@Ronald
Sure, there’s a market for gas delivery too. Why not trucks that deliver fast charging?
That’d make more sense than valet charge stops
jessicah said:
@Ronald
Sure, there’s a market for gas delivery too. Why not trucks that deliver fast charging?
That’d make more sense than valet charge stops
AAA does have trucks that deliver fast charging in some places, usually in an emergency context.
They don’t usually come with restrooms, food, etc. like a target-the-rich chain of DCFC would.
@Ronald
Yeah, but at that point you’ve just described bucees with the chargers closer to the building
Howard said:
Yeah this is a serious problem - and idk if reservations make this worse or better yet. I think worse if not everyone can make them (ie Mercedes charging network in the US)
A condo building in Burnaby just opened with 1,800 charging stations. You are in the wrong town!
My local airport’s cell phone waiting lot has a good model for queueing. The idea is that when coming to pick someone up, you go to the cell phone lot and wait for them to call you to say that they’re ready, and then you go pick them up. The lot is long and narrow, with two lanes down, a turn around, and two lanes back. One lane is for parking and the other is for exiting, so that cars in the middle of the line aren’t trapped.
My favorite fast food place had a queueing model during covid (when everyone used the drive-through) that worked OK; the drive-through line spilled out onto the street and cars would queue up on the shoulder on the same side of the street as the restaurant. As long as people didn’t try to queue from the other direction it worked well, but when they did it caused traffic jams.
Ultimately what we need is for the parking lot to have a place to put a line that is out of the way of traffic and that is not so narrow that people are trapped in it.
There are some great models for how to board a commercial airplane in the most effecient manor. This would save airlines time and $$$. Not a single airline uses them as they rely on the customers following the plan and don’t make first class feel rich. Main problem is people, people can’t follow rules, especially if it’s more complicated than 2 + 2 = 4.
Chargepoint is starting to offer this for their L2 stations I believe I saw. Haven’t come across them in person though
emma said:
Chargepoint is starting to offer this for their L2 stations I believe I saw. Haven’t come across them in person though
the amazon building in arlington va with 100+ stalls offers this
emma said:
Chargepoint is starting to offer this for their L2 stations I believe I saw. Haven’t come across them in person though
I saw some parking ramps in Chicago that required you to buy a ticket to use the chargers in addition to the parking itself. I suspect level 2 parking garages it’s a bit more important for the person to be able to plug in for the 6 hours so the parking garage company saw a money making opportunity.
emma said:
Chargepoint is starting to offer this for their L2 stations I believe I saw. Haven’t come across them in person though
The L2 chargers at my work have this. If all the stations are full, you scan your phone and it puts you in the queue. When your 3 hour limit is up, you get a notification to move your car, once you unplug, the station says the name of the guy it’s blocked for. The next guy can either scan to charge or let someone else take the spot.
This has literally never been a problem before. There’s a charger I go to that can get somewhat busy and there are always calm conversations and chatting.
@jabali
It’s economically impossible to install enough chargers to always meet the absolute peak of demand. As chargers will remain unused most of the time.
What is needed is some queue space when I have never seen any other than the normal roadway.
@jabali
Diminishing returns - each charger I build only has a value to my business if it’s in use or it has brought a customer into my store. It doesn’t matter to me if I make my sale at 9am, or I make it at 10am, so I don’t actually care about people having to wait in a queue.
Yes, it matters a little if people leave the queue and charge elsewhere, but public charging is a “hard” business to be in, so I never expected big profits from charging. So, if the charger gets someone onsite to charge and shop, and they only shop because the charger is full, my charger install is still serving the purpose I bought it for.
So, the benefits of adding another charger are lower than you might otherwise expect, and a DCFC install is very expensive so that’s a lot of people who have to go charge and shop elsewhere before upgrading charging is financially worth it.
(And that’s assume business owners are rational about it.)
@jabali
Cause it’s only crowded during peak hours. If half of those people charged in the morning, there would be no issue. But since nobody wants to be the idiot that gets up half an hour earlier they are all the idiots that wait for two hours.
@jabali
I guess there’s the supply issue too, more chargers sharing the same load means just the same throughput of drivers.
It’s an M/M/N queuing model. Assume the arrival rate is a Markov process with a fixed average arrival rate. Assume the service time is a Markov process with a fixed average service time. There are N servers (chargers). Assume first-in/first-out with no queue departures. As long as the average service time is faster than the average interarrival interval, the queue is bounded. However, as the interarrival time gets close to the service time, the queue length grows quickly. The important measure is utilization, the ratio of the two. You can predict average waiting time and queue length from this.
There have been myriad studies on this (BTW, if you don’t assume an M/M/N queue, the math is intractable). It pertains to bank queues, dial-up modem queues, operating system processing times, highway traffic, and just about any other real life queue.
Yes. Best model is automatic queuing through your car OS. Nio does this. You can only get a swap in Nios case when it is your turn. Would be even better if all cars did it especially at busy charging stations. I hate when there are multiple ways in to a parking lot and you got people waiting on both sides with no obvious way to see who was first and who is next or where you should actually be waiting.
Out of Spec reviewed a Mercedes boutique charging station in Atlanta which has this feature.
It depends on the 2nd person in line to create the line after talking to the first person in line. They then tell the third person to get there where the line is.
It’s a social psych thing.