Replace cars with velomobiles
Replace cars with velomobiles
About a quarter of the existent wind turbines would suffice to power as many electric velomobiles as there are people.
Speed record of a velomobile: 144 km/h https://www.aerovelo.com/eta-speedbike
We don't need any knew infrastructure, we just need to get cars out of the way
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The idea of needing specialized transport as an individual beyond just walking is a failure of society. Replacing cars with "not-cars" isn't really helping that aspect. You should be structuring society so that cars or "not-cars" have no need to exist for almost everyone.
Someone versed in urban ecosystems could chime in better, because there's gotta be proper terms for city to city transport, city to neighborhood, neighborhood to street, street to home.
Bikes or some kind of personal vehicle are still probably necessary to get you from city to home, because they can't put train stations next to every house (unless they figure out how to shoot us through tubes or something).
@dessalines @PowerCrazy No, it really is feasible to have PT close enough to everyone's house. Some will choose a bike to cut 15m walking into 5m riding, but it isn't required.
Part of that is that every neighbourhood needs all types of housing. Okay, not every one needs high rise apartments. But medium rise next to the station above the restaurants and retail, surrounded by town houses, surrounded by units, surrounded by 1/3rd acre house blocks
It really isn't crazy
Utopia needs many changes
Indeed, and currently there exist several cities that execute that ideal more-or-less. NYC is the obvious one, but Washington DC, Chicago, hell even the worst city in America, San Francisco does it adequately. The only reason we can't have that kind of public transit everywhere is because no one is forcing city officials to plan for the long-term, and reduce sprawl.
Zero Growth Lines are a great way to mandate density, without any other policies needed.
@PowerCrazy I think even those examples are more on the less side, they aren't continuing to grow that way. But they are good places to live because of how close to those ideals they still are.
I'd be happy just having bikes be viable as an individualized transportation method. I'd much rather a 30-minute bike ride than a car ride every day
I rode my bike instead of driving today. It took twice as long, and the hills kicked my ass, but I felt amazing afterwards. Evem hours later I am still riding the endorphin high. Hearing traffic used to give me anxiety, but I used noise cancelling earbuds so I could listen to an audio book and that made a huge difference
The transition needs to be easy for adoption to happen though. I think first replacing cars with not-cars, and only then scaling cities to be more walkable makes sense.
I don't see how going from car to proper city planning is any harder than going from not-car to proper city planning. This just feels like an extra unnecessary step that could be taking resources away from the city planning part.
If you make a city hostile to cars first, people will still have their cars and their commutes, it will just double the time it takes for them to get anywhere. You will lose support for any further changes.
If you replace the cars first, such that no one's daily schedules are significantly altered, and then condense the cities, then the change might be less jarring for those who can't weather dramatic changes in their lifestyle.
If you replace the cars first, such that no one's daily schedules are significantly altered,
Is that going to happen if you replace cars with another vehicle that still requires car infrastructure?
it shouldn't, should it? Switch an ICE for electric, as long as they travel the same daily distance and meet the same use cases, the only lifestyle change would be the expense.
It'll take years to build that high density housing. And several generations to convince everyone to move into it. In the mean time, it'd be good to use velo mobiles for transportation from suburb to suburb.