Inductive chargers work on the same principle that switch-mode power supplies work in your tiny cellphone wall charger works -- it's just a transformer with two loops of wire -- and while each cycle might not move a lot of current and magnetic fields are very weak -- if you cycle fast enough you can move a significant amount of current with relatively small losses.
Once upon a time in the Great City, Hugh L. Carey, one of New York’s best modern governors, and certainly its most underrated, pledged not to raise the 50 cent fare on the subways and buses. Swiftly, the man Carey had picked to chair the system, Richard Ravitch, contradicted him.
The fare, Ravitch explained, was the difference between how much money was needed to properly maintain and operate the system and how much the state, the city and others put in. Math, in other words, not politics.
Afterward, Carey, raised in the gentle arts of Brooklyn politics, summoned Ravitch to dinner at one of the Governor’s favorite midtown watering holes. In the hardball of New York, the menu would be expected to include a dressing down. Which is why to this day Ravitch loves to repeat what the governor actually said next: “Dick, thanks for getting me off the hook. Don’t pay any attention to what I say.”
That was then.
This is now. “Train Daddy” Andy Byford came and went faster than a speeding A train, the casualty of Governor Cuomo’s penchant to “micro-manage” a system he is bound by state law to keep his hands off of.
The new all electric city buses (well excluding the seasonally uses diesel cabin heaters) that CDTA has bought use 488 KWh battery packs to provide roughly 200 miles of range in city traffic for a 10 or 12 hours of operating service. City buses are heavy, they do a lot of stop and go driving, they burn a lot of energy. Diesel buses get 3.5 mpg or burn roughly 55 gallons of diesel for a 200 mile day.
The thing about it is that 400 kWh a day (save 88 kWh to avoid over depletion) or two megawatt hours worth of electricity for a five day service week is an incredible amount of energy when you’re trying to get it from any renewable source. A week operating a single bus is equivalent to burning one ton of coal or the output of 9,000 250 watt solar panels operating for one hour, assuming a real world output of 200 watts on the panels. The energy math of powering a whole urban fleet of buses on solar power or even wind is pretty insane when you think of all the other energy demands of the economy.
I do think electrifying the bus fleet makes environmental sense and provides long term cost savings and flexibility. It is more energy efficient to use electric motors and batteries in city buses as diesel motors pale in efficiency to large power plants and energy efficient electric motors. But the idea that electric buses are going to be powered by renewable anytime soon is pretty silly in my book.
Fare box recoveries are so low, they might as well make it free.
It costs a lot of money to collect money, while most transit systems are heavily reliant on state and federal subsidies -- CDTA relies on 85 percent of it's revenue from sources besides fare boxes. Smaller systems recover even less from the fare box.