[i_am_proteus]

While the headline references "power," the issue is that these electric trucks do not have enough battery capacity to plow snow for a full day before recharging overnight.

I have always thought that municipal road services had great potential to be electrified via partial catenary: take power from (and charge batteries) where the roads are electrified, discharge battery where the roads are not electrified.

[hef19898]

Stupid question so, why would you use a garbage truck to plow snow? Over here, cities, towns and musipalities use different vehicles for different jobs, suxh as garbage, snow plowing, street cleaning and so on...

[rz2k]

They very rarely need to plow snow in New York city, but when they do there are hundreds of miles to plow, and it is much faster if they begin the plowing before even an inch accumulates.

It is much more efficient to press the thousands garbage trucks into this rapid snow plowing service a few days per year than to waste 20 acres storing snow plows for the 350 days per year when they are not needed.

[mertd]

They also bury the trash bags under the plowed snow, which is a win-win for them because they can forget about collecting them until spring. :)

[i_am_proteus]

This and also: NYC residential trash collection is curbside. Literally leave trash bags on the curb. Trash collection cannot occur when the curb is snowed in.

So, were there separate trucks for the two tasks, the trash trucks would sit idle until after the snow plow trucks had finished their rounds.

Given the infrequency and relatively small volume of snow NYC gets, plus the curbside trash collection, sharing trucks and drivers is reasonably efficient.

[ElevenLathe]

This is a guess but most cities have a road/right of way department that does snow removal. For whatever reason, in NYC this is apparently done by the sanitation department. I think this is a meatspace Conway's Law, unrelated to whether or not it is actually better to have separate trucks or not.

[xtorol]

NYC does have a number of dedicated salt-spreader/plow trucks [1].

As for why they use garbage trucks to plow, I speculate that it's an issue of scale. Buying a special purpose plow truck to replace every garbage truck that currently does double duty would leave you with a pretty significant/expensive fleet of trucks that are sitting idle most of the time (not to mention taking up space, which is at a premium in NYC).

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/site/about/fleet

[darkwizard42]

Garbage trucks have easy attachment of snow plows and allow existing infrastructure to be on double duty. In a place like NYC storage of this many vehicles is also a concern, so just doubling your fleet for winter (3, maybe 4 months) usage isn't ideal either.

[gopalv]

> why would you use a garbage truck to plow snow?

They're optimizing for trained drivers who can drive safely in the snow rather than hire two.

For a dangerous job on snowy roads, I think the fewer people employed with better pay is better than more people with lower pay for the same skills.

That said, there are a lot of places which can buy EV garbage trucks before we get to the snow or ice.

Who's not buying them is not as relevant when we're supply capped on the production of decent trucks with batteries in them.

Sure, it affects the total-market calculations & how the development is funded, but might not change how many are sold per-year until the production scales.

[Ekaros]

It is one of those solutions that at first look might sound good. But with closer inspection there is more and more problems. Like for example is equipping the trucks sensible? And what happens to the garbage that should have been collected? And training people for both jobs. As driving snow truck does require some expertise.

[LarryMullins]

This is one of those objections that sounds good at first. But upon closer inspection you find out that the practice of using one truck for two different sorts of jobs has been commonplace for decades and it works out fine.