bearable when you could drive to town, and relatives in different communities could stay in contact.

And beside those sociological benefits, the automobile was a huge environmental improvement.....People who lived through the introduction of the automobile were not stupid - they knew what was good for them, and they celebrated the change.
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No argument there -- the reason for the approximately 50 years dating -- is that untll Gen. Eisenhower saw the Autobahn ... he had known from his experience with an Army transcontinental convoy in the 1920's that there had to be something better than Rt 66 and Rt-1 -- he just didn't know how to do it

When he became President Eisenhower nearly 60 years ago -- he knew what needed to be done and he did it -- but it took about a decade for a critical mass of Interstates to exist -- the rest Southern California, Houston, etc. --- is as the hiistorians say '"Is history"

Now the US Interstate model not just highways but mesh networks of commerce and population --- is being emulated in China, India, Poland and the rest of "New Europe" and yes in Old Europe as well

Interstate Highway society -- another Post WWII techological / socialogical revolution on par with:
electric power grid (some places a bit more reliable than others)
personal communications (landline telephones treansitioning to cell phones, blackberries and Ipads, etc)
jet air travel (e.g. 16 hours Boston to Delhi)
satellites (pix of my house from Google shown to audience in India)
fiber opticcommunications (could have given the lecture from Lexington)
multimode container shipping (just about everything now)
computers (topic of another whole forum)

all of which have changed virtually the entirre world in about 50 years -- trully revolutionary
 
I wouldn't argue any of that either because it all true, but I also wouldn't ignore the fact that the automobile enabled some absolutely horrific land use patterns in this country.
 
Capital Bikeshare is getting 82 new stations in the next year.

I hope Boston can expand as quickly.
 
I don't know if they are adding more stations here or realigning away from less popular ones, but I've seen new locations sprouting up all the time. Boylston/Mass Ave a few weeks ago, and the Prudential Center plaza on Boylston just today. The online map does indeed seem to be filling out with density beyond where it began. In fact, the printed maps at the stations are not up to date, for the most part.
 
We are in talks with Hubway to get one at Wentworth. It would most likely be on Ruggles near the Front Lawn or Sweeney. Hubway will be presenting an urban biking workshop (with Hubway info as well as bike safety info - how to ride in traffic, not riding on sidewalks, helmet avail., etc) for our students sometime in October. I'm on the coordinating committee. I'll give more details when I get them. Hubway is actually really excited about this workshop. We e-mailed their general contact email and ended up with one back from el presidente.
 
Shepard said:
I don't know if they are adding more stations here or realigning away from less popular ones, but I've seen new locations sprouting up all the time. Boylston/Mass Ave a few weeks ago, and the Prudential Center plaza on Boylston just today. The online map does indeed seem to be filling out with density beyond where it began. In fact, the printed maps at the stations are not up to date, for the most part.
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They still havent finished the 61 stations promised at launch. Looks like theyre at 57 right now.

The only actual expansion has been "one or two" stations in cambridge they might get around to this fall, according to an article I quotes a few weeks ago
 
What exactly are those pole-mounted things on the Bikeway racks: wireless antenna, security cam, or solar panel?
 
datadyne007 said:
Solar panel
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Right, the stations need something like 4 hours of sun a day to power the locks and the user inter-phase.

Thee is of course wireless communication in there. Probably a 3G connection
 
The stations aren't really solar powered, it's just easier to explain them as solar powered because they have the panels sticking out of them.

All the internals run off batteries that reside in the stations. The solar panels are used to recharge the batteries so that they last longer. The stations could run for days off batteries alone and they wouldn't run for a second of the solar no matter how sunny it was.

The wireless antenna runs up into the solar pole as well for better reception. It's not a 3g connection though.
 
nobody said:
The stations aren't really solar powered, it's just easier to explain them as solar powered because they have the panels sticking out of them.

All the internals run off batteries that reside in the stations. The solar panels are used to recharge the batteries so that they last longer. The stations could run for days off batteries alone and they wouldn't run for a second of the solar no matter how sunny it was.
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Sounds like the stations are... solar powered.
 
Nope, battery powered. The chargers are solar powered. If you are going to make the claim that the most proximate power source is solar because somewhere down the chain the sun is involved, then you'll need to view almost all energy as solar.
 
Depends on how much longer they keep the batteries running, IMO. If they double the battery life (or more) then I'd call it solar.
 
BostonUrbEx said:
Depends on how much longer they keep the batteries running, IMO. If they double the battery life (or more) then I'd call it solar.
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My guess is that they are connected to the grid

Around these parts -- you can not depend on solar power to run anything unless you have enough batteries to last through a week or more of cloudy wet / snowy weather

Ultimately if you are off the grid all you can do with batteries is trade sporadic availability of solar charging for either:

1) a background continuous demand -- but at a low level
2) infrequent high demand
3) a combination of the two

BUT -- in any event when you design such as system:

The key is that the total energy consumed by all of your loads integrated over some time period (say a typical day) --- has to be less than or equal to the total solar energy that can be collected and converted into energy and stored in the battery during that same time period

Then you have to throw in some extra solar & battery capacity to allow the near worst-case demand days and some additional battery capacity for those days when there is no sun

Finally, you need to think about the occasional weeks when there might be very little sun or you need a big smiley face to say -- "Sorry the system is waiting for the sun to reappear!"

There is no magic -- solar is mostly a joke!

PS: I speak from experience as a company, which I was a co-founder, provided a touchscreen system installed by the developer inside an information kiosk designed to explain an early commercial installation of solar panels in Cambridge
 
whighlander said:
There is no magic -- solar is mostly a joke!
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Thank you for being one of the few people to not be drinking the kool-aid. Solar doesn't make practical sense outside of the sunbelt. If people were serious about green energy we'd have lots of geothermal wells. But General Electric isn't politically connected to the people that do deep boring and geothermal generators. There's simply more of a profit in Chinese built wind turbines and PV panels that don't work. Besides who wants to explain that one doesn't need vast fields of highly visible and publicized equipment to generate electricity, when a boring looking structure the size of one of the CAT vents could suffice.
 
Lurker said:
Thank you for being one of the few people to not be drinking the kool-aid. Solar doesn't make practical sense outside of the sunbelt. If people were serious about green energy we'd have lots of geothermal wells. But General Electric isn't politically connected to the people that do deep boring and geothermal generators. There's simply more of a profit in Chinese built wind turbines and PV panels that don't work. Besides who wants to explain that one doesn't need vast fields of highly visible and publicized equipment to generate electricity, when a boring looking structure the size of one of the CAT vents could suffice.
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Lurk -- its not rocket science or nuclear physics although I've enough credibility to say I've done both

What it is -- Solar and Wind have two quite fundamental problems -- one that can in principle be fixed and one that can't be fixed no matter how good your skill with Aladdin's lamp

the former problem is that both wind and solar are unreliable -- sometime they are there and sometime they are not - you can't plan for anything except long-term averages -- this can ultimately be fixed by the development of storage that is a lot better than today's batteries

The latter and intractable problem is the one you hit on -- these are low energy density sources -- the sun provides the planet as whole with a tremendous amount of energy -- yet a simple candle flame can bring water to a boil nearly as fast a you can with an electric heater powered by solar panels covering most of a typical suburban home's roof.

The numbers with current solar cell efficiency of about 10% (this can ultimately be improved to about 30%):
peak power (summer 11:00AM - 2:00PM EDT Boston) 80 W for a square meter of panel
peak power (winter near noon) about 30 W per square meter
all of the above decreases for hours away from noon and for panels not directly aligned south - and of course can drop to near zero for different amounts of cloudiness and night

Wind is also a diffuse source of power as you can not place windmills / turbines very close together without them cannibalizing each others wind stream

So while a typical solar installation providing city-scale generation is a giant field of panels with nothing else possible except growing Belgian Endive (needs to spend several weeks without sun to blanch the color out) -- the equivalent wind farm is a comparable scale field with a fairly sparse array of the giant sticks holding up the turbines which could be used for farming or a nursery for Christmas trees

To be credible -- both need some sort of very large storage facility -- not yet available

Ultimately -- If you really want reliable and affordable Green Electricity -- GO NUKE!!
 
whighlander said:
My guess is that they are connected to the grid

Around these parts -- you can not depend on solar power to run anything unless you have enough batteries to last through a week or more of cloudy wet / snowy weather
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You guess wrong, no grid connection. 4 hours of sun a day needed for regular use and the backup lasts around a week.

Im not sure if bixi stations are even designed for grid connections. There are certainly areas that a connection could come in handy to make station placement more convenient.
 
jass said:
You guess wrong, no grid connection. 4 hours of sun a day needed for regular use and the backup lasts around a week.

Im not sure if bixi stations are even designed for grid connections. There are certainly areas that a connection could come in handy to make station placement more convenient.
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How much power could those things possibly need? Prepayment and powered security locks seem to be the only functions that require it. That can't be much more than all those solar-powered trash compactors on every downtown street.

Wouldn't overthink this too much. There are LOTS of road and public works doohickeys around town that run on solar, and have for years. Many that don't use even a small fraction of the electricity of the computer you're all browsing on. If the power needs are miserly enough, panels can supply them fully adequately on an overcast day. You may not be able to place these stations on the obscured side of a building so tall it'd be in 24/7 shadow. But that's pretty crappy siting for a bike stand to begin with, so there'll probably never be a scenario where they can't install one in a location they want to.
 
So unless jass is incorrect, these are solar powered, despite solar power being a joke and blah blah blah blah political bullshit blah blah blah blah.

I understand that it is extremely difficult for some of you not to go off on a tangent, but concerning the subject of this thread, and specifically the power source of the Hubway stations, can we agree that a solar panel feeding a battery is and should in fact considered "solar power"? Can we see the distinction between this and "sun > plants > photosynthesis > dinosaur food > petroleum"?
 
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