Re: i want some fish n chips...

On 2007-11-18, Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]

and Piaggio make scooters with two wheels
at the front.

Isn't that more a trike than anything else?

Look at the MP3 models here <http://www.piaggio-center.co.uk/piaggio.php>;

Hmm - interesting, but expensive at £5k, and why have the extra wheel if
you don't get to leave your lid at home? I'd rather stick with a
bicycle than one of those, I think.

The selling points are apparently to do with shorter braking distances

It might be an advantage, but you should ride in a fashion where the
difference is irrelevant. On the few occasions I've come a cropper due
to not having enough space to brake, full 1G braking wouldn't have saved
me.

However, I might have a different opinion after trying one of these
strange three wheelers in the wet. With ABS, it'd be like magic, I
reckon.

Particularly for the rider on the traditional two-wheeler following a bit
closely ... I've had a normal Vespa rammed from behind by a courier on a
midleweight Honda motorcycle; he got a two-wheel skid when I had to do an
emergency stop for a car changing lanes without warning. I was only doing
about 20 at the time, and I doubt if the courier was going much quicker.
So if those two-in-front scooters can out-stop a normal scooter, which
seems reasonable to expect, I can imagine a few surprised bikers.

and better cornering, and being able to stop and engage the 'tilt lock'
(or whatever they call it) instead of putting your feet down and getting
your Gucci shoes all wet (or fighting with your tight skirt, presumably,
if so clad).

But you've got to clamber out and put your feet down at some point,
surely? And if it's raining, you'd better be wearing weather protection
or you're going to get wet anyway.

You haven't noticed the scooters with 'aprons' covering the rider's lower
half in wet or cold weather? People who chose scooters tend to be the
sort who don't want to dress up in special clothes - they want as much
car-like comfort and cleanliness as possible.

They are also self-supporting when parked, so there's no need
to lift them onto a stand, which would appeal to the less gorrilla-like
types.

Modern bikes are often missing a centre-stand. Side stands all round,
so it seems - although it seems that with scooters, they're more
inclined to have the centre stand and be missing the side stand
(sensible way round if you ask me).

I expect very heavy bikes are seldom lifted onto a centre-stand even if
there is one, but if your bike has to lean over when parked it isn't going
to be very welcome in crowded urban bike-parks where the machines often
end up touching each other on both sides.

They certainly seem to be better conceived than this old one
<http://www.oldclassiccar.co.uk/photos-cars2/bsa_ariel_3_99.htm#BSA Ariel 3>
which was justifiably rare even when new.

There are some very odd old vehicles, aren't there? But it looks like
quite a neat bit of kit, actually - and I'm intrigued by the cantilever
mounted wheels, which indicates to me that there might well be other
fancy engineering within.

I'm sure there is, but fancy bits inside didn't make it a 'better' bike;
they were very noisy and uncomfortable-looking on city streets, and slower
than most mopeds, and I think only one of the rear wheels was driven so
the handling would have been decidedly quirky. There were springs to
'assist' keeping the front half upright, which I suspect would take some
getting used to. They were also up against the 'sixteener specials' which
were much more attractive to most of the moped-buying punters at the time;
boy racers did not want something that looks like mum's shopping trolley -
even one of the old-fashioned NSUs or Raleighs would have been preferable.

I came across one mentioned on a (real-life-type) auction Web site -
sold in 2004 for £70!

the two front wheels are quite close together and the vehicle 'banks' like
a two-wheeler, and they are legally classed as motorcycles for licencing,
tax, etc.

And helmet wearing, I suspect - which irks many. But aside from that:
`coo'!

Quite different from the Vespa trike goods vehicles in Italy or
the Indian tuk-tuk taxis.

Indeed. But still: two wheels is bicycle, while three is tricycle.

Technically, yes. Tilting trikes are a very intriguing idea
<http://www.maxmatic.com/ttw_index.htm>.

Yet more! I do quite like the idea. I still like two wheels, mind - I
quite like the semi-enclosed two wheelers like the old Quasar.

<http://www.angib.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ff/quasar0.html>

Recliners have problems with seeing where you're going, especially in
traffic, and getting your feet down when stopping - at least the
pedal-cycle types do. I don't think there's really much of a future for
two-wheelers with rooves, but narrow-track tilting trikes that can keep
themselves upright when stationary or crawling are a very attractive idea
and would make total enclosure viable.

I'd quite like to have go with one of the more modern
Messerchmitt-style bubble-cars.

I want to see the good electric ones turning up.

[snip]

I don't want to be tied to a mains plug for re-charging - not easy to
arrange from an upstairs flat!

I hadn't thought of that. Hmm. Foolish child.

But I reckon that as and when, that issue will be dealt with 'cos
electric is the way it's going and a lot of people live in flats. But
it's a point I'd not considered myself - well, I've even got a garage on
the side of the house, I have (I am basically a creature of the
suburbs).

Not sure what the solution will be, mind.

Road-side charging points are technically feasible, but I can see the oil
companies and the anti-street-clutter lobbies getting heated about
installing them in every street (and the 50 or so households in my close
fighting over the ten parking places). Communal vehicles rather than one
per household are a partial answer, but they bring their own problems.

The problem with road-side charging is not the clutter but how to get
the right person paying for the electricity

'Smart cards' or even mechanical keys would probably take care of that.

and the cost of installing
the kit in the first place.

That would call for public subsidy, I think.

Methods for avoiding clutter could include
magnetic induction loops for power transfer,

Could people park that precisely? There would also be problems with
interference with heart pacemakers, mobile phones, radio and TV
broadcasts, etc, I think, as well as identifying who to charge for the
power and how to turn it on an off. Plugs and sockets ('induction loop'
rather than mechanical pins, for safety's sake) are much more likely.

or mounting sockets into
existing street furniture such as lamp-posts.

There would need to be one post per parking-space, or at least one between
two, like traditional parking meters, unless long cables were to become
tolerated. New-build streets could have 'island parking' built in so that
vehicles could cluster in fours or sixes around a central pillar, but that
would be difficult to add to existing streets. Around here, such
lamp-posts as there are tend to be placed on the property-line side of the
pavement rather than on the kerb, so using them to hold charging points
would effectively block the pavements - unless some sort of over-head
gantry were installed (which would require a supporting structure of its
own, of course).

Petrol station companies
might see road-side charging as an opportunity: how about `pay per
charge' roadside boxes operated by Shell?

Not inpossible.

Lack of range, and the time it takes to re-charge, are also serious
problems for electric vehicles and we don't have sensible means of
overcoming those yet.

Oh yes we do. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Charging>

`In 1995, some charging stations charged BEVs in one hour. In November
1997, Ford purchased a fast-charge system produced by AeroVironment
called "PosiCharge" for testing its fleets of Ranger EVs, which charged
their lead-acid batteries in between six and fifteen minutes. In
February 1998, General Motors announced a version of its "Magne Charge"
system which could recharge NiMH batteries in about ten minutes,
providing a range of sixty to one hundred miles.[21]

[...]

I reckon 250 miles range before needing a 1 minute recharge (and that's
what we'll be seeing on the road in about five years, I reckon; takes
time for the developments to come to market) would be fine by most
people.

The oft-prophesied rapid charging systems seem to be remarkably slow in
hitting the streets; there is an obvious market fors such things, for all
sorts of portable gadgets quite apart from vehicles, so demand can't be
what's holding things up.

There's also a cunning plan intended for electric buses: don't bother
building the bus with a big battery pack or super-fast charging
technology, just charge the thing via a magnetic induction loop at every
bus stop.

Might as well build a trolly-bus system and do away with batteries
entirely. Using induction loops in the public roads for power delivery
sounds to me like a recipe for disaster, but trolly-buses are well
understood and well within our existing abilities to build - given the
encouragement. I've always though that the excuses for abandoning trams
and trolly-buses in the UK were spurious at the time, and the pressure for
re-introducing them is growing.

Hydrogen is tricky stuff (although not as dangerous
as it's often depicted, as long as it isn't stored at liquifying pressures)
and fuel-cells are a long way from being 'green' to make and dispose of -
as well as costing a huge amount.

I can't say I've seen anything in fuel cell construction that ought to
be a toxic hazard or similar. I'd guess that they were pretty much
fully recyclable from reading about 'em. You'd certainly want to
recover that palladium...

Mining and extracting such metals isn't 'clean', nor are they cheap.
There is some hope that cheaper catalysts might turn up - or that
biological systems for converting hydrogen (or methane) into electricity
can be made practical. (A car that makes somthing like Marmite or
lava-bread in its exhaust might just catch on!)

The hydrogen-powered buses on order
for use in London, cost almost ten times as much as diesel buses; and
hydrogen stored as a gas /will/ leak - the molecules can pass through most
solids so a leak-proof tank is just a dream.

Umm. My dad used to work with a leak-proof tank that held liquid helium
- and it was entirely leak-free. It had to be - any leak, any leak at
all, and you lose helium very quickly indeed and that's expensive. They
did have a leak once and it took a lot of work to find and fix - very,
very expensive work. All those cryogenic NMR machines have coils
sitting in liquid helium, contained inside a leak-free casing. And if
they can do it with liquid helium (the trickiest thing to seal up in the
known universe), they can do it with hydrogen.

Valves are trickier, mind - but a big tank of liquid helium needs a
vent, not a sealing valve...

The big question is `Can the engineers come up with kit that'll do the
job as well in the context of ordinary road vehicles'. Given their
track record, I reckon the answer is `yes'. So I'd not worry about
leaking hydrogen at all.

The buses destined for London carry the hydrogen in gas form, not
liquified. On the roof of the bus, in full sunlight. Nothing cryo going
on there.

The only advantage they
offer is that the particle and gas pollution they create will happen
wherever the hydrogen is 'made' rather than on the streets of central
London

Not the only one: an efficient industrial process to create the hydrogen
will probably result in an overall efficiency increase, so there will be
less pollution per mile in total. Oh, internal combustion engines with
reciprocating (reciprocating, I ask you!) pistons are just stupid -
stupidly inefficient, stupid everything. Think huge industrial plants
making hydrogen in an efficient, steady flow way. Think enormous
multi-stage steam turbines in the power station wringing every last
available joule out of the high pressure steam feed from the low-loss
boiler fed by an incredibly efficient burner.

What's fitted inside a car just can't compete with that.

No, but transmision of electricity isn't 100% efficient - and storing it
in rechargeable batteries is a long way from 100%. Moving hydrogen around
isn't as easy as doing it with petrol or diesel.

(and electric trams or trolly-buses would do that at least as
effectively, and probably more cheaply in the long run).

Well, an electric bus with `every stop recharging' might do as well as
trolly-bus and work out cheaper, not to mention not buggering up the
skyline with lots of ugly overhead wires.

'Might' can't compete with 'already can', and the overhead tram-wires need
not be as intrusive as all that - the supports and gantries don't have to
be any less elegant than street-lamps usually are, and I think the wires
are a small price to pay for clean, quiet, reliable, public transport.

And as electricity generation moves over to non-fossil fuel sources, the
emissions will drop. Not only that, but even coal power stations emit
much, much cleaner exhaust than do motor vehicles - at least, the ones
in the UK do.

Going nuclear is the only viable alternative to fossil fuels we have at
present; wind and wave power are far from being up to the demand, and have
problems of their own with environmental concerns and matching the timing
of production and demand.

Veg oil would be the preferred fuel, I
think.

Fuel production shouldn't take land from food production.

No, indeed not, while some people are hungry. But we can grow stuff we
can't eat, and it makes more sense to use any surplus as fuel for machines
to generate electricity or transport than to feed it to cows or make
processed foods to make westerners obese.

I don't see that it makes sense to stop meat production, because I don't
see any way to manage a balanced agricultural economy without using
animals to put back what's taken out by plants, if you see what I mean.
Said Mr Organic.

Humans are animals, when it comes to fertiliser. But I'm not saying we
should all go totally vegetarian - that wouldn't work, even if everyone
wanted it to; what I object to is burning fragile rain-forest to grow GM
soya to feed to cows for hamburgers that people would be healthier
without, or palm-oil to make confectionary and the 'trans-fats' and
'hydrogenated vegetable oil' and so on in margarine and other processed
foods that are making us all unhealthy. Or getting poor farmers into a
trap where they can't earn enough to buy food from growing their sugar or
coffee and haven't got enough land left over for growing their own food.
(And don't mention patented seeds and GM crops that demand expensive
chemicals).

But aside from that: while we *can* grow stuff we can't eat, we
shouldn't be doing that if the land can be used to produce useful food
while the world still has hunger problems. It's happening now and it's
causing starvation *NOW* because it's put grain prices up *NOW!*.

US corn growers can get a better price by selling to ethanol-for-fuel
buyers in the US than by selling to foreigners for food, but that could
change. I do dissaprove most strongly of the current trend for growing
palm-oil and other such things for making into bio-diesel, in areas where
the people would be much better advised to grow stuff they can eat - and
probably would, if their own governments weren't so desperate for exports.

The policy of growing biofuel feedstock is *ALREADY* killing the poor by
starvation. And I'm hopping mad.

Thing is, starvation's caused by lack of money,

Among other things. It really comes down to international politics and
corruption.

not by a global shortage
of food. The situation isn't simple - but... But if the starving poor
see fields being used for biofuels and not human food, they're going to
riot and they'll have my encouragement.

Another thing is that Brazil didn't have any problems when it started
with alcohol-run vehicles - but that is, I assume, because it already
had lots of sugar plantations and they're just there to make money -
sugar's not exactly a required part of anyone's diet. So it doesn't
matter what you do with your sugar just so long as you sell it.

It seems to me that what we could do usefully is use waste products as
biofuel feedstock, and only put land over to biofuel production if that
won't put up the price or reduce the availability of human food.

I agree with that.

This is eco-friendly technology
that we can do right now and it works, and the more ways there are to be
free of fossil fuel, the better for world peace and for pollution
reduction.

I dunno about `world peace' - the oil producers might be kicking up a
fuss. On the other hand, nations like China and Japan are 100% for
anything at all that'll reduce the amount of fossil fuel burning - just
so long as it's economically and technically sensible (in China, they
don't even have to worry about it being socially acceptable: the
authorities can just do stuff). And the EU is all for `going green'.
So while N. America, the Middle East, and Russia might be against
sanity, they can't do a thing: who can withstand a bureaucratic
onslaught from the EU? Very few - and Chinese bureaucracy is possibly
worse in some ways, albeit possibly a bit less persistent.

There's not
enough waste veg oil to power us all on the road.

But what there is might as well be used by someone - and it does get us
back to the chippy :))

Indeed - thing is, I can't help feeling that there are better things to
do with waste than to just burn it straight off. On the other hand, the
basic idea of only using waste as biofuel feedstock is a good principle
to work on, I think.

That's roughly the direction the EU seems to be taking; adding 'up to x%
bio-fuel' to all diesel supplies, rather than encouraging a proliferation
of 100% bio-diesel outlets or converting engines to run on 'pure vegetable
oil' - although individual people or enterprises can and do do that.

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~
.

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