Welcome to EKB Solutions Transportation

At EKB Solutions, we are dedicated to providing safe, reliable, and affordable transportation services to our customers. With a fleet of modern vehicles and experienced drivers, we offer a range of transportation options including private car services, airport shuttles, and corporate transportation solutions. Our commitment to excellence and customer satisfaction has earned us a reputation as one of the top transportation companies in the industry.

^^ That's pretty good copy.  Maybe It's true.  But not today.  EKB Solutions is just me doing research.  What is included in this site is the aggregation of several years of research, assembled into two main files: A Google Earth Map, and a very large PDF file.  It isn't probably half of what I wanted to put together, but operating on a $0 budget means you have to make some choices about where you spend your time, but not so much where you spend your money.  And so, what is provided is the raw synthesis that was meant to be converted into something a bit more digestible, but is not, despite having a pretty good idea about how to turn it into something that interested people might like to read.  I guess you have to be willing to go through a bit of chaff to get to the grain of this matter.

My original reason for starting this project was that the USPS LLV fleet was starting to burst into flames.  It also had been under a "NGDV" Project for something like a decade, with, at the time, no clear end in sight.  A few things have changed since I started the research, but the determination I made around when I started, based on the research, was that EVs were the way to go--just not based on the present (at the time) market conditions.  The USPS made the same determination, and awarded a contract to Oshkosh to produce traditional ICE vehicles, based on their need.  This seemed like an unfortunate thing, and so I kept working at the idea of creating an EV, except requiring exactly what I would need to build it and feel safe about building it--materials, logistics, manufacturing, engineering, charging infrastructure, and electronics (and whatever other tidbits of interesting science could be applied).  

Those requirements turned out to be pretty extensive, as I effectively determined that it would be near to impossible, if not impossible from a personal needs standpoint, to deliver what the USPS had asked for--a $35,000 NGDV, that I had determined had to be an EV.  The market has developed, and a lot of what I have researched has suddenly lurched forward with the recent influx of federal dollars, but it seems that a lot of my original conceptions still stands as items that ought to be improved.  While organizations such as the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak have been working all over the US with various State agencies to develop a comprehensive plan, I've been doing something similar--just on my own, poring over the present circumstantial data, the past projections and project concepts, and the future planning currently under development.

In some ways, what I propose is completely separate from what is going on, and yet I believe there is a great opportunity for overlap.  The original conception was to rely on a heavily-engineered tunnel design that would allow for multimodal transport options to stack on top of each other.  The scale of development, despite higher up front costs, would permit an incremental improvement plan, while creating the base infrastructure that would immediately serve pressing needs.  There are a lot of required components to make this work, and the original plan was to have gotten started two years ago, but, you know, sh*t happens.  Where I am today is that a lot of people are working on these problems but there still remain some unaddressed issues, and while the solutions proposed may "work", I propose there are alternatives not being considered due to the historical precedents already set.

I began my research knowing approximately nothing about cars or trains, and made my determinations based on the fact that there were complex passenger and freight rail systems that I was very unlikely to be able to decouple and process into the desired improvements.  Granted, that was before billions of dollars suddenly got dumped into precisely that issue, but here we are.  What I conceived of instead was a way to implement the features that I believed would be necessary for a period of American growth, and to do that you would need to redevelop an American manufacturing base.  As it turned out, due to COVID lockdowns and tensions with China, the government had the same idea. 

The difference, I suppose, was that I came at it from the perspective of "how do I build an EV with this severely lacking logistics network", and the government came at it from the perspective of "how do we get people to build and buy EVs with this severely lacking logistics network".  I figured that by pushing along a USPS EV, the charging network would need to be built.  I think today's circumstance is fine--Ford just sold a bunch of much more expensive EVs to the USPS and is going to build some charging infrastructure for them that they licensed from somebody else.  Highly typical, but not everybody can get a $9B loan to do something they've never done before.  And so, here I am, and here is my research, and therein lies a "master plan" of sorts with regards to how an EV company can be constructed, and the reason for my continuation of this research is that I still believe in the merit of its underpinnings--a scheme to aid the USPS in binding the nation together.  So prepare yourself for a wild ride of highly connected and highly disparate research topics, all related to the primary goal: build an eLLV, and do so in a way that meets the budget and provides for the solutions of tomorrow.