Very cool to see how you've aggregated so many products into one service. How do you plan to compete with FMTC and others that aggregate feeds together? Speaking as a publisher, I'd not want to share commission unless absolutely necessary and would prefer to just pay a fee so I can access the feed and not have an unknown amount of revenue lost between myself and the merchant.
As a brand running a program, I'd be very cautious about allowing my feed into your database if I didn't have any way to finding out who is featuring my products and where/how. Are you providing visibility to the brands since you're effectively functioning as a sub-affiliate network?
Those questions aside, great to see YC funding a startup in the space!
> The low density of Charlotte means a transport network like Munich’s is not viable, but the city could take its pre-existing light rail network and join it up to the extensive network of railroad lines around the city that are currently used only for moving freight.
This is not a feasible option due to the vast difference in crashworthiness standards between US freight rail and other system types such as light rail. The FRA actually prohibits allowing these two types on the same network of tracks at the same time. However, they could use a line along the right-of-way were it big enough to accommodate another set of tracks.
This actually changed fairly recently in 2018 and European rolling stock, including tram trains are allowed under alternative compliance regulations.
Older American regulations favor pure buff strength. European regulations tend to emphasize making collisions impossible by using signalling and automatic emergency stop braking, and then crumple zones and other safety technologies. And the US has ended up adopting similar signalling regulations anyways with PTC, so now it is perfectly fine to allow European rolling stock. We already emphasize safety technologies over buff strength in US car regulations.
Interesting - I wasn't aware this covered tram-trains. I was under the impression it only granted the exception to lighter off-the-shelf EU equipment like Stadler FLIRT or Siemens Desiro.
It's the same safety regime - the way tram-trains work (the only way they can work really) is by being compliant with the regulations that apply to regular trains.
In quite a few cases, old rail right-of-ways near cities are large enough for an extra track or few. Because, back in the heyday of American railroads, they either had another track or few, or they expected to.
The biggest issue is often bridges. Retaining the land that additional track(s) were on is fairly cheap. Building and maintaining rail bridges is not.
And building the light rail bridges for a transit system is not cheap. It's just less horribly expensive than building bridges which you could run strings of 220-ton freight locomotives over.
Funny reason there used to be double tracks almost everywhere that is now single tracked: while the government granted the property to the railroads, they still excised a tax over the portion of that land used by the railroads, so in the 70s when companies were going bankrupt left and right they tore up their own infrastructure to reduce the tax burden. Hell of a fuckup.
To really be usable - by revenue-generating trains - track has to receive regular maintenance. Which costs money. If your RR is desperately short on both revenue-generating trains and money, then it's kinda obvious that you cut the no-longer-necessary expenses.
And railroad rails are steel, generally weighing 100+ pounds per yard. Scrap steel sold for far fewer dollars per ton in the '70's - but you get about 200 tons per mile of unused track that you tear up.
Is there a reason you couldn't build new light rail trains to a higher level of crashworthiness than they are currently? I don't know the full details, but that's how tram-trains in Sheffield, UK were allowed access to the main railway network.
Unfortunately no. The main difference is mass - US trains are vastly heavier than anything in the UK so by the time you make a tram crashworthy it isn't a tram any longer.
That said, I believe the FRA did allow lighter designs such as the Siemens FLIRT for commuter lines so the rules are definitely less onerous.
After a couple train crashes the FRA mandated PTC signalling everywhere, and in a world in which trains come to an automatic stop unless explicitly authorized to operate in the next segment, the old buff strength rules are not as important.
Also, the old buff strength rules were not great at keeping people alive. 25 people died in the Chatsworth train collision that led to the PTC mandate, which compares poorly to a similar crash between two trains in Germany which killed 12. There is a reason why buff strength has not been the criteria for automobiles for decades.
It’s done in various places. NJ Riverline is an example. There are a bunch of others.
The bigger problem is the freights just have no interest in sharing the tracks with passenger trains, and requiring heavier and more expensive passenger trains is a convenient way to price the project to death.
How does this work for say, the New York and Atlantic Railway which runs freight trains on the same tracks as the Long Island Rail Road? There are stations where a freight train passes through while a passenger train is behind it.
This is similar to something we've been doing for a while. Instead of individual agents we are creating many iterations and sub-iterations of spawned agents that are largely autonomous. A lot of the human-centric paradigms just don't really apply to LLMs/AI but people are used to approaching them that way.
I think the app will be for plug-and-charge users, while they'll have credit card readers for everyone else.
I do agree that chargers requiring an app are a royal pain. We're an all-EV household and I don't bother with local chargers that don't have readers or support plug-and-charge. There's a lot of Shell chargers in our area that require an app to work and almost no-one uses them because of how clunky it is.
The article says the app is the primary way to activate the charger (scan a QR code on the dispenser) while they'll have credit card terminals for states that require it.
It will likely work for Walmart because as of 2021 the Walmart app had 120 million active monthly users [1]. That's almost half of the US adult population.
For all of those people, using the chargers won't require downloading some new clunky app that they only have because of EV charging.
It will be that an app they already have and use regularly and already have their payment information adds EV charging to the list of Walmart goods and services that they already use it for.
Teslas do not need any app for charging. I mean sure, they do have an app, but no need to even have the app on the phone or with you to charge. No need for a phone or a credit card or a code or a password or a chip or a retina scan or interacting with a screen or tapping a keypad or anything. Just plug the plug into the car at the supercharger and it charges. Or, do it at home, cheaper.
Very cool. If you could also make a smaller one with ~3kw output that fits on a locomotive frame you'd literally have the entire freight rail industry the world over as customers.
Would you though? A lot of freight lines in europe are already electric, wouldn't it be much more efficient to have a stationary high-power reactor than carrying around a smaller one on each locomotive?
I think maintaining thousands of miles of wire and one large powerplant would be cheaper than maintaining thousands of small mobile reactors, but that's just speculation of course. And most of the wire has to already be there anyways for passenger transport, I think, because many rail lines are used by cargo and people. Unless every train should have a reactor?
The underlying technology does not exist in a production form, to the extent that it's not clear which basic reactor design option is going to be the future. So we can't know what the maintenance burden from a fisson rector is, much less one mounted on a train. Don't plan on tearing down those overhead cables just yet.
In europe sure, in the US most of freight rail isn't and companies operating those rail roads don't want to spend money on eletrifying railroads.
Currently they're trying to gas light us that hydrogen-hybrid locomotives are the futures (why not use diesel-hybrid locomotives that already exist is a mistery)
trains in the US have electric motors that actually make the wheels turn.
The issue with the US is the distances trains have to go. Mostly short distance trains will be(are?) fully electric but long distance and frieght is diesel series hybrid engines.
Sorry, I wasn't clear in my comment. I was talking about trains that can use grid or diesel engine to power those electric motors.
And hydrogen comment was about this: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/usdot-announc... . My tinfoil hat theory is that every carbon-fuel company pushing for hydrogen knowing well it's energy density isn't enough, so the experiment will fail, and they're going back to diesel saying that green tech isn't ready.
I'm still confused, but that's ok. I spoke to why we don't use electric trains in the US, because the distances are too far and the terrain is too varied. The rockies, the cascades, just to get imports from west to east. No matter what, the power plant will have to be on the freight trains in the US. In the US, all freight trains are electric series hybrids, with diesel power plants.
I doubt hydrogen will ever go, because people like me will say "Hindenburg, but already on the ground where it can do the most damage, plus moving at 50-80MPH"
I get that, but US freight doesn't want to eletrify railnetwork at all. From my understading this is because even where it's totatly doable, but financially not feasable for various reasons (IIRC one of them are double stacked containers?).
4.5MW of power for GE 6000 locomotive (might be incorrect but it comports with other comments here), and i routinely see freight trains with 3 or more locomotives (i've seen way more than 3, but i don't have a picture or anything). In the midwest, where it's flat, trains can be miles long. I've counted over 250 on a single train before. and that's 4+ locomotives, so >18,000,000 watts.
I guess they could keep freight trains real short so they're single engine, but that's still 4 and a half million watts stall. Each one can move itself plus at least 10,000 tonnes (i don't know the conversions, nor care, it's a lot of mass) The world record is 82,000 tonnes, 4.5 miles long, 682 cars, 8 locomotives - in Australia, with american locomotives, hauling iron ore.
I have to ask, are you from or in the US?
GE does make a battery powered locomotive, designed to be used for regenerative braking, it can run at full power by itself for a half hour or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabtec_FLXDrive 3,200,000 watts.
3kW output? I think you mean 5MW output... large electric locomotives are in 2.5 to 3.5MW continuos power. Some diesel-electric huge ones are even larger, like 5MW.
> Some will be mystified how study of railways, maps and fish trading has anything to do with cognitive neuroscience and representing space.
Commenting as someone who loves railways, maps and fish(ing) this is both a novel thought and endlessly fascinating. I fear you've provided me another rabbit hole to explore. Thank you!
I've found that adding prompt elements such as "hi-fi", "sharp imaging" and "clear soundstage" have helped create a less compressed and generally cleaner sound.
I've been using a 12.9" M2 iPad Pro as a daily driver for six months. It is almost perfect - the only big issue I have is a problem in WebKit where a two-finger-tap on a trackpad procs both the system contextual menu and the web app context menu. It makes using VSCode, Google Docs, etc. highly annoying and remains unresolved.
Outside of that, I love using it and actively prefer it over a regular desktop OS for all tasks outside of software development (and with the bug fixed even that would be better)
Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.