Commuting on wheels across the Williamsburg Bridge -- Casey Kelbaugh for the New York Times September 24, 2006
Most drivers know when to hit the brake. When will we? Citiessolve the transportation problem by bringing everything close together. Cars make them more difficult, expensive, and dangerous. And cities thrive despite them not because of them. Cars are a major cause of climate change and energy waste. Half the people in the world live in cities. Humanity was not meant to live the self-imposed nightmares of much of the world's cities. We are meant to live in The Garden. When are we going to start removing cars from cities? When will we start hitting the brakes?
Citroen E-3POD Antistatic Concept: ultralight, micro segment electric three-wheeler
/Pages/CitroenE3PODAntistaticConceptUltralightMicroSegmentElectricThreeWheelerGizMag20110208.aspx
Zep'lin flying boat ponders the future of electric vehicles
By Noel McKeegan original
22:55 March 9, 2010
A boat that flies. Now there's a vehicle Phileas Fogg could really have used. Zep'lin is a blue-sky concept developed by industrial designer Damien Grossemy during a five month internship at Renault which imagines the use of solar panel sails and electric propulsion to liberate the yacht-like vehicle from terra firma.
Setting out to "explore new design language of electric vehicles," Grossemy has come up with a land anywhere vertical architecture that incorporates a propeller drive, flexible wing and rudder system that would enable the craft to tilt sideways to make the most of the Sun's rays.
Beautiful, elegant design? Yes. Workable? We live in hope!
Video
Local knowledge has it that it is fairly easy to rowfrom Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico by leaving early in the morning to catch the right current and arrive there by nightfall. Iceboats had been clocked at 144 miles per hour back in 1914 to hold the speed record for many years to come. And in the next few years it's predicted that catamaran sail boats will be capable of speeds over 65 miles per hour. In the fastest unassisted self-propelled sport, elite long-track speed skaters accelerate to over 40 mph coming out of turns. And top speeds for human-powered recumbent bicycles have exceeded 80 miles per hour.
Olympian Shawnee Davis
www.ecoagile.com/ShaniDavisOnEdgeNYT20100204.aspx
www.ecoagile.com/AmericanSpeedskaterShaniDavisBelongsToTheWorldNYT20100213.aspx
http://www.hulu.com/watch/122032/the-colbert-report-skate-expectations-speedskating-race---shani-davis
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/20/sports/olympics/20100220-davis-graphic.html
The liberty part of the Bill of Rights, being able to move is intuitively trivial with profound benefits too obvious to ignore. Those lacking human-powered transport are disabled and self-propulsion is main stream mobility, not alternative transport. "Transportation Alternatives" is archaic usage from the 1970s energy crisis. This is a cognitive problem and one of technological naivete as literally one-half billion people in China use bicycles and virtually the entire world's population uses human-powered transport in one way or another. Eco-friendly design is often better design because it leverages the tremendous value of normally-present natural systems -- largely comes free -- while not destroying them. It provides very elegant commonsense strategies for building things that work a lot better.
This would be a very cold planet without solar heating. On a planet that is heating up it only makes sense to use solar to the logical extreme since large scale use not only provides clean emission-free energy, it reduces the global temperature in the process since the energy is used for other things besides heating (although this is most often miniscule because of the overwhelming amount of solar heating).
Heat is simply the distributed kinetic energy of microscopic particles moving in random motion accelerating as the temperature rises. Natural phenomena remarkably capture and concentrate this kinetic energy in thermals, light breezes, winds, and in the tremendous dynamos of tornados and tropical cyclones. Much of the kinetic energy of the world's winds is converted back to heat by frictional dissipation. How extraordinary would it be to capture the enormity of kinetic energy in the world's giant storms for both the fantastic power and awesome cooling as well!
Imagine this planet's heating and lighting bill without solara huge source of energy! Buildings that get most of their heating and energy from the environment using solar, geothermal, and other free natural resources have the potential to work a lot better, especially when things go wrong because if designed correctly there is much less to fix and fewer externalities to depend on.
Transportation that extracts energy locally, naturally, and from what is being transported (i.e., us!) also has the potential to work a lot better.
Hybrid human-electric transport resulting from very effective design and development initiatives, may well provide the best solution to local transportation. It has taken hold in the developing world because there is little choice; but, not completely since, when affluence arrives so does automobile technology. For it to take hold in the developed world, industrial design will have to meet certain challenges reducing the differences in practicality, comfort, and safety between human-scaled transport and automobiles and should be achievable at a greatly reduced cost compared to what may be perceived as other options. Most cars won't fit the mid-century self-imposed environmental bottleneck through which life must pass to enter the future.
The trillions of dollars needed to support antiquated very costly transportation practices and infrastructures will not continue to be available. Reason prevails when all else fails.
Safe local conditions accelerate success!
Ongoing use of cars is a seemingly intractable problem in a world trying to deal with climate change and extreme environmental degradation. With hyper industrialization creating broad shortages of raw materials and accelerating costs, cars will most likely be accessible to only the most affluent few. Designing hybrid human-electric vehicles to take their place in many instances may be a very viable solution.
Sustainability: Optimize use of the environment to supply human needs with minimum ecological degradation.
Sustainable transportation: Since people are quite adept at moving themselves develop methods to optimize human self-propulsion.
Implementation: There is a clear and immediate indication that hybrid human-electric agile monorails can provide the highways for human-powered transport and transit with minimal ecological degradation. Hybrid human-electric agile monorails fully address the local transportation cause of climate change by using a minimum of energy, materials, and infrastructure and producing a minimum of emissions. Since humans are quite adept at moving themselves there is terrific benefit in developing methods to optimize human self-propulsion just like there is terrific benefit in optimizing use of the sun.
How extraordinary would it be to have a transportation system that produces energy rather than using it! If a million commuters' average power output is 50 watts per person to cycle to work, "siphoning" off two percent of that power (1 watt per person) to the grid produces one megawatt.
UnoCycle EcoGeek UnoWebsite
The Arc of Invention And the Making of Heroes
"The Wrights’ airplane, like Goldilocks’ third bowl of porridge, was just right. It functioned convincingly and it was a system whose size and complexity was just as much as we could fully digest in our minds. That is why we name the Wrights as inventors of something no one person could ever invent. Indeed, if we hope to understand the arc of invention, we need a word other than invention for the device they gave us.
"Instead of “invention," consider the word, multigenium—literally, the aggregate genius of many. The Wright brothers were the canonical builders of the multigenium called an aeroplane.
"With the arrival of a multigenium, something else happens. We’ve already mentioned exponential improvement as a phenomenon that has been observed by many and debunked by some, since it is not universal. Exponential improvement of a desirable feature of a multigenium (speed, accuracy, efficiency, etc.) occurs when certain conditions are met: The public, and technologists working in the area, must agree among themselves that some new function needs to exist. But then, exponential improvement only continues as long as it’s not limited by physical constraints. Steam engine efficiencies, for example, rose exponentially from the fully developed Newcomen engine until the laws of thermodynamics imposed a ceiling.
"Exponential improvement always begins either soon before, or exactly when the multigenium takes form and we name our hero, because that is where communal agreement solidifies.
"Now another word, not a new one, but one we use in its less common meaning: crisis. Technically speaking, the multigenium, and the canonical inventor, are identified at the exact moment of crisis.
"We use the word crisis so often to describe moments of desperation that we forget it really refers to an irrevocable point in the course of things where, for better or worse, a new direction is set in motion. Since the term tipping point captures that idea so well, Malcolm Gladwell adopted it (in place of crisis) in his fine book, The Tipping Point." -- John H. Lienhard is M D. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and of History at the University of Houston, and the author and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a radio program heard nationally on Public Radio. The ideas in this article derive from his most recent book, How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines (Oxford University Press).
Segway
Rough numbers
A 50-pound bicycle or human-scale vehicle carrying a 200-pound person has a vehicle weight per person of 50 pounds divided by 200 pounds that equals 0.25: with 50 pounds as a weight easily carried in a backpack though probably not advised for people with bad backs.
A 67,800-pound subway car that has a 188-person capacity transports about 361 pounds of steel, glass, plastic, etc. per 200-pound person with a vehicle weight per person of 1.8 (for R142A cabless subway cars): the 361 pounds being a weight easily carried by an industrial pallet truck.
reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R142A_%28New_York_City_Subway_car%29
Try a thought experiment of 188 Segways weighing 100 pounds and costing $5,000 each on and off an automated palate system maybe similar to the UPS Worldport sorting facility weighing a total of 18,800 pounds and costing a total of $940,000 that can be used as transportation to and from the system as well; all at less than a third of the weight of a subway car and costing less and on the way to being a lot faster, more convenient, practical, and comfortable.
"The Machine that Changed the World" (Copyrighted 1990) by James P. Womack, Daniell T. Jones, and Daniel Roos describes "The Story of Lean Production" and "How Japan's Secret Weapon in the Global Auto Wars Will Revolutionize Western Industry." Recently, reprinted in March 2007 this bestselling book completely sidesteps an even more important issue: "Lean Low-Carbon Transportation" where one-half billion cyclists have been responsible in part for China's economic juggernaut; with the potential to revolutionize western industry again in providing a very important way to mitigate and adapt to the climate change crisis.
WindCheetah
PlayPumps
Optibike http://www.optibike.com
Earth: The Sequel - The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming