Every so often I recalculate my household’s carbon footprint. Continue reading Post G22-053, Halving my carbon footprint in four not-so-easy steps.
Category: Transportation
Anything related to transportation, including cars, traffic, other modes of transport, and so on.
Post #1563: Meanwhile, the price of gasoline continues to plummet
Just thought I’d say it, because nobody seems to be. Below, the top graph is gas, bottom graph is crude oil.
People were stupid enough to blame the rise on the President. But the President, praise the Lord, was not stupid enough to take credit for the fall. Yet. Though he did remark on it as being a good thing. Continue reading Post #1563: Meanwhile, the price of gasoline continues to plummet
Post #1548, the electric charging sequel
There ought to be a law.
Source: myparkingsign.com
Yesterday I ranted about the disorderly situation for public car-charging stations.
You’d think that you could drive up, swipe your credit card, plug your car in, and buy some fuel at a known price. Just like at the gas pump. I mean, how hard could that be? And you’d think that drivers of non-electric vehicles wouldn’t park in the car charging spaces, either by law or out of a sense of live-and-let-live.
But based on my recent experience, nothing written above is true. My first experience with a public car charger was a machine with no instructions and no posted prices. It had balky hardware and/or software that gave us multiple false starts before we actually got the charger to work. Kind of.
And there was a proudly gas-guzzling truck parked in one of the two available charging spots despite a nearly empty parking lot.
But, on the bright side, apparently I’m not the only person to have run across a non-electric car blocking an EV charging spot. To the point where laws are being enacted to prohibit that.
My wife pointed out this recent change in Virginia law. As of today (July 1, 2022), in Virginia, it’s illegal for a non-electric car to park in a marked EV charging space:
"Parking at Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Parking vehicles not capable of receiving an electric charge in a space clearly marked for charging electric vehicles is now prohibited, and subject to a civil penalty of nor more than $25. (HB 450)
Source: Fairfax County Government website.
And, she further notes that as of October 1, 2022 Maryland will so something similar:
Electric Vehicle (EV) Parking Space Regulation Beginning October 1, 2022, individuals may not stop, stand, or park a vehicle in a designated EV charging space unless it is an EV that is actively charging. Violators may be subject to a fine of $100. EV charging spaces must have signage that indicates the charging space is only for EV charging, day or time restrictions, states maximum violation fine, and is consistent with design and placement specifications in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways. EV charging spaces count toward the total minimum parking space requirements for zoning and parking laws.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy
Thus, in Virginia and Maryland, it looks like EV charging spots have (or will soon have) the same sort of legal treatment as (e.g.) handicapped parking spots. There’s a uniform state-wide requirement barring you from parking in those spots if you don’t qualify to use them.
But Delaware — where we tried to charge our car — appears to have no such laws on the books. And, as far as I can tell, neither does the District of Columbia.
In those states, by contrast, any restriction on blocking the use of an EV charging station would be at the discretion of the owner of the property where that station is located. In the same way that the owner of a parking lot can post “No parking, towing enforced” and tow away cars, presumably any rules against blocking access to EV charging spots would be privately enforced.
Shockingly expensive, to boot
The other big surprise to me was the cost of using these public charging stations. Based on the few places in Ocean City MD where the hourly rates for charging were posted, our level-2 charging (240 volts) would have cost anywhere from $0.50 to maybe $1.25 per kilowatt-hour. That compares to somewhere around $0.12 per KWH for residential energy use in Virginia (reference).
The lowest rate we observed — 50 cents per KWH — makes electricity as expensive a fuel as gasoline. Based on the EPA ratings for the Prius Prime (for miles-per-gallon and miles-per-KWH), electricity at 50 cents per KWH costs as much per mile as gasoline at just over $5 per gallon.
(YMMV. Literally. Note that the standard of comparison above is the efficient Atkinson-engine Prius. If, by contrast, you would otherwise be driving a standard (Otto-cycle) non-hybrid, your gasoline cost per mile would be higher.
Let me use the 2018 VW Golf as an example, because that came in an electric and standard gas model. Fueleconomy.gov lists those as getting 28 KWH per 100 miles, or 3.6 gallons of gas per 100 miles. Doing the math, $0.50 per KWH costs you the same as gasoline at $3.90 per gallon. Or, if gas at $5 a gallon, you break even if you pay no more than $0.64 per KWH.)
But no matter how you slice it, the whole notion of big cost savings from electrical transport goes right out the door if you’re paying an appreciable fraction of a dollar per KWH.
So I’m left wondering whether the high prices observed in and around Ocean City, MD were merely a result of being in a resort town. Or whether we were paying more because of the slow (level 2) rate-of-charge (which means we occupy the charging slot for a long time, to receive just a modest amount of electricity). Or whether that’s the norm, suggesting that it really is that costly to deliver electricity to a car in that fashion?
It only took a bit of internet search to find that the 50-cents-per-KWH charge is not out of line with prices elsewhere. And I’m starting to get some hints at some reasons this market is so screwy.
Electrify America runs a chain of charging stations, and they charge $0.43 per KWH for level-2 charging, per their website.
But that’s only in locations where they are allowed to charge per KWH. Because, in some states, the only entity that can sell electricity is the public utility. In those states, electric car chargers have to price by the minute, not by the KWH. Electrify America charges $0.03 per minute for level 2 charging. Because a Prius Prime charges at a rate of just about 3 KWH per hour (the actual rate varies over the course of the charge), with per-minute charging, that’s about $0.60 per KWH for a Prius Prime receiving a level-2 charge.
Blink charging quotes rates ranging from per $0.39 to $0.79 per KWH, per their website. But, as with Electrify America, in states where they are not allowed to charge per KWH, they charge per minute, where the highest cited rate ($0.03 per half-minute) would cost about $1.20 per KWH for level-2 charging of a Prius Prime.
I think that’s enough to tell me that the pricing we observed in Ocean City is not out of line with prices elsewhere. It’s also enough to tell me that more-or-less the entire fuel cost savings from electrical transport vanishes if your only charging option is a public charging station. If your only access to charging is at five-to-ten-times the residential rate per KWH, chances are that your per-mile fuel cost for electrical transport exceeds that of the equivalent gas-powered transport.
Post #1458: Eco-bore
People Instagram a picture of what they had for lunch. Or TikTok footage of themselves dancing solo. Or unironically post a YouTube video on how to boil water.
Don’t even get me started on cat videos.
With that as context, I can post about the gas mileage in my wife’s Prius Prime.
Which was 67 MPG for the 145-mile trip back from Ocean City, MD this afternoon. Not dogging it, either. A chunk of that was flying down the Lexus lanes around DC, at 75 MPH and up.
Thus demonstrating that the 72 MPG on the way out to Ocean City (Post #1454) wasn’t the fluke I thought it was.
This, from a car that the EPA lists at 53 MPG on the highway.
On the one hand, MPG is not the smartest way to measure fuel consumption. It exaggerates small differences. In terms of gallons of fuel used, the difference between 53 (EPA), 67 (return trip), and 72 (outbound trip) MPG ain’t much. Per 100 miles, it looks like this:
My incremental 27 tablespoons of savings (per 100 miles) on the outgoing trip pales compared to the eight trillion tablespoons of crude oil in the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve.
Yet it puts a smile on my face, no matter how much my savings is just so much pissing into the ocean.
Which, because I just came back from Ocean City, I will clearly state is simply a metaphor.
And yet …
And yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.
Hey, we were on vacation. Our favorite destination store (Made By Hand, Bethany Beach Del) now had an electric car charger out front. We were driving a car that could use a recharge. I’d never used a commercial charging station before. We had a lot of free time.
Seemed like a series of matches made in heaven.
What a mess.
The plug that goes into the car is standard. So the engineers did their job.
Beyond that, I’d say that pretty much every other profession involved in this industry has screwed up to a greater or lesser degree.
Let me start with the asshole with the proudly gas-guzzling pickup who occupied one of the two EV charging slots. In an almost-empty parking lot. Clearly parked there on purpose. Clearly parked there to deny use of the EV charger.
It was one of those Dodges (now, hahahaha, Fiats!) that advertises the displacement and configuration of the engine (7.3 hemi?). I doubt that the average knuckle-dragger who drives one of those as his grocery-getter even knows what hemi is short for, or the long and proud history behind that engine configuration.
But I can assure you, as an early Prius adopter, there are a lot of insecure people out there who are threatened by changes in the car market. Just as it was common to be harassed (e.g., tailgated) driving a hybrid in 2005, it now seems some people are threatened by electricity-driven transport. (And yeah, it was true, there was a lot of anonymous hate directed at hybrid drivers back in the day.)
Suffice it to say that the aim of the Hemi is the opposite that of the Prius Atkinson engine. Which is to say, the Hemi was developed to have a high power-to-weight ratio, at the expense of poor fuel economy. Which makes the Hemi driver the natural enemy of the Prius driver.
So that much, at least, made sense. The asshole needlessly denying revenues to the private-sector concern offering charging services drove a pickup with (no doubt) great acceleration and power, but fer-shit gas mileage. And perhaps was not all that happy with $5/gallon gasoline.
And so he squatted in that precious EV charging space. Not for any benefit to himself. There were plenty of space in the lot. Just to own the libs, I guess? But he didn’t have the guts to straddle the line and block both spaces. So both a gas-guzzler and a coward. Because he did only what he had a legal right to do.
And so, it appears that the purveyors of this charging station just assumed that good will would keep those slots open. Not only is there no legally-enforceable restriction on parking there, there’s not even any signage suggesting that gas-only cars should park elsewhere.
These stupid lib-tards assumed that people would simply cooperate. In America? That because there’s no benefit for a gas-only car to park there, they assumed gas-only cars would leave those spots free for the electrically-powered cars that could use them.
Ha ha ha. Hemi ha ha. Idiots. There’s a whole piece of the political spectrum that takes pleasure in owning the lib-tards. And the lib-tards didn’t even consider putting up signage to discourage that. Because they were stupid enough to assume good will on the part of the average American.
Let alone towing non-EVs out of those recharging spaces. Which is, apparently, what it will take in that resort destination, to keep those charger spots free.
And yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.
OK, so ignoring the asshole in the black truck, blocking one EV charging space, we pulled into the space next to that. And attempted to recharge the battery in my wife’s Prius Prime.
And we were faced with:
- No indication of what recharging would cost.
- Virtually zero instructions.
- Malfunctioning credit-card reader.
But after numerous tries, it took my credit card, and let us do some level-2 charging (240 volts).
And yet, it still has not charged my credit card. So … I guess that was free?
What? When was the last time somebody required you to swipe a credit card, then didn’t charge you? It’s hard even to characterize the degrees of incompetence involved in that.
But looking on the website for the parent company, the charging cost should have been more expensive than gasoline. On a cost-per-mile basis. If they’d been competent enough actually to charge me what their website said was the rate for charging at one of their stations. But instead, they let me charge, and then didn’t charge my credit card.
And that was true for most or possibly all the public charging stations in Ocean City, MD and environs. Sure, you can recharge at a public station. And per-mile, the resulting KWHs cost more than gasoline. At least for my wife’s PHEV Prius Prime.
Anyway, I think I learned a lesson. For now, at least. I wanted a recharge so we could do our gadding-about-Ocean-City travel with a relatively low carbon footprint.
I now realize that the public-recharge market is such that this goal is not easily obtainable. There’s just a whole lot of learning-curve, jerk-avoidance, cost-incurring turf that you have to negotiate. All for the privilege of saving a few tablespoons of gasoline, in our otherwise efficient Prius.
On net, I’ll save the recharging for home, and run this as a straight-up gas vehicle when we’re on the road.
At some point, I suppose that whole public-charging market will straighten itself out. But right now, it’s just not ready for Prime time.
Post #1454: 72 MPG, why I truly don’t give a 💩 about high gasoline prices in the U.S.
The context
Source: Calculated from Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) data, series GASREGW (week, regular gasoline) and CPIAUCSL (CPI), accessed 6/26/2022. This is the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular, in constant May 2022 dollars.
The price of gas appears to be peaking, at least for the short term. Per the AAA, the price has fallen in the past week, in tandem with a drop in the price of oil. Looks like the peak this time likely will be just under $5.02 per gallon of regular, as measured by the AAA on 6/14/2022. Continue reading Post #1454: 72 MPG, why I truly don’t give a 💩 about high gasoline prices in the U.S.
Post #1512: Highest gasoline prices ever? Not really. Not even really close.
Source: Calculated from Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) data, series APU00007471A (gasoline) and CPIAUCSL (CPI), accessed 5/15/2022
In terms of the number of dollar bills you must surrender to purchase one gallon of gasoline, sure, gas is now at an all-time high within living memory.
But, as an economist, I have to point out that a dollar isn’t a dollar any more. It used to be worth quite a bit more. And because of that, it’s just plain stupid to look at long term price trends — or all time highs — in nominal dollars.
In real — that is, inflation-adjusted — terms, the current price of gas in the U.S. is nowhere near at an all-time high. Within living memory. That honor goes to June 2008, when the price of gas in the U.S. hit $5.46 per gallon, in today’s dollars. Continue reading Post #1512: Highest gasoline prices ever? Not really. Not even really close.
Post #1381: SNOVID-19.
I can’t help but smile when I hear the term “snow day”. It’s a conditioned reflex, the result of having gone to school in the South.
But now there’s a new perspective on that old joy. After a couple of years of complaining about hanging around the house and not doing much because of COVID, I now find that hanging around the house and not doing much because of snow is totally different. It’s unironically fun.
Thus proving that mental attitude is all in your head.
It’s a snow day here in Fairfax County, VA
This is God’s way of shouting at us “Do Not Go Back to School”! (That’s per a a friend of my wife’s, a schoolteacher who isn’t much looking forward to in-person classes with Omicron).
People from northern climates laugh at the degree of disruption a little snow causes in the South. But, having seen it from both sides — grew up and live in Virginia, but spent several long, cold winters in Chicago — I can tell you that snow in the South is just a completely different beast from snow in the North.
It’s slipperier. And that’s a fact.
Wintry mix is our favored form of precipitation this time of year. It’s a random combination of snow, sleet, ice pellets, freezing rain, and rain. The weather forecasters aren’t quite sure what will be hitting the ground at any particular moment. The only thing they agree on is that whatever it is, you can slip on it.
(My wife often said that Baskin-Robbins should offer a flavor of ice cream by this name. It would come pre-marketed because everyone in this area hears that term all season long.)
We get wintry mix so often in this area because the temperature is typically just about freezing when it snows. Might get snow, might get rain. You never know until it gets here and makes up its mind.
This morning, it’s 30 F with high humidity. And so, we’re actually getting just snow. It melts as it hits, then piles up, and as a result, we end up with a thin layer of slush everywhere, covered with snow. That will be freezing to ice in random areas throughout the day, and will freeze uniformly tonight. Tomorrow morning, anywhere that hasn’t been shoveled and salted will have a uniform coating of snow-over-ice.
Let me contrast this with a typical Chicago snowfall. Typically, it’s 20F or so, everything is already frozen solid, and 4″ of powdery dry snow comes down. It doesn’t melt. It doesn’t stick to anything. People sweep off their sidewalks and life moves on.
Having driven on roads in both areas, I’d trade their coefficient of friction for our coefficient of friction any day.
Finally, hills. Midwesterners in general don’t have to cope with them. For sure, they just plain don’t have them in Chicago. Around here, though, they are a fact of life. And once you find yourself sliding downhill, on the frozen slush hidden under the snow, there really isn’t much you can do about it.
Bottom line, I’m leaving the car in the garage today. And the power has gone out now. So I will just enjoy sitting around the house doing nothing. For a change
Post #1310: What does 30 electrical miles get you?
We haven’t bought gasoline since mid-August, owing to my wife’s purchase of a Prius Prime. That’s a plug-in (PHEV) version of the Prius, with a battery that’s good for about 30 miles.
It’s not like we stumbled into that purchase. We researched the offerings available and decided that hit the sweet spot for us. No range anxiety, no need to rewire the garage, and no need to mortgage the house if that big battery wears out.
And, as you can guess, it’s working out well. We’re not avoiding traveling, it’s just that most of what we do seems to fit into that 30-mile-a-day limit. Or nearly.
Which got me to wondering: Is our experience all that unusual?
I mean, people seen to think that little 30-mile battery isn’t much. It’s certainly no Tesla, either for distance or acceleration, for sure. But it’s not intended to be, and, from my perspective, that smaller battery is efficient. Most people who drive a full EV aren’t going to use the full capacity of their battery on most days.
But with this PHEV setup — where the first 30 miles is electric, then it switches to gas — just how much gas would the average American save?
More precisely, how much would total U.S. private passenger vehicle gasoline consumption decline if the first 30 miles of everybody’s driving day were done on electricity? As if everybody had a Prius Prime, but nobody could recharge mid-day. And with no change in behavior otherwise.
Turns out that you can’t just look that up.
You can find some glib statistics on (e.g.) the fraction of individual car trips that are short. And yeah, sure, most car trips are for just a few miles. I don’t think anybody’s shocked by that. But that’s not the question.
So I turned to the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) to get an answer. If you ever want to know anything about how Americans get from A to B, that’s the place to look.
I took their file of vehicle trips, reduced it to travel by private passenger vehicle (car, SUV, van, pickup), focused on the vehicle driver only (to avoid duplicating drivers and passengers), and summed up the total miles that each driver drove, each driving day. That yielded about 150,000 distinct person-days of vehicle driving. At that point, I (arithmetically) substituted up to 30 miles of that with electricity, and tabulated the results.
Source: Calculated from 2017 NHTS trip file, weighted estimate.
And there’s your answer. If you were to substitute the first 30 miles of everybody’s private vehicle driving-day with electrical transport, you’d reduce gasoline-powered miles by 55%. That’s all the miles on days under 30 miles, and 41 percent of the miles on days over 30 miles.
The upshot is that with PHEV, that 30-mile battery is enough to cut average private-vehicle gasoline consumption more than in half. All of that, without the truly huge batteries required for full EVs. And without a whole new electrical infrastructure required to keep EVs going, at least for those of us who can recharge at home out of a standard wall socket.
So I’m back to where I ended up in my last post about electrical transport. People seem to get all caught up in their underwear about this huge, dramatic, risky blah-blah-blah.
And it’s all nonsense. If you have a standard outlet available, you have the option to shift most of your personal transportation to electricity. Right now. With absolutely no other change in your lifestyle. And a Federal tax credit, to boot, depending on what you choose.
Well, OK, in truth, we have made a few lifestyle changes. I buy fewer lottery tickets now. But that’s probably a good thing. Otherwise, except for remembering to plug it in, there’s no practical difference between our last (all-gas) car, and our current (nearly-all-electric) car.
And now, judging from the U.S. numbers, we’re probably not alone in terms of the advantages from that small PHEV battery.
Think of it as a case of diminishing returns. Your first few miles of electric capability get the most bang-for-the-battery-buck. Here’s the picture, same data source and analysis above, just plotted for PHEV batteries of various sizes.
Source: Calculated from 2017 NHTS trip file, weighted estimate.
Sure, you can be a purist and insist on nothing but electrical travel. And more power to you. But even with zero change in behavior, and no mid-day charging, a PHEV with a modest battery size can get you a long way toward that goal.
Post #1308: Washington Post article on electric vehicles.
Today’s Washington Post had yet another article by somebody explaining why they didn’t buy an electric car.
Am I the only one who finds that weird? Do we see published stories about the great National Parks that the author hasn’t visited? Detailed reviews of restaurants the author would have liked to have dined in? Or travelogs about the wonderful luxury hotels they’ve driven by?
You get the drift.
And yet, “Why I didn’t/won’t/can’t/shan’t buy an EV” is a surprisingly robust genre. Once you realize that it exists, you’ll soon see that it’s pretty common.
For this particular story, maybe it was the author’s high-anxiety writing style. Maybe it was all the angst-y, over-the-top comments from the general public.
Or maybe I’d just had my fill of the unnecessary us-versus-them-ism.
Because, when you boil it down, there are two types of people in this world: Those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.
For whatever reason, I was motivated to leave a comment. So here’s my comment on that WaPo article, copied in word for word.
There is a compromise: PHEV. That’s a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
My wife bought a Prius Prime.
We haven’t bought gas since the middle of August.
The Prius Prime is a nice balance of electric and gas. It has enough battery to do somewhere around 30 miles as a fully-capable EV. With no range anxiety. When the battery is discharged, it’s just a regular gas Prius.
It doesn’t have a huge battery. So it plugs into a regular 20 amp household circuit. And with that, it takes maybe five hours to recharge.
When you think about it, a huge battery is kind of a waste, most of the time. Most people do most of their driving pretty close to home. Give them a way to do the first 30 on electric, and you make a real dent in their gas use. Without demanding the materials needed for a 300-mile battery.
Anyway, it was the right choice for us.
We’ll probably fill the tank some time next month. Or maybe not. Depends.
I’m reading all this angsty stuff about the decision to go electric, and all I can say is, you’re making it way too hard.
Go look up what’s happened to the price of batteries over the past decade. There’s a reason that Tesla went from a rich man’s play toy to a car for the masses. It’s called a more-than-ten-fold reduction in the cost of batteries, over the last decade.
All this stuff about, Oh my God, the battery replacement will bankrupt us — that’s so last-generation. Look up the current data before you decide to stress about something that’s increasingly a non-issue.
Post #1219: Bought a Prius Prime
That’s the plug-in Prius. So far, my wife and I like it. A lot.
This car is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). It’s a standard Prius gas hybrid that also functions as a fully-capable electric vehicle (EV) with limited range.
In a nutshell, this car combines good electric-vehicle performance, easy at-home recharge, no range anxiety, and all the bells and whistles that you expect to get with a modern car.
And it was cheap. Toyota offered $5000 worth of incentives, the Federal government chipped in $4500 worth of tax credits. Net of both, the car cost $22,000.
What’s not to like? Continue reading Post #1219: Bought a Prius Prime