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.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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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.
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.
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
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.
I feel there's probably some reasons they haven't become popular.
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Don't turn as nimbly as a bike
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Can't put them on your shoulder and carry them indoors, onto a train, etc. like as a bike
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Don't climb hills as well as a bike (source)
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20× the cost of a bike, maybe that could be brought down by economies of scale if they were more popular
I could imagine a velomobile being preferable if you're commuting from a satellite town to the city, and the journey consists of a long straight road.
I'd definitely say they're worse for getting around the city, and their comparative advantages are bought at the price of significant extra overhead.
I'm not sure the bike is the accurate comparison target compared to the scooter or car for commuting. Also, I think the main reason they are not so popular is laws. I think there was another article on solar.lowtechmagazine where this was discussed, but from my fuzzy memory, the issue there is not yet a separate category for these kinds of high speed limit, electrical assistance vehicles. You either have to use it like a bike, in which case in many countries you are not allowed to go past a low set speed limit (something like 30 km/h) with elecrical assistance, or you have to register the vehicle to be in the category of motorbikes, in which case you are subject to the same rules, like having a license plate, needing to get your vehicle checked at the garage every year and other things. Maybe try to find the article, it will be better explained.
@ertai @frightful_hobgoblin Registered as a car may mean adding airbags, passing crash safety tests, etc. It all depends on where you are.
If you need to pass all those car tests you can't be a velomobile any more, you have to be a car. Someone was making a modern electric Moke, which sounds like a fantastic vehicle, except it wasn't legal in many places because it couldn't pass modern safety regulations.
(Heck postie bikes aren't legal in Australia any more because they wont add dual ABS)
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Velomobiles are neat but the idea is more practically executed in something like the Electrom LEV
Seems like a neat thing! Is it $20,000?
I think it's around 10k but they're trying to get it lower
Nice, had no idea these existed.
This seems like something you don’t want to use on a road with cars. Otherwise it looks neat!
There's nothing, except maybe a tank, that I would want to use on a road with other cars/tanks.
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the biomass powered motor, also known as the driver
okay that's funny
this looks unsafe as fuck
Well, unsafe if there are cars all around you. But if we replaced a lot of cars with these vehicles which typically go around 40 to 70 km/h cruise speed, I think it would become way safer than cars.
A colleague of mine has one. They are easy to overlook and he sometimes has pretty bad looking crashes (from the outside) but the chassis themselfs are extremely sturdy and protecting. He slid down a road 25m at one point, crashing into a pole, but only got a bruise from it. Because, and that's the main point: these things are not going down 50mph, they are at 18mph and the only dangerous parts are intersections where cars are slower anyways
Just like regular bikes, it depends on how the bike and car lanes are layed out. If you keep them seperate the bike is unlikely to be hit.
separation of bikes and cars are rare in my city/country, and traffic tends to be very chaotic.
the main reason i say these look unsafe is that they look way less maneuverable for this situation. the nimbleness my bike has helped me avoid pretty gnarly accidents a couple of times before.
They also have e-scooters now that can do like 80 mph / 130 km/h .
This wiki page on Efficiency of transport is really well done. But if you sort by km / MJ, e-scooters and bikes are the most efficient forms of transport.
If I lived in a city, I’d love one of those! I live right out in the sticks, and it’s worrying enough meeting a big vehicle down the lanes on a bike, so being wider and lower is terrifying. I had a go on a recumbent bike a while ago, and would have bought it if it weren’t for the feeling of permanently being about to be squashed by a kid in a tractor. An electric-assisted recumbent trike that looks like a spaceship, and has room for some shopping would be mint anywhere else though!
Is there open source designs for this?
Kinda. There's a subreddit with people making fiberglass shells to strap to their off- the- shelf recumbent bikes. Converting a recumbent into an ebike is well documented online.
Adaik there isnt a 1 stop comprehensive plan to build a velomobile.
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Do they make some for hauling things (say a weeks with of groceries for a family of 4 or several sheets of drywall)?
That's totally different from a velomobile. Did you read the article?
At what point is it just a car pretending to be a bike? You can't take a velomobile inside with you, so you'll need a parking lot. They can't take tight corners like bikes, skateboards, scooters, or other methods of personal transportation.
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