Wirelessly Charged Buses Being Tested Next Year 245
An anonymous reader writes "From the article: 'Bombardier's electric transit technology will be tested next winter on buses in Montreal, followed in early 2014 on a route in the German city of Mannheim. The transportation giant's Primove technology is designed to allow buses to be charged by underground induction stations when they stop to let passengers hop on and off.' This technology while impressive may not make it to the U.S. even if proven successful due to the lack of popularity of public transportation. If they could only get my phone to charge wirelessly."
The article says that the induction charging stuff could also be used to charge trains.
Chicago is better then other citys and price is be (Score:3, Informative)
Chicago is better then other citys and price is better then driving in and parking also faster and less stress some times when walking you have to deal with turning cars that can stack up.
Bad Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with public transportation? (Score:3, Informative)
In to work
Drive: 20 minutes
Bus: 45 minutes, two transfers.
Out of work
Drive: 20 minutes
Bus: 1:30, two transfers.
Re:Why not popular? (Score:3, Informative)
Plus the bus schedules never line up with work schedules. Might have to get up at 4AM to catch the 5AM bus in order to work at 7. And god forbid you miss the bus and the next one isn't until two hours later. Then if you have to work on a weekend shift or late hours... Bus? Nope!
There's only a few major metropolitan areas where buses are any good. (Usually about 15 min apart in those cases.) Head out to the burbs or anywhere else and buses tend to really suck. (They're pretty much neglected in the U.S. in a manner similar to bicycle and pedestrian friendly transportation infrastructure. In other words: If you live in the U.S. outside of a major large city and don't have a car, you're gonna have a bad time.)
Tried in California in the 1980s. (Score:4, Informative)
CALTRANS had an induction-charged bus [latimes.com] deployed in Berkeley in the 1980s. It required precise parking at bus stops, so the two halves of the split transformer could connect magnetically. The system worked OK, but wasn't a huge win.
GE once patented a system where an entire lane had transformers, so vehicles could run on ground power. That was too expensive. It would cost like a maglev track.
Re:(repost) Welcome to falling behind China (Score:4, Informative)
I thought the whole point of supercaps is that they DONT lose capacity, i.e they can be cycled faster and more times than conventional batteries.