Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient; passengers and cargo are pooled into compartments; compartments pooled and unpooled mid-trip as needed to maximize total efficiency; where traffic runs underground and on a rail where that makes sense; where stations can be very large or very small based on traffic; where the economics of laying out the tunnels is such that it makes sense to build small stations; where car roads are a rarity; where safety is not relient on human judgment, skill or reaction time; where transportation is not dependent on fossil fuels. Aah, those things are pleasant to imagine.
Or, Imagine where we toll everyone daily who get's on a highway in a car, and instead provide sheltered lanes for bicycles. And those bikes are simple sturdy steel bikes with wire cage panniers and can hold a ton. And in this utopian world a lot of health related issues are reduced because of the incidental exercise that people get on commuting around.
I mean, it is cheaper but it's not that cheap. There was recently a post here showing very clearly that for example in Germany electricity is so expensive that a good diesel car beats it in terms of cost easily. Even here in the UK if I were to charge at public points it would again be cheaper to just drive a diesel. It only becomes cheaper when I charge at home with a good tariff.
Besides, seeing as our roads are exclusively maintained from fuel taxes, I cannot see this going on forever - the government will have to find a way to tax the electricity going into electric cars somehow.
Sounds evil-ish, but how about gasoline tax paying for electric car recharge? Electric cars being very expensive to buy is a problem though. You'd end up subsidising those who are already wealthy.
I mean the car I have(volvo phev) currently has a deal where Volvo pays me back for the 1st year of electricity used by the car, they do it by having the car automatically upload the number of kWh used to Volvo servers, then they will pay me back based on the number of kWh I've used during that year.
I don't see why something similar couldn't be done for taxes - the car keeps track of kWh used and you just pay tax based on how much you used. Obviously, that runs into certain immediate problems - like, what if you drive abroad? Normally you'd simply buy fuel while abroad, so therefore contribute to taxes there - but with this system this wouldn't work anymore.
Maybe a GPS and pay-per-km-driven scheme would be more tamper proof. You can spoof a GPS as well, but it can be double-checked automatically by state traffic cams.
Gas tax doesn't stop car dependence. In LA one gas station might be two dollars more a gallon than another one 5 blocks down the road (not due to tax, I'm really not sure why this happens), and both are packed with customers during rush hour. If you are well off enough where you can afford to pay >$5 a gallon without thinking about it, no reasonable tax is going to change your behavior. These people sitting in traffic 5 days a week in these black Mercedes luxury-safari-imperialist SUVs wouldn't care if gas was $15 a gallon.
I suggest you look for more than just arthritis related information. The amount of mechanical wear it causes is significant over time.
That is not to say it doesn't have benefits but to suggest the entire population can haul their arse on a bike doing a 20mi round trip every day for 40 years and be hopping along nicely is a dream.
Not to mention the incidental injuries of which my colleagues suffer from, and myself going back a few years (hospital wasn't much fun)
No, come on, provide something concrete. Searching for "cycling joint wear" just provides unreliable sources saying you don't use your joints up, but it doesn't provide unreliable (or reliable) sources saying the opposite.
It is easy to avoid incidental injuries, and everyone would much rather the trauma of an incidental cycling accident than the trauma of a highspeed car crash. Mentioning them in just scaremongering. Ride at a safe speed on a proper path and look where your going. If you can't look where you're going, you're going too fast; slow down. (You can't say "proper paths don't exist", because we're talking about the dreamland in which they do, therefore, by definition, they do.)
20 mi round trips are unlikely. You get long trips in cities developed for cars.
This is 20th century nonsense that has been debunked. Your body is not a battery that you use up, use means regeneration. Not using your joints for strength production is more harmful than biking everywhere.
> Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient
This is already true when you augment public transport with bike lanes, cheap or public bicycles, and slow narrow vehicles for the movement-impaired which can go on bike lanes.
... that is, in many cities in the world, especially in Europe. The Netherlands is particularly good in this respect.
