From Scooter Hell to Scooter Heaven in Taiwan
This is a bugbear of mine for a longtime. There's been no apparent
advancement in scooter tech in the last 10-20 years in Taiwan where I
live. I myself drive a 15yr old scooter and it seems to be pretty much
the same as the new ones coming out. They still burn gas, emit toxic
fumes and make too much noise.
I have a couple of ideas and questions to ask regarding scooters and pollution.
1. Is it more environmentally friendly to drive a scooter or take the MRT. Which one is more energy efficient?
2. My idea for replacing gasoline driven scooters, solving at least the
MAJOR noise and air pollution issues that they cause. We all know the
benefits and advantages of scooters. Scooters are economical, don't
take up much space and ligthweight so very fuel efficient compared to
car. Very easy to maintain and almost never break down. What could
replace a scooter as a personal motorised vehicle, easy, an upgraded
scooter! Taking into account how much Taiwanese love their scooters and
the gap in public transportation (which is getting better however) how
about brining in an advanced electric scooter and batter switching
system.
Because Taiwanese people are not able to charge their scooters in their apartments we need to create a public system for charging the batteries. Build automatic battery tower stations where the gas stations are at present. The batteries are charged from the main grid. Batteries are publically owned, individually serial numbered and rented by deposit from the govt. regulator. The batteries run off the latest Li technologies increasing their storage power. Scooters are designed with a special electronic key system. When you go to the station you park your scooter on a grid and swipe your battery card with prepaid credit. The scooter is aligned with the robotic battery switching arm according to a sensor system, the old batter is switched out and the new battery switched in. It's all done in 20 secs or so and you drive away with a soft hum.
The main issues I see with this plan are.
1. Energy demand switches to the main grid. This could be supplied by another LPG plant or by additional nuclear reactor to reduce CO2 emmissions
2. To have enough batteries (5-10 million?) to support the system it could potentially create a lot of heavy metal waste. However as long as the batteries were efficiently recycled the actual environmental cost may be quite manageable. Anyway current scooters use toxic batteries as is. Just depends on how robust the batteries are.
3. The batteries carry enough power to make people feel like they are not giving up too much compared to their solid old dirty bikes.
4. Lastly but not least, it requires bold vision. I believe all these technologies are easily within reach of Taiwanese manufacturers, just lack any political vision here and people here don't really want to be first in any new tech. The best way to get this scheme off the ground would be for Taipei City Hall to declare a gas scooter free zone within the Taipei City limits after building the infrastructure.
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