It’s a thermal engine for only one or two people, it’s incredibly loud, it needs big roads to go fast, it has poor cargo space… I like bikes for the aesthetics but I don’t think they are a step in the right direction.
Tbh, as someone living in rural community all i want is decent public transportation of any sort. Like, it would be nice to have trains or escooters but, we don’t even have busses ( though that having been said i don’t how busses would get out here without it making tarc fare more expensive) or making bikes or scooter ( e or otherwise) a viable option in my area or making walking a more viable option. Admittedly i don’t know how they would do the last one but, the others they’ve been trying to do for awhile. I’m hoping that this not only made sense but, actually was on point.
The US (and much of europe) needs to realize that car centric planning is not the solution to mobility problems, it’s the cause! Suburbia could be more walkable if a few steps were taken during planning:
Note that the commenter said rural rather than suburban, and that’s a really whole other can of worms, but on the other hand they aren’t as frustrating to have cars. The population density is so low and the distances so large, it’s hard to figure any thing other than cars to meet those needs.
But I’m in suburbia, in fact right next to one of my cities mixed use mandate (all new housing must be dense housing and must construct retail space and office space with any housing construction). They also have very little parking for the retail space. So what has happened with those projects? The housing has filled up, but no company wants the retail space. A company could choose to open up a store there to serve that community and not much else owing to tiny parking, or they can set up 5 miles away for not much more and serve dozens of communities.
There was one successful mixed use development, but they were massive and dedicated a huge amount to multiple parking decks. People pay a lot of money to live there and it is walkable distance wise, but it’s car centric and unfortunately would have failed without accommodating cars.
Best walkable experience I’ve had was a place with trams and pedestrian bridges, as well as roads and parking decks. Businesses could count on the reach afforded by accommodating cars, and pedestrians never had to step on a car road or suffer a bus stuck in traffic. However, it was a massively expensive place to be.
Well in the UK, considering that a return ticket to London for commuting hours costs me £140, no, it is not the future here. I could drive most of the way from home into London, pay the ULEZ charge, park in an expensive train station car park and get a short distance train for a third of that, including fuel.
If you aren’t willing to put your money where your mouth is, you’re just putting on a show. It’s a performative belief. Don’t criticize someone for a spending decision when you’re not willing to make it either.
The cost of commuting to London via train every day would be more than my entire salary lmao, what are you on about. I work remotely for the most part anyway, which is better for the environment than taking the train every day.
But that’s an issue with capitalism, not the technology itself. Roads and high(motor)ways are very heavily subsidized and tax funded, while rail in the UK is largely privatized. It’s just a sign of what is being prioritized by government and/or society, which is cars in this case. There are plenty of places where public transit is free or at least the definitive cheapest way to travel, also due to government funding.
Trains are directly linked to capitalism, not sure what you are getting at here. They require incredible amounts of capital to build, and incredible amounts of money to operate. They enabled the industrialization.
Communist countries also, in fact, received their trains from capitalist countries. Russia had hardly any before the US started supplying them during the industrialization process by Albert Kahn and associates.
The most train centric countries in the world are also the most capitalist. Whether that’s state run capitalism or private, state run generally provides more passenger rail service. However, Japan is an exception there with its JR Rail.
“The most train centric countries in the world are also the most capitalist.”
That’s because most countries in the world are capitalist mate.
Also, if you acknowledge that JR Rail is not capitalist, even if China is defined as a state capitalist country you still have to acknowledge that the rail system itself is not capitalist (it is also state owned like JR rail).
The fact is once profit is prioritised in something like mass public transportation, it starts to go to shit. That’s why American rail is so shit, that’s why every place in the UK has shit public transportation after privitisation bar a few cities like Nottingham, London and Manchester, and why it’s so expensive to get from city to city. Countries with largely state owned public transport tend to do better with their public transport.
No, I was actually pointing out that JR rail is not a state run passenger rail corporation, unlike Amtrak in the United States, DB in Germany and SNCF in France. It’s fully private and is only profitable due to Japan’s extreme population density and narrow shinkansen corridor between Tokyo and Osaka.
Same here. Trains are only cost effective in the SF area only if you don’t own a car. If you have a car, even traveling alone, almost every trip is cheaper even with $5 gasoline. For me I’d have to hit about $8/gal and pretend my time is free to have parity with a train. If I could not own a car, I would, but I don’t hate myself that much. And since I have a car, I only use public transit within the SF core (mission->north beach range)…which is funny because more often than not I just walk to my destination since SF is so fucking tiny.
given the talk of expensive trains, a resident would infer i live on the peninsula. bart is awful but not that pricy.
Berkeley is part of the core urban area on the other side, although as long as you don’t want to cross the bridge I’d argue east bay’s public transit has almost no value given the ubiquity of parking and abundance of freeways.
I tried transit up to berkeley once and it took 2 hours, so now i drive and my worst case time frame is 55 minutes. Bridge costs make it roughly the same as transit but at least twice as fast.
no shit about the bay bridge, though. I’ve not driven across that hellhole since 2018.
In Japan a train ticket on an express train to central Tokyo from the suburbs 50 miles away would cost you around $30. The local trains would be around $10-$15.
$110 will get you about 300 km by high speed shinkansen, say Tokyo to Nagoya.
But even if its star trek type, it’s still good, just need to convince people to use it, climate crisis is averted! Who cares if they are the same person after teleportation, as long as my teleporters sell and I make a profit! 😈 insert evil CEO laugh
(I wont use star trek type teleporter btw, I mean unless I wanna die)
As a thought experiment, do you know if going to sleep kills you?
You wake up in the morning with all the memories of life before sleeping, but do you really know if that was you living that life? What if your consciousness dies each night when you fall asleep, and a new consciousness is formed in the morning who thinks it’s you?
It’s not even overnight. Neurologically speaking, consciousness ‘drops out’ briefly roughly every 90 seconds (IIRC), as the brain attends to other tasks. It’s spooky to see people who have impaired working memory; it’s like they completely ‘reset’ after a short period. Here’s an example. It’s a new consciousness formed from your memories that thinks it’s you, every minute and a half.
Thinking of which, I’d image it’d be used for military use way before commercial. Militarized teleporters sound pretty terrifying. Move someone’s torso over one foot, or put micro bombs inside people or vehicles.
We have long reached the point where everyday is "joke about the Ministry of Transport and Digitalisation"-day, as the idiot in charge has still not understood his job description and is just running a Ministry of Cars instead (including persistent and completely moronic narratives of how efuels will solve everything) while single-handedly failing CO2 reduction goals for the whole country.
[Image] Hinterher develops innovative bicycle trailer based on the traffic light government’s transport policy
“We fed ChatGPT with the transport policy concepts of the governing parties and this is what we came up with,” says Peter Hornung, founder and CEO of the Munich-based trailer manufacturer Hinterher. What may seem strange at first glance is the result of artificial intelligence and intensive analysis of previous transport policies.
The company normally manufactures rectangular trailers with two wheels, “but we are open to new technologies,” says Hornung. Although the new trailer cannot drive straight ahead, it can turn in circles at high speeds. The company is convinced that the new model will be a success: the existential consequences of the climate crisis are well known to the governing parties FDP [liberals], SPD [social democrats] and Greens. It must therefore be assumed that this urgency is also reflected in their policies. So our latest model can only be a direct hit".
Company spokesperson and media expert Johannes Schubert therefore has no technical objections to the functionality of the bike trailer. “The evidence-based and scientific foundations on which transport policy has been based for decades are forcing us as a manufacturer to innovate.” Hinterher is therefore setting itself apart from tried-and-tested straight-ahead technologies with a view to the future.
The comprehensive analysis also included the transport policies of the last transport ministers from the CSU [conservatives], Wissmann, Ramsauer, Dobrindt and Scheuer. From this, the AI calculated a trailer travelling in reverse. “I’d rather drive in circles,” says CEO Peter Hornung, who, together with his company, is hopefully looking forward to the decisive steps taken by those in power to save the climate.
Also available in other colours!
[Images]
As a company from the transport industry, we are concerned that the current German government is continuing to prevent and delay urgent measures to limit global warming in the transport sector. This article is our satirical attempt to channel our frustration about this into creative channels. By chance, shortly after publishing our Hinterher H-Ampel [“H-traffic light”, referring to the colors of the government coalition] trailer, we found the picture with Minister Wissing in the social media, which was published by the BMDV and, as we think, fits like a glove. We would like to expressly mention here that the credits for this picture lie with the BMDV, not with us - and we would like to thank the ministry for this contribution.
[“Feedback” by various people]
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) Contents in [square brackets] added by me.
Civilized Cycles has a starting price of $4999 for the CC Model 1, 60 mile range, released in 2020.
In the mean time , the cool thing is that truck bikes already exist, e.g. the oldest US bike manufacturer, Worksman Cycles, and they've worked out the electrification part, too.
Downtown Northville in the winter was the bomb. Cozy up by a fireplace. Eat in a private cabin. Walk around with a warm beverage.
The real kicker is the lady in the interview. They want to kill the whole thing… Which world be awful. I love having a safe area to walk, hang and eat with my family and dogs. That’s now in jeopardy.
there are many people who say the same thing as you. “would love to both replace my commute with a better option”
i don’t know if this applies to you but personally, i know lots of people who say want to give up the car but won’t do it because they don’t see public transit as the better option. but they will NEVER see transit as a better option because they are using flawed metrics to decide
let me give you a simple example i hear over and over. “driving takes me 20 mins, but taking public transit takes 30 mins! i’m saving 10 minutes!”. no you’re not saving ANY time. 30 mins spent on public transit is 100% YOUR time. read a book, listen to podcast, or do nothing… 20 mins of driving is 100% lost paying attention to the road (in theory). people just need to have a different perspective of what “better” means instead of just comparing the minutes of each mode of transportation
My coworker says his commute is 2-3 hours by car so I suggested he take the train which would take around 45mins. He kept making excuses on why he couldn’t and later asked me why I ride my bike to work instead of driving.
Some people just cannot take public transit seriously.
Also, your time argument only makes sense with tame numbers. Trips often take 2-3 times longer by public transit. Yeah I can read a book on the train but I can’t cook my dinner, do my laundry, or clean my apartment.
I don’t understand you. If driving takes 20 mins and transit takes 30 mins, it’s fair to argue transit is superior because I could be responding to emails or doing some productive task on the bus, and I’m only “losing” 20 mins a day of time at home.
If your commute takes 45 mins by car and 2 hours by bus, pointing out that the person on the bus can read their email on the way home will hardly be a consolation to the fact that they are “losing” 2.5 hours a day of time at home.
I am not arguing against public transit, I’m pointing out that when public transit sucks, it’s really hard to make an argument that taking it is more convenient than driving.
On vehicles modified for sporting purposes the silencers no longer work because the propagation of sound is different and therefore db-killers are applied or it is avoided to drive them around the city center or during off hours. Then there are people who purposely remove the silencer just to make noise and this also reduce factory performance, these deserve to have their license withdrawn because they take advantage of the fact that noisy vehicles occasionally exist.
The CAQ don’t care about Montreal. They will never be elected there. They represent a class of people that is in the minority in Montreal. There will be backlash, but if you’ve ever spoken to the average voter from outside of Montreal, they describe it as a hive of scum and villainy. Anything that goes to the city of Montreal is wasted in their opinion. I don’t think anyone will listen to the backlash out there.
I live in Lanaudière. My city is Montreal, I am just temporarily unhoused and had to move to a friend’s basement to shelter in until rent prices and salary meet again in the center. The shit I hear about Montreal from suburbanites is completely fucked.
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