Mother of God…
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I mean no offense to you as an engineer, but when I’m paired with someone and come to find out their degree was some engineering major, I cringe. They usually think they know more than the individuals who designed and built the damn jet. 
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For the record, I’m no engineer. 
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HA!
A few years ago they started testing this charging road thing with public buses in one of the new cities somewhere in Korea. Not sure how that’s going though.
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We should put them everywhere to cut down on traffic. Half of our population will refuse to drive on them “because that’s what the government uses to control your mind, man!”
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Heating all the things :all-the-things-emoji: is part of it but so is the way these cars are engineered. For example, Tesla uses a heat pump to scavenge any available heat to warm the cabin but, has no resistive heating ability so they have all their electronics go into “inefficient” mode (think of an old computer from the 90’s with their noisy fans cooling the internals) to generate heat for the heat pump to scavenge on cold days, hence the beginning heavier load. There have been instances where, when the Tesla heat pump fails, the only available cabin heat is from the seat heaters. VAG, on the flip side, has the same heat pump architecture, since it is hyper efficient but, also has resistive heating capacity for that initial warmup and as backup. The difference between a car designed in warm SoCal and one designed in colder Germany, I guess.
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Kind of on topic, kind of not, but I recently bought an electric vehicle: a class 3 e-bike. On days that it isn’t rainy, I can completely leave my car at home and ride three miles to the nearest MetroRail station, catch a 15-minute train ride, and then another three mile ride to work. Takes about twice as long as driving in no traffic, but it’s decent exercise and on the highest assistance level I don’t turn into a sweaty mess.
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I really like the idea of an E-bike for local commutes.
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I would not do it without the abundant bike lanes in Austin. Not sure what Houston is like in that regard.
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I’m curious, do many other people use that train? About how many are on it when you use it?
It’s pretty empty right now, but we’ll see how long that lasts. Pre-pandemic the train was packed at peak times.
45 years ago I used to ride my bicycle from Westbury (W. Belfort and Chimney Rock) to UH and other than a couple of miles, most of the trip was along Brays Bayou avoiding surface streets.
Bad.
I do not have a commute right now (and may not ever again) but I was looking at e-bikes as an option for good weather days. The problem for me would be that at least half the ride would be on a three-lane “stroad” without bike lanes.
The vast majority of car journeys are with a sole occupant and less than 30 miles. That means that the vast majority of car journeys can be undertaken by e-bike. It’s a chicken and egg though, in that you have to put in the bike infrastructure in order to drive (pun intended) people to take up biking. Right now it’s just too unpleasant and deadly to bike in Houston.
I rode bikes a lot at one point in my life, and would commute downtown from Oak Forest pretty frequently. There is almost always some reasonably save way to get from here to there, but I was a good cyclist and probably stupidly arrogant. The original bike lanes put in by houston seemed to me to be dangerous. The new ones seem quite decent.
That’s exactly my neighborhood and the few times I’ve biked to the bayou for a weekend ride, getting there was pretty harrowing. Once you get to the bayou it’s relatively smooth sailing (there are a lot of flood mitigation projects on Brays that would interfere with it now), but yeah, there are a lot of white knuckle, heart pounding, just peddle as fast as you can stretches in the mile it takes to get to the bayou.
Roads properly designed with multiple types of user in mind are much nicer and much more efficient.
I’ve probably told the story before, but when I lived in Montrose I used to ride my bike to Grif(f)'s. One night, peddling back drunker than Cooter Brown, I was pulled over by Houston’s finest warning me to be careful…that there were a lot of drunks on the road that time of night. Yessir, occifer…
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I may have linked this clip before, but this is what’s horrible about North American urban design. Houston being the poster child for what’s bad…
Riding a bike around Austin on surface streets is easier than anywhere except maybe three or four other cities in the county. A very good friend, is partly responsible for that. He is a crazy cycling enthusiast and when he was on the city council he was able to get millions of dollars spent adding bike lanes. Very pro public transportation too. Of course, he doesn’t own a car. He is so idiosyncratically weird about biking that the conservative AM radio guys constantly made fun of him. He wore that like a badge to be proud of. He didn’t get reelected. Lost to Kathy Tovo.
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