Germany's new incentives for electric cars

Impetus

In Monaco electric cars have an E suffix to the car license plate number, free parking, and lots of charging opportunities, especially in underground car parks (as well as on-street). They also get a tax subsidy. This has been the position for probably a decade, and there is a high use of electric cars in the principality, relative to elsewhere. Electric vans are also in use for commercial purposes - eg mail delivery, provision of local services, etc.

Germany has now announced the adoption of similar incentives, and added in the use of bus lanes by e-cars. Many Irish urban local authorities have badly designed bus lane "systems" - with no predictable, reliable bus service to make use of same. Thus these lanes are empty 90% of the time.

Cork city has totally screwed up its already narrow medieval streets with large amounts of space wasted on bus and bike lanes. Cork is a hilly city in one of the wettest countries in Europe. The last place one would want to cycle regularly, in place of us of a car. The traffic light system in Cork (SCOOT) is based on 40 year old control software is hobbled by inappropriate manually inflicted timing constraints and over-rides to further add to the mess. Dublin’s SCATS traffic control system is even less agile, and less self-correcting. All this needless start-stop driving dictated by appallingly designed traffic light non-systems leads to delay, noise and air pollution and waste of energy.

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/technik-m...-13800399.html

Dynamic greenwaves push 30% more traffic around arterial roads compared with conventional traffic control systems. They use video cameras, mounted up high, to recognise platoon groups of vehicles in advance, turning the lights to green as they approach each stop line. One camera can monitor three+ lanes of traffic flow, giving priority to public transport, and trucks travelling up hills approaching a traffic signal. Less use of brakes. Less acceleration from 0 km/h. Less fuel consumed. The system is programmed to adjust timing minute by minute based on flow direction, and can deal with bi-directional greenwaves. The control system is available via a cloud based service over the internet, and can use existing on street hardware. No need for central computers. Tablet and mobile phone apps are used by local authority employees to fine tune and manage the system. The system is in use in many German and Scandinavian cities.

http://www.mobility.siemens.com/mobility/global/sitecollectiondocuments/en/road-solutions/urban/case-studies-for-traffic-solutions-en.pdf

Nukem

Interesting post - thank you.

Like to hear about the traffic control in Cork & Dublin. Be interested to learn from the Dept. Transport & Energy if they ever intended on upgrading these systems to deliver CO2 savings considering that vehicles are one of the largest contributors to the Irish carbon footprint.

May I ask how you came about this information please?

Impetus

Nukem wrote: »

Interesting post - thank you.

Like to hear about the traffic control in Cork & Dublin. Be interested to learn from the Dept. Transport & Energy if they ever intended on upgrading these systems to deliver CO2 savings considering that vehicles are one of the largest contributors to the Irish carbon footprint.

May I ask how you came about this information please?

I travel a lot, and am curious when I see things working well (or not working). As a federalist, I would suggest that it is the responsibility of urban traffic authorities to update their systems.

Central government departments in my view are a big part of the problem, rather than being part of the solution. Central government is big, bureaucratic, far away (measured in distance terms or at an interaction level) and achieves little, at great cost.

Countries with good public transport and intelligently designed traffic control systems tend to be both federally structured (pushing responsibility down to the lowest level) and non-English speaking.

I therefore doubt if the quaintly named "Department of Transport and Energy" as you put it has any plans or strategy to focus on mobility efficiency - by which I mean getting people or merchandise from X to Y in a minimum of time, using a minimum of non-recurring kWs of raw energy input.

Timmaay

The last report you put up (by Siemens) is interesting, this quote in particular:

Already today, drivers looking for a parking space account for over 40 percent of all inner-city traffic, and that on perfectly ordinary days. On Saturdays just before Christmas, for instance, the proportion may even rise to up to 90 percent.

Capt'n Midnight

Timmaay wrote: »

The last report you put up (by Siemens) is interesting, this quote in particular:

And people who drive into Dublin city centre only account for 20% of retail spending


Wasn't there something about a green GPS which planned routes based on trips with constant movement / less stops or changes of speed so you'd also save fuel and wear and tear ?


As an aside.
From a safety point of view there are quite a few places in Dublin city centre where if you accelerate rapidly to the speed limit and hold it there you can make several sets of lights. Or at least that is the impression.

Nukem

Nukem wrote: »

Interesting post - thank you.

Like to hear about the traffic control in Cork & Dublin. Be interested to learn from the Dept. Transport & Energy if they ever intended on upgrading these systems to deliver CO2 savings considering that vehicles are one of the largest contributors to the Irish carbon footprint.

May I ask how you came about this information please?

It's not C02 we should be concerned with it's cleaning up ou high rate of particulate and Nox emissions from solid fuel burning and Diesel engines.

There is one good reason the U.S banned diesels for passenger vehicles and that's because they have far stricter emissions regulations than Europe !

envaction

Deleted User wrote: »

It's not C02 we should be concerned with it's cleaning up ou high rate of particulate and Nox emissions from solid fuel burning and Diesel engines.

There is one good reason the U.S banned diesels for passenger vehicles and that's because they have far stricter emissions regulations than Europe !

That is true. I think that sometimes we just turn out heads to things like these. The diesels are so bad, that's why I'm glad that we are much stricter than other places.