Smart spaces will fine petrol car owners illegally parking in electric bays

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/smart-spaces-will-fine-drivers-illegally-parking-in-electric-bays-r7t9rwqkf

by Biba89 • 6 years ago

61 133 6 years ago

thetimes.co.uk

ultimoo• 6 years ago

Not sure what's so surprising/interesting about this (I don't have a subscription to read the full article). This nugget in the introduction seems to summarize the tech behind this --

Sensors installed in electric bays can be used to detect the presence of a vehicle and whether it is being used to recharge the car battery.

sandworm10113• 6 years ago

So it will fine an electric car that parks in the bay if it isn't charging? These are not really parking spots anymore. They are "charging bays". That's cool. Just remember not to park your electric car there with a full battery. I guess if your battery is full, by the time you drive around a while looking for another spot it will be low enough that you will be allowed to use the bay.

The few times I've tried to charge an EV at a public non-tesla charging point, it has been a real hassle. The multitude of protocols mean that sometimes it just doesn't work. I'd be very not happy if that meant I would then have to find another spot.

Perhaps there is a market for a defeat device, a plug that simulates an electric car, like those HDMI/VGA simulators used to trick motherboards into thinking they are attached to a screen. It probably wouldn't need much of a resistor to simulate minimal charging rates.

paledot4• 6 years ago

They're not parking spots.

Don't park next to a gas pump if you're not putting gas in the car, even if it has an internal combustion engine.

labawi• 6 years ago

It probably wouldn't need much of a resistor to simulate minimal charging rates.

Resistor wouldn't be a huge problem. A heat sink might be - the chargers typically support 5-50kW¹ charging rates. I'm not sure they would consider 100W or so "charging", so you might end up with something bulky.

¹ a guesstimate

mft_• 6 years ago

Maybe I’ve been lucky, but here in the EU, I’ve not yet found a non-Tesla charger that won’t charge my Tesla.

And also, the mobility+ app (no affiliation) has dealt fine with multiple brands of charger.

ogre_codes5• 6 years ago

Perhaps there is a market for a defeat device, a plug that simulates an electric car, like those HDMI/VGA simulators used to trick motherboards into thinking they are attached to a screen. It probably wouldn't need much of a resistor to simulate minimal charging rates.

EV parking isn't that premium or common where this would be valuable. Also, this kind of anti-social behavior is a good way to get your car keyed when someone rolls up and needs 10 miles of power to get home and sees a jerk in a non EV in the only charging spot.

hannob3• 6 years ago

It's surprising because car drivers are used to the fact that rules are not or rarely enforced.

Just think about it: Technically it would be no big problem to enforce speed limits widely. The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex, you could mass-produce them and deploy them basically in every street. I'm not aware of any country doing that.

telotortium• 6 years ago

Maybe not in the US, but in both France and China, to name two countries I've been to, speed cameras were obvious on the highways and actually sent out fines.

choeger5• 6 years ago

The same holds for a lot of other rules, from public transportation tickets over legal fireworks and drinking age to softer drugs and taxes. Society as a whole seems to be generally fine with smaller infractions and I consider this a good thing, tbh. I would be perfectly fine with a similar scheme for traffic laws.

The thing with speeding cameras is that they could easily be adjusted to allow for 20% (say at most 20kph) margin (which would be perfectly fine for me even on the German Autobahn), but drivers would learn that fact and adjust perfectly to just 1kph below that limit. This would then enrage puritans that would DEMAND that these MURDERES be PUNISHED. Sadly for some reason traffic law is an area of zero tolerance for some.

orangeshark• 6 years ago

See red light cameras. You recieve a ticket through the mail and you get pictures and a video of the violation. There is a lot of people against it and some governments have legistation against the use of it.

sandworm10113• 6 years ago

> The technology for speeding cameras

Speed cameras are not the go-to tech. Nearly every car on the road has a GPS, either organic to the vehicle or inside the driver's phone. If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information.

This was done by a few rental car companies many moons ago (circa 2001). Speeding laws don't know how to account for such data. Should someone speeding continuously over many miles be fined more or less than someone who speeds twice, each time only for a short distance? Traffic laws are premised on the systems by which people are caught (cops, traffic cameras etc). They are not adapted to the perfect knowledge that modern tech can provide.

https://www.drivers.com/article/428/

Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular speed while on public roads. Japanese motorcycles are already limited by industry agreement, iirc 300kph (see the Hyabusa fiasco). Merc/BMW cars are limited to 250kph. Those limit could be lowered via a simple software patch.

PurpleFoxy• 6 years ago

An interesting method that is widely used in Australia is “average speed cameras”. They set up 2 sets of cameras on a long highway and then time how long it took you to get from one camera to the next. It’s an excellent idea because you can’t just slow down for the camera and then speed up again.

davchana3• 6 years ago

Absolutely correct about the technology. Qatar is doing that.

I lived in Qatar for 7 years, drove a car. All speed cameras are not visible. Some are marked with sign boards, but many are hidden permanently on a lamp post, or in a palm tree, or in anything. There are even mobile cameras, which an operator puts on a heavy tripod, & goes away, & camera takes photos of offenders & send back to data centre. Cameras are on highways, on streets, on intersections. Every traffic signal has built in camera. Fines go up progressively with each offense & over the limit. Owner of car gets a mobile notification as soon as his car speeds in front of camera. All fines are payable fully at yearly registration. If paid in some x days, there is a discount.On Holy Month of Ramadan also sometimes there is a discount.

The biggest is, there is no need of a man standing behind camera. Two photos taken apart a second or such are the proof. Owner can only contest it if he has gps recordings. Speed limit is speed limit. No +5 or +10.

But then, fine amount stings only if they are enough. For an expat like me, a fine of $200 is a lot. For a local Qatari 20ish year boy, thats nothing. Some of my photography club members had fines in tunes of $2500 a year, & totally normal.

hansvm3• 6 years ago

We'd probably need a few other societal changes to make automatic enforcement of the posted speed limit manageable. As an example, if you're on a 50mph road in the USA and assume that your speedometer is calibrated within legal tolerances (and no further) then you'd have to set your cruise control to at most 43mph to ensure that you'd never speed (5mph speedometer error at that speed plus 2mph in speed variability from bumps/hills/etc), you could actually be averaging as low as 39mph in practice, and somebody else behind you with a speedometer off the other direction could think you're going as slowly as 35mph (on average, slower from time to time). I can say from experience that doing so is an easy way to be flipped off, sworn at, passed on the shoulder or a sidewalk, and have police called to your location (occasionally driving the speed limit plus 0-10mph results in similar levels of aggression), even though you can potentially be ticketed for going even a mile per hour faster (most police forces allow a lot more slop in your speed for precisely that kind of reason, but there are definitely a few who don't give a shit because they know you don't want to drive all the way back to the middle of nowhere to fight it) and even though driving that slowly is totally legal in most places.

None of that is insurmountable of course, and the easiest fix seems like just having the automated system only ticket you at some threshold above the limit while grandfathering in tighter speedometer tolerances. Aggression from driving the speed limit would probably decrease rapidly as tickets started arriving in the mail.

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Technically it would be no big problem to enforce speed limits widely

More than you suggest.

The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex

But speed cameras are just one piece of enforcement. With those and automatic license plate reading you get a piece of evidence that a car violated the limit at a particular time and place, but even if the law is that a set limit is a hard limit (which is not the case in much of the US, where posted limits are often prima facie but not dispositive limits), that's not all you need for enforcement. You also need legal process to weigh potential counterevidence, to deal with contested identity of actual drivers, etc. This isn't technically complex, but it adds a lot of overhead, which is why even places which legally allow this mechanism deploy it selectively, not comprehensively.

kwhitefoot4• 6 years ago

Would be better to spend the money that this will cost on fitting a simple domestic socket in every parking bay. That we even my Tesla will gain 13 km per hour of charging.

jfk13• 6 years ago

Running power -- even just 13A power -- to every parking bay, not to mention ensuring those "simple domestic sockets" are safe to use in all weather conditions, will probably make this quite a bit more expensive than you think.

kwhitefoot4• 6 years ago

Outdoors rated 13A sockets are readily available in every electrical supply shop along with the necessary RCDs. We have similar things here in Norway and have done for at least forty years and we get much worse weather than the UK. I mean they can be buried in the snow, never seems to be a problem.

In case you wonder why we had them they were for car engine preheaters. Handy when it is -20C and snowing.

gambiting8• 6 years ago

I'm still eagerly awaiting explanation on how this is going to work with terraced houses where there's about 40 houses on each side and people park how and where they want, and most importantly where the local council barely has enough money to fix the worst potholes. But suddenly they are going to dig up a 300 year old street to put down enough cabling and charging points for every car. My question is "with what money".

chrisseaton3• 6 years ago

Can lampposts be adapted?

882• 6 years ago

So charge your vehicle at your workplace, or at the shops, or at a dedicated charging station?

In the medium term, if this becomes a real problem, properties will be devalued and owners can decide whether it’s worth contributing to the cost of installing the infrastructure.

In the long term, most people won’t have private vehicles, so there won’t be any need to store and charge them on public roads.

ClumsyPilot5• 6 years ago

"My question is "with what money"."

This is a good question, we know that total cost of ownership of the charging network for cars is massively lower than that of petroleum infrastructure. So the problem is not shortage of money, but alighning incentives and investment. I believe this needs to be done through a large-scale national program, where central govermnet provides granta for modernising cities for efficiench: that includes charge points, insulation and enegy efficiency, etc. All those measures result in long-term savings, and we have record low interest rates

ogre_codes5• 6 years ago

My question is "with what money".

If people want to charge their electric cars and live in a place where it's difficult to do so, that is their problem.

Most places with super dense housing like you describe are probably in fairly dense urban areas where other forms of transportation are probably better regardless.

tillinghast• 6 years ago

Not if we park there hard enough.

dawnerd2• 6 years ago

So if a car stops charging for whatever reason (fault, someone unplugs, finished charging) they get fined too since they're not actively charging? Seems like a system with more potential problems than it solves.

In general I'm against any system that automatically fines people.

sys_64738• 6 years ago

This is in Britain where they constantly foist such automation on the unsuspecting public.

cameronh902• 6 years ago

Why do you think we're against it?

mattlondon• 6 years ago

Most charge points charge extra if you are sitting in the bay but have completed charging anyway as I understand it.

I also think that for safety reasons you cannot just unplug a charging EV car without stopping th charge first (i.e. a child cannot just walk up and knock the plug out etc).

If there is a fault in the charger, then I expect a "smart" parking spot to deal with that.

To be honest, the better approach in my mind is to put the electric charging bays further away from the entrance to the store or whatever. Quite often EV charging spaces are some of the "best" (i.e. closest) spaces available. Selfish pricks who want to park right by the door don't care if it is a disabled space, an EV space, or not even an official parking space at all - they'll just park where they want. Move the EV charging spaces further away from the store and you'll solve 99% of ICE'ings I reckon.

ianai2• 6 years ago

Agree. Particularly if they’re going to be parked there for hours. This depends on the installer and person paying for the outlet though. I’ve seen both situations.

ClumsyPilot5• 6 years ago

Selfish pricks who want to park right by the door don't care if it is a disabled space, an EV space, or not even an official parking space at all

Seems like the right behaviour to discourage, just like littering, etc

dawnerd2• 6 years ago

Completely agree with the completed charging is a bad move but that problem is solved with idle fees.

Also you absolutely can remove a charger while its going and I've had it happen multiple times on my M3 when charging at a L2. I do get a notification but like.

But yes, spot on just put the chargers where no one wants to park. They keep installing them right at the front of stores and wondering why people ICE them.

teh_klev• 6 years ago

Sans Paywall:

https://archive.is/CS0yx

Smart spaces will fine petrol car owners illegally parking in electric bays

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