Iron Lynx

And even a smaller Bakfiets will readily handle over 99% of the listed cases.

NGL, Orphaniser or Orphanizer sounds like one hell of a metal band name

And no mention of ordering ; DROP TABLE orders;-- beers?

Look mate, if you’re going to shove the “tHe stATeS arE ToO bIG, thus wE cANNot SOlvE The transIt ProbleM” rhetoric on us, please find another place to wallow in your lack of trains while assuming car industry rhetoric as undeniable fact.

Also, your claim has been debunked and reclarified so often that I’m not going to begin to explain just how wrong you are.

I’d call them less a solution, more an attempt at harm reduction.

And the only things they’ll properly resolve are tailpipe emissions and idling noise. At least one of which is of no concern when dealing with the externalities of car traffic.

If you really want to solve the environmental impact of transportation, you minimise the need for transportation. Put homes and workplaces close together, offer mass alternatives for the pairs where you really do need motorised mobility solutions, and minimise the number of situations where it’s more convenient to take a car. Ban on-street parking and heavily tax off-street parking. Need to park your car in the city? Hope you can afford to pay an arm and a leg. Oh, you can’t? Looks the Park & Ride at the train station two towns over is the nearest alternative. Don’t worry though, the trains go six times an hour and a day ticket is, like, four quid max.

This all vibes like the kind of lawsuit that ideally should land managers in prison.

His name was on the patent. There was a second name on it as well, and that guy was someone whom the first cited. This second guy lost his license two years before publishing his paper, that the infamous one cited.

Put concrete barriers between the road and the bike path. And raise the bike path to top-of-the-barrier level with a sheet of perspex between them and the road. I thought of installing device to damage cars at roughly head height for motorists, but that'd move into the satirical and unserious domain. But the first two parts are pretty serious.

If the street is sufficiently hostile to fast moving cars, at some point dedicated infra space for cyclists becomes unnecessary. As soon as it becomes reasonable for a nutjob to speed past 30 kph though, cycling infra becomes quite necessary.

Let me rephrase it: how big is the market of domestic/household users for 300 kgs of photocopiers? Of course commercial shipments are a class on their own, while household cargo is generally so reliant on a handful of small packages every week or so that you can do that by bakfiets.

How big is the market for 300 kilograms of photocopiers? I’m pretty sure an average few streets of web shopping, a bag here, a coat there, a few mugs two houses over and two boxes of LEGO on the other side of the block, stuff like that. This sounds easily doable by cargo bike, assuming the infrastructure is sufficiently geared towards bikes of course.

Most domestic radiators are water radiators, from what I’ve gathered in a country where most houses are fitted with water based heating.

From what I’ve gathered, water based heating systems pump around hot water, not steam. Otherwise, the radiators, which are easily touchable by anyone, would be insanely hot, and thus a significant fire and injury risk.

In order to use them for cooling, I suppose you’re going to need a different transport medium, i.e. something like glycol instead of water. This would make the system harder and potentially a bit more dangerous to maintain, limits power when heating (water has higher specific heat than glycol), and you’re still stuck dealing with condensation at the radiators.

Using an air system for centralised cooling works. Using a water system is much more problematic.

Technology Connections? *checks link* yep, Technology Connections.

Loads of feed sacks? Either you’re running a commercial operation, in which case: fine; or your scale is smaller, at which point, if you’re close enough to town, an electric bakfiets might be able to do what you need.

Let’s slap a very Dutch solution onto that:

Ban any construction on the side of a through road, except for anything that strictly must serve cars, e.g. gas stations, EV fast chargers, stuff like that. If you want to build any other business near town, it has to be off the main road, closer to town.

Besides, make the village small enough, especially compared to the through road, and a through road through the village becomes more of an obstacle than a lifeline.

It’s worth considering the possibility of “rural” meaning villages. And in a village, most urbanist concepts work. Keep the main road outside the village, either horizontally (ring road) or vertically (tunnel). Put the places people need to go to in places where you can walk, mode separation & disentangling, all that jazz. And of course, with a village it absolutely makes sense to have a bus line go through it. Or maybe something heavier & faster if it happens to be there. Doesn’t have to be a bus line to the village, said village may exist between two larger towns, so a bus line from town to town, that happens to go via village. Maybe an extra peak hour bus for high schoolers if the village is small enough to warrant bussing kids to high school out of town.

As for the areas further out, for those who live a bit further into the boonies, I’d say the Park&Ride idea makes sense. Especially if most parking facilities are for bicycles. That can bump the catchment radius of a P&R bus stop from a few hundred metres to a few thousand metres.

How often do you need most of that range? Frankly, if you have an EV with a range of well over twice your commute, and you live in a place where you have regular access to even a regular wall socket, you can charge overnight, then, briefly assuming you’re a raging workaholic, you’ll never have to go to a place to add acutely usable range to your car ever again.

Besides, most EV’s have a battery that’ll drain about 75% over the course of two hours of motorway driving, and with current generation fast charging, it can recharge that range again in about ten or fifteen minutes. This builds in a ten or fifteen minute stop for stretching your legs, a wee and a cuppa, to top up on charge every two hours or so, which is actually recommended in general by many highway services for breaks anyway.

Assuming fast chargers are regularly available in your area, and having a plug socket near where you keep your car, daily driving electric, even today, is fine for 90% of us. And something that would be useful now would be to find a way to roll this out economically at places like apartment buildings.

(even better would be to not need a car in the first place, and to make it easier for people to ditch a car in favour of bicycles and transit, but that’s a debate for another day)

I’m stuck between “Did the Standard Oil Company write this comment?” and “I also want everyone and everything on the only habitable planet we know of to die.”

Makes a lot of sense. I don’t think I would put my life in the hands of a company whose culture was built heavily on a mantra of “move fast & break things.” That motto gets us really sweet tech, sure, but as soon as it matures to the point that lives depend on it, it’s better to have it built by someone who takes making it safe & enduring seriously. And Elon, by many accounts, is a manchild in his fifties who still thinks 420 and fart jokes are funny, and shoves that onto his customers.

I myself am not in the market for any car right now, my bicycle is likely to last me a few more decades and the trains & busses, although a little pricey in my area, are still reliable enough that I can depend on them for my regular needs. Though someone in my family is looking to get an EV in the somewhat nearby future (and solar cells on their roof), so that’s something to consider…