Slippery slope aside, I think reducing unnecessary consumerism would be beneficial for our most vuneral populations. There would be a lower barrier of entry into the economy and more resources would be available at a lower cost for people who cannot afford them
Stock price is not inherently tied to profit. That is why p/e ratio exists. Also different industries can have different p/e ratios. Not even this holds though. Tesla’s p/e is OOM more than Toyota, but Toyota has higher profits and sells more cars.
Wear a raincoat or winter jacket, much cheaper than a car.
I have a trailer that can hold 40 kilos. That’s enough for anything I need regularly. I rent a moving van for the once in a couple year big item hauls.
Cars spread things apart making places take long to get to not using a car.
When you say takes long to get anywhere by bike, it is a self report you don’t live anywhere meaningful with anything fun around you
As a disabled person, I am lucky to ride my bike. I know other disabled people who can’t. But I know plenty of disabled people who can’t drive too. When people advocate for human centric cities instead of car centric cities, disabled people benefit the human centricity. Less cars on the road makes it convenient for other disabled people to get around in their cars. Also bike lanes are wheelchair accessible.
A car crash would injure an elderly person just as much. Cars claim they are safer by just getting bigger. But when big car hits big car, injury and death will inevitably happen
What about the people who can’t even afford a car they are even worse off? Society should not waver on its social services, or sociietal norms to only meet the needs of unhoused people with cars. Many managers won’t hire housed people who don’t have a car, or even share a car with a spouse. Societally mandated car ownership just makes everyone more poor and hurts those who cannot afford a car.
So let’s build more urban heat islands and parking lots. Exactly what a +40 C environment needs. Biking might be unpleasant in 40 C weather, and the cyclist might get a bit sweaty, but all of the positives are true. And cars are just going to make the planet hotter.
I bike to work when I go into the office, it’s about an 8 mile ride. I go at a speed where I’m not sweating. I’m not a pro athlete or anything either
You may live in a place that is the result of building car dependent infrastructure. To achieve a “bike city” op is describing, it would take decades, if not a century in your area for it to make sense to just bike everywhere. It takes time.
Unfortunately for most Americans, this is the situation. All of those places have a mediocre chicken sandwich because all of the restaurants are chains. Small businesses struggle with how new commercial areas are built, and chains run on such thin margins it is hard to compete.
I live in a Chicago neighborhood and have access to many delicious, reasonably priced chicken sandwiches. I have not had the need or the craving to go back to chic fila a since
Convert the parking to housing and business. Build a nuclear reactor instead.
My one critique is that this ruins human habitat and encourages car dependency, where a lot of fossil fuels will go. And no not everyone will drive electric cars soon. People couldn’t handle a mask mandate, they won’t handle a ev mandate. The best thing to do is to infill this land with more housing and commercial space so people don’t have to drive everywhere and just use nuclear power.
This law is a step in the right direction for reducing systemic inequities in our state
I honestly disagree. If you can get 5 car users on a diesel bus, you are making a positive impact on the environment. And you can deploy way more diesel busses than electric ones. Once you build demand, you can skip busses altogether and replace with trams. The batteries in busses are a cool technology, but still exploit child labor and extended neocolonialism in the same way oil does. Also battery fires are much worse than normal fires.
I think we should electrify fleets as soon as possible but I think adding a few battery busses here and there won’t do anything but pander to environmentalist
I think if they are doing a vacuum tube, they should get as close to a vacuum as possible.
I think if the USA is going to spend trillions on rail infrastructure, I think we should start with doubling or tripling the amount of trains on Amtrak first. It’s not as sexy as the Hyperloop, but it would get people riding trains more often
I think if we had an economy already built around these tubes it would be much cheaper, but I think that it would still be similar if not more in price as the building of highways.
It is not as easy as building a "bigger oil pipeline and running trains through it. The train moving at high speeds will need a complex and robust system that is continuous inside and outside the tube. The tube will also need ground foundation to handle those forces.
Curves and elevation changes will need to happen at even flatter grades than highways. The higher speeds mean higher acceleration around curves or up inclines. The less sharp turns means more of a reliance on raised structures and tunneling. Good luck on convincing thousands of farmers to put a tube through their property
Maintenance. A highway with a crack in it still works. A highway with a pothole in it still works. Maintenance on that pothole costs $10k USD and the highway is still usable through maintenance. Hyperloop maintenance would not be as cheap, the tube would be shut down before and during maintenance due to repressuring. The tube would need to be vacuumed again.
I’m sure there are other things undiscovered that would be costs as well.
I think the Hyperloop is a cool and shiny idea. In the US I would much prefer reliable and cheap, normal speed rail first, then highspeed, then Hyperloop if we ever get there. I don’t think we should be able to eat our pudding before we eat our meat if that makes sense.
Hi, aerospace engineer here. As far as benefits go it depends.
If we assume the tube is constant volume and constant temperature. The ideal gas law says that in this case, the pressure would change proportionally with density. So if you lower the pressure by 50% the density should lower by about 50%.
Drag force is also proportional to density. So a 50% decrease in density will result in a 50% decrease in drag. This is true for subsonic speeds. The speed of sound is 343 m/s or 770 mph.
Drag also has a square relationship with velocity. So drag gets extremely high when there is an increase in velocity.
If we take the speed of the shinkansen(90 m/s or 200mph) as a baseline and lower the pressure by half. The new speed the Hyperloop would be able to travel with the new speed is 127m/s or 284 mph. That is faster 40% for the same amount the trains will have to work, but to build all of that infrastructure, spend all the money creating a lower pressure environment and maintain that pressure for thousands of miles is just not worth it. The vacuum tube is just not practical to make.
Edit: If you maintain a reduced pressure and increase speeds about 30% of the speed of sound, the subsonic equations I used start to be less accurate. But in that case drag increases dramatically in transonic and supersonic regimes.
Honestly, for growing places, or places with bad public transit, diesel busses are the way to go. They are the cheapest and require almost no new infrastructure so it can offset car emissions quicker than the other options. Established bus routes that are popular should be converted to tram lines or BRT.
Chicago has a long history of segregation in the city. It’s worse than a lot of cities in the US. POC are leaving the city in droves because the city hasn’t well addressed the issues of the past. While I think wording it for pedestrian safety makes a lot of sense, this also makes sense in the context of Chicago
This person has never heard of tavern style.