Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: Chinese automaker BYD showcases one of its EVs at a promotional event in Kathmandu, Nepal, February 26. (Sulav Shrestha/Xinhua/Getty Images)

Five years ago, there were barely any EVs in Nepal. Last year, 65% of the cars sold were electric.

Nepal’s capital Kathmandu is one of the most polluted cities in the world. But it’s also one of the fastest growing markets for EVs: Nepal’s electric cars now outsell new fossil-fueled vehicles. In the U.S., around 9% of new cars sold last year were electric. In Nepal, that number was around 65%.

“There’s been a really remarkable transformation in the uptake of electric vehicles,” says David Sislen, the World Bank country director for Nepal, Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Only five years ago, EVs made up a tiny fraction of new car sales in Nepal. Three-wheeled minibuses, a popular vehicle in the country, were also mostly gas. For those vehicles now, “the adoption rate went from less than 1% to 83%,” Sislen says.

There was one main reason for the change. “So many public policy challenges are complicated and nuanced and hard to understand, but this one is the opposite,” he says. “It’s incredibly simple. In July of 2021, the government radically dropped the import duties and excise taxes on electric vehicles. You make it cheaper, and suddenly people will adopt them.” (The country has recently slightly increased taxes on EVs, likely because it was missing the revenue. But electric vehicles are still a better bargain.)

After someone owns an EV, it’s also cheaper to operate than a gas or diesel vehicle. That’s true anywhere, but especially in Nepal, where fuel is imported and expensive. Charging an EV could be a tenth of the cost of refueling another vehicle, or even less. The models that are available—from companies like China’s BYD and India’s Tata—are also desirable. (Tesla also recently started selling cars in Nepal, though Chinese alternatives are more affordable and arguably even better performing.)

“You see electric vehicles every day, all day long,” says Sislen. “It feels like it’s half of what’s on the road. And the number of [electric] dealerships is amazing.”

Nepal was an early adopter of electric three-wheeled vehicles, known locally as tempos. The first wave of hundreds of electric tempos, funded by USAID and manufactured locally, rolled out in the Kathmandu Valley in the 1990s. But by the turn of the century, government policy helped kill the early industry by cutting import taxes on gas microbuses. Now, modern electric tempos are quickly growing again.

Charging can still be a challenge, though charging infrastructure is also quickly growing, along with alternatives like battery swapping. “We want to deploy technology to make the entire journey seamless,” says Deepak Rauniar, an entrepreneur who is working on a network of battery-swapping stations for two-wheeler and three-wheeler EVs throughout the region.

Kathmandu is also beginning to roll out a fleet of larger electric buses. Last year, Sajha Yatayat, a co-op bus service that serves the city, added 40 new electric buses and a large new charging station, and it now plans to add another 100. The buses cost around 33 times less to charge than fueling a bus with diesel, although the upfront cost is higher.

The charging essentially runs on clean electricity, since most of the country’s energy comes from hydropower. “That makes this even more impactful—you’re not charging your vehicles with coal-fired power,” says Sislen. “You’re charging them with green energy.”

Nepal’s climate goals under the Paris agreement include getting to 90% adoption of EVs for private four-wheeled vehicles by 2030. Though with just 0.027% of global emissions, climate isn’t the biggest reason for the country to act—instead, it’s air pollution.

Kathmandu’s geography, surrounded by mountains, traps pollutants. Climate change is leading to more drought in the winter, meaning less rain to help clear the air. Pollution comes from a variety of sources, including wildfires (also increasing because of climate change), and outdated boilers at factories, which the World Bank is pushing to help replace. But transportation is another key factor. And with fewer vehicles belching black exhaust on roads in Kathmandu, the city will be a healthier place to live.

The final deadline for Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a senior writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to climate change and other global challenges, interviewing leaders from Al Gore and Bill Gates to emerging climate tech entrepreneurs like Mary Yap.. She contributed to the bestselling book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century and a new book from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies called State of Housing Design 2023.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91345333/how-nepal-became-one-of-the-worlds-fastest-growing-ev-markets

Source: Fast Company, Grace Snelling
Photo: Alstrom

The fifth generation TGV Inoui is both beautiful and high-tech—and it’s making us wish America would embrace a rail travel renaissance already.

France just unveiled its charming new TGV Inoui trains, and they’re a jealousy-inducing reminder that America’s rail travel renaissance can’t come fast enough.

The TGV Inoui is a high-speed rail system, running at around 200 miles per hour, that connects France’s major cities as well as providing connections into Italy, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. This Tuesday, the manufacturing company Alstom and the TGV’s operator, SNCF Voyageurs, revealed the brand-new fifth generation TGV Inoui interior design at Paris’s Gare de Lyon.

The new train, which is slated to hit the rails in 2026, includes a delightfully colorful aesthetic, an ultra-sleek bar car, and expanded accommodations for wheelchair users—and its further proof that, for now, America’s rail system might as well be in the dark ages.

According to Alstom, a team of more than 2,000 designers started entirely from scratch to create the new TGV Inoui cars, which are constructed in a modular format that allows them to be reconfigured in less than a day to suit the particular needs of each trip. The trains are made from 97% recyclable materials, have a 20% higher seating capacity than previous iterations (up to 740 passengers), and are 20% more energy-efficient than the fourth generation trains.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91297387/frances-high-speed-trains-tgv-makeover

Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: Amtrak

Taking the train from D.C. to Boston is about to get nicer—and a little faster.

Earlier this year, if you happened to be standing at a train station in New Jersey at a certain time of night, you might have seen a sleek new high-speed Acela zip by. The trains, which did 900 test runs between January and August, are expected to start commercial service on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line next spring.

They’re designed to be a better ride than the existing two-decade-old Acela trains, which carried nearly three million passengers last year. The new trains are quieter and designed to minimize vibration, so the ride feels smoother. They weigh less and are more aerodynamic; though the old trains are also electric, the new version uses less electricity to run. The first trains went into service in 2000, when cellphones were relatively rare; the new trains will have USB outlets (and regular outlets) at each seat. Winged headrests at each seat will offer a little privacy and prevent your neighbor from falling asleep on your shoulder. The trains will have an extra car, to carry around 25% more passengers, and will run more often. They’ll also be faster, at up to 160 miles an hour. The current trains are limited to 150 miles an hour.

The caveat: 160 miles an hour is still much slower than high-speed rail in other countries. In China, the Shanghai Maglev can travel at up to 285 miles per hour. Deutsche Bahn runs trains in Germany at up to 217 miles per hour. France’s TGV can run at nearly 200 miles an hour, with faster trains coming out next year. India is planning a new high-speed rail line that will also travel around 200 miles an hour, with help from Japan, where bullet trains go as fast.

Amtrak is limited by aging train tracks and curves along the route. “In most places in the world, when you’re doing high-speed rail, you’re designing the tracks and building the system at the same time that you’re building the trains,” says Dani Simons, VP of communications for Alstom, the French company that designed the new Acela trains and is building them in upstate New York. “Those tracks are generally designed to be very straight, very few curves. You’re not sharing tracks with other types of trains. Here in the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak had a really interesting and bold vision to bring high-speed trains to [an area] which had basically none of those qualities.”

Alstom, which also designed France’s high-speed trains, engineered Amtrak’s new trains to travel at up to 186 miles an hour—though that won’t be possible on this route. But new tilting technology means that the trains can better lean into curves, shaving some time off the journey. Amtrak also plans to upgrade some of the slowest parts of the route, like the B&P tunnel in Baltimore, which was originally built during the Civil War, so that trains will eventually go a little faster in those spots. (Right now, that tunnel is limited to 30 miles an hour.)

Building a whole new track in the densely built Northeast is probably unlikely at this point. But new, truly fast routes are more feasible in other parts of the country.

Brightline is working on a high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and Southern California, with plans for trains that could travel at 186 miles an hour. (California’s long-delayed high-speed rail project is also under construction, though it’s possible that Trump could set the project back.) And Amtrak has proposed building a new high-speed line between Houston and Dallas. “Those are two major metropolitan cities that are a little too far to drive, a little too short to fly,” says Amtrak spokesperson Jason Abrams. The 240-mile route, which is fairly straight, would take less than 90 minutes.

Catching up with the rest of the world will take more investment. “A lot of this is historical in the sense that in the 1950s, America decided to get more into highways and roads and planes [instead of] trains, as opposed to counterparts in Europe and Asia,” says Abrams. Over the last half-century, the U.S. has invested $120 billion in rail, he says. (Around half of that came from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in the past few years.) Since 2000, the U.S. invested $1.3 trillion in highways. Europe invested a trillion dollars in rail over the last two decades.

Faster trains, of course, could help better compete with carbon-intensive driving or flying. The climate benefit is especially big for the Acela trains, which run on electricity. The current trains reduce emissions compared to flying by 73%, and have 83% lower emissions than driving. The new trains will have a carbon footprint that’s even lower.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a senior writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to climate change and other global challenges, interviewing leaders from Al Gore and Bill Gates to emerging climate tech entrepreneurs like Mary Yap.. She contributed to the bestselling book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century and a new book from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies called State of Housing Design 2023.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91242054/amtraks-sleek-new-high-speed-electric-trains-are-coming-next-spring

Source: Fast Company, Benjamin Schneider
Photo: Subway train passing the Golden Horn Metro Bridge over the Golden Horn in Istanbul (Getty Images)

Cities around the globe are doubling down on transit. Why can’t the U.S. do the same?

The most spectacular way to cross the Bosphorus is by boat, but the most impressive way is by subway. Istanbul’s Marmaray Line, completed in 2013, links Asia and Europe by way of an eight-and-a-half-mile undersea tunnel. The ride is so fast and so smooth, it feels like a hovercraft.

When my dad and I traveled to Istanbul last year, we were prepared to witness the city’s beauty and stand in awe of its history. But what really blew us away was the city’s transit system.

“It’s like a sci-fi movie,” my dad remarked as we rolled above the waters of the Golden Horn on the M2, another relatively new transit line that crosses another iconic body of water in Istanbul. (His take on robotaxis: “It’s like The Invisible Man!”) Even Istanbul’s light rail lines are completely different from their American counterparts. The T1 tram arrives every two or three minutes, and enjoys seamless signal priority that keeps the train moving at all times, except when it’s picking up passengers. The view, once again, is awesome.

For Americans, state-of-the art transit systems like the one in Istanbul are about as familiar as the transporter on Star Trek. As the U.S. lavishes billions on highway expansions and subsidizes tricked-out SUVs, other countries are investing in transit systems that are setting new standards for speed, convenience, and technology. Increasingly, transportation is looking like another area of American exceptionalism.

Earlier this month, I wrote a piece in CityLab about the rise of “rapid regional rail.” New transit lines in London, Seoul, Delhi, Guangzhou, and numerous other global cities, straddle the line between suburban commuter rail and urban metros. They cover long distances at very high speeds—as fast as 100 miles per hour—but with frequencies as good as every three minutes. These systems make big cities feel smaller, allowing riders to effectively teleport across busy neighborhoods to the other side of the metropolis. But rapid regional rail is just one flavor of transit innovation that’s spreading across the world. Spain and France are automating more and more of their existing subway lines, allowing for increased frequency and lower operating costs. Transit lines in Vienna are being upgraded with platform screen doors, improving rider safety and comfort while people wait for their trains. Three-quarters of global metro systems, from Sapporo to Santiago, operate “endless” open gangway trains that increase capacity onboard and allow passengers to spread out.

Name a global city, and it’s probably building miles of new rail transit, oftentimes with much more impressive technical specs than Americans are used to. Rome, Athens, Montreal, Moscow, Mumbai, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Doha, Shanghai, Bangkok—these diverse cities are unified in their bet that transit is the way of the future.

It’s a smart bet. High-quality transit is the only way to facilitate upward growth without causing unbearable amounts of congestion. It’s the only way to speed up trips through crowded neighborhoods. And it’s by far the most efficient and straightforward way to reduce pollution and carbon emissions from transportation. As an added bonus, a transit-oriented model of urban growth allows for much more pleasant surface-level streetscapes, with more space for walking, biking, and communing.

On a more philosophical level, these once-in-a lifetime transportation investments signal faith in a better future; that transforming the way people get around cities will pay dividends for generations to come. This faith is lacking in the U.S.—and so is the transit construction.

The opening lines of a 2023 article, “Once a Leader in Urban Rail Investment, the United States Now Trails” by transportation researcher Yonah Freemark sums up the situation:

As late as 1980, the United States had more kilometers of metro lines per capita than all large developed countries but the United Kingdom—thanks in part to large public investments in projects like Washington’s Metro and San Francisco’s BART. In the decades since, both the United States and the United Kingdom have stagnated, falling behind even as other countries, particularly China, but also India and many in Europe and South America, have invested in massive new construction campaigns. Much of the world’s urban areas are rapidly becoming dominated by metro service.

This graph in Freemark’s article tells the same story even more starkly. See the U.S. flatlining in transit miles per capita, while other countries embark on steep growth curves:

These are the statistics underlying the reality that in San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Atlanta; and many other major cities in the U.S., not a single mile of rail transit is currently under construction.

New York City currently has fewer miles of rail transit than it did in 1940. The city’s exceedingly modest transit expansion plans—a one-mile extension of the Second Avenue Subway and a light rail line connecting Brooklyn and Queens—are effectively on hold following Governor Kathy Hochul’s cancellation of congestion pricing.

Los Angeles and Seattle are the only cities in the U.S. whose transit development plans come remotely close to those seen in other global cities. And while their future transit maps are impressive, all of those colorful lines don’t mean the same things as the ones on Istanbul’s transit map. LA and Seattle’s light rail lines are not nearly as fast, frequent, or high-capacity as the heavy rail metros being built in other countries.

Nor are they as high-tech. Honolulu is the only city in the U.S. currently building an automated metro line, and it’s doing so at a snail’s pace. New York City just debuted a handful of open gangway trains—a first in the U.S. And platform screen doors only exist on airport people movers.

Why is it so hard for the U.S. to build quality transit?

This is one of the central questions underpinning this newsletter and my book. It’s also something that several other researchers and journalists, such as Eric Goldwyn and Jerusalem Demsas, are looking into. There’s no easy answer, though there is a growing consensus around certain factors that are holding America’s transit systems back.

But pointing out the degree of the discrepancy between the U.S. and other countries is an important place to start. Otherwise, there’s a risk of normalizing the nation’s dismal transit status quo.

This story was republished with permission from The Urban Condition.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91166562/us-transit-exceptionalism

Source: Newsweek, Micah McCartney
Photo: China built out its high-speed rail network in a remarkable two decades. Today, these railways total 25,000 miles, long enough to encircle the Earth. (Newsweek)

China has established the world’s most extensive high-speed railway network in just two decades.

Since the first line launched in 2008, the network has grown to roughly 25,000 miles, more than double the combined length of the rest of the world’s high-speed railways and long enough to circle the Earth.

A passenger train is considered high-speed if it travels at least 124 mph on upgraded tracks or 155 mph on new tracks. More than 20 countries currently have high-speed rail networks, mainly European and East Asian states but also Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Uzbekistan.

The planning began in the 1990s when China was experiencing high economic growth but also infrastructure challenges. The enterprise gained momentum during China’s “speed up” campaign in the late 1990s and 2000s, aimed at increasing the speed of commercial trains.

The first high-speed rail line, launched in 2008, linked Beijing with Tianjin, just 75 miles away. During the 2008 global financial crisis, China ramped up investments in infrastructure, including high-speed rail, to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

Initially, China relied on technology transfer agreements with foreign companies such as Alstom, Siemens and Kawasaki Heavy Industries. Over time, China developed significant domestic expertise and innovation, becoming a leader in high-speed rail technology.

This approach involved integrating and eventually improving on foreign technology with domestic innovations.

https://www.newsweek.com/china-high-speed-rail-miracle

Source: Dezeen, Alyn Griffiths
Photo: Courtesy of Vessev

Maritime transport firm Vessev has developed a fully electric boat that uses hydrofoil technology to reduce energy consumption by up to 90 per cent.

The nine-metre-long VS-9 is designed to transport up to 10 passengers at 25 knots, with retractable hydrofoils that lift the hull out of the water when travelling at speed.

This technology reduces drag and improves efficiency, allowing for a 90 per cent reduction in energy consumption while facilitating a range of up to 50 nautical miles, according to Vessev.

The VS-9 can be charged using existing electric charging points, paving the way for a quick rollout as dedicated infrastructure is not required.

“Our objective is to break down the barriers to adopting electric vessels,” said Vessev CEO Eric Laakmann.

“From the outset, our goal was to design a commercial electric vessel that can use the charging capacity already available in many marinas to run serious commercial businesses.”

The efficiency of the hydrofoil technology means the VS-9 can take advantage of innovative electric power systems and batteries, allowing for faster charging and reduced operational costs.

In a trial against a petrol-powered boat following the same route, the cost of the electricity used to charge the VS-9 was 25 times less than the cost of the petrol fuelling the chase boat, according to Laakmann.

Sensors linked to a system of underwater flaps constantly adapt to the sea conditions, allowing the vessel to remain stable even in adverse weather.

As the hydrofoils reduce drag, they also ensure a smoother and quieter sailing experience while maintaining a streamlined design.

“Traditionally, larger vessels are required to deliver a comfortable passenger experience as they can handle the impact of waves and wake,” Laakmann said.

“By flying above the waves the VS-9 delivers a large vessel experience on an agile platform that can be berthed and charged in nearly any marina.”

Targeted at commercial sea transport and tourism operations, the VS-9 could open up new routes that are hard to access via traditional ferries thanks to its streamlined design.

The vessel is currently undergoing sea trials at Auckland’s Westhaven Marina in collaboration with New Zealand’s largest ferry operator, Fullers360, which has committed to running entirely on electricity and hydrogen by 2040.

Elsewhere, Vessev is applying the technologies and design developed for the VS-9 to larger vessels, with plans to create a 100-passenger VS-18 that could offer additional seakeeping capabilities.

Several companies are racing to make electric boats more efficient and less expensive to help them compete with their fossil fuel-powered counterparts.

Among the first electric boats to make it to market was X Shore – a smaller 5-person vessel that can travel 100 nautical miles on a single charge.

https://www.dezeen.com/2024/07/08/vessev-vs-9-electric-hydrofoil-ferry