Jed Rothwell wrote:
Keith Nagel wrote:
I've seen _many_ other scooter and minibike devices, perhaps this summer I'll take some pictures and post.
I, on the other hand, have actually ridden some of these things, commuting 6 miles a day. Most of them do not seem practical. For a distance of 1 km or more you need to ride in the street, and the only practical way to do that is with a bicycle. Traveling on the sidewalk is so slow you might as well walk. A vehicle with wheels smaller than a bicycle is difficult to maneuver and it is likely to be overturned by a stone or broken bottle. (The railroad accident in Japan on Monday may have been caused partly by a stone on the rails.)
That, and the fact that the train was behind schedule and was reported to be traveling rather faster than normal in an effort to make up the lost time. The relatively inexperienced engineer (23 years old, just 11 months on the job) is suspected of having taken the curve where it derailed far too fast, but there is as yet no proof, and may never be unless the engineer recovers and admits to it.
Would a stone on the rails not have tended to derail the locomotive rather than several cars farther down the train, as I believe actually happened?
It is difficult to design human-proof systems.
Safety is the biggest problem with any of these vehicles. In the US, riding any kind of vehicle outdoors is dangerous, especially with SUVs prowling around. Even walking is dangerous with those damn things around! You cannot see the drivers and they cannot see you. I have been nearly run down by them on numerous occasions.
SUVs are the biggest argument I know of against the CAFE law in particular and against efforts to directly mandate fuel consumption in general.
When the government was serious about putting a dent in cigarette consumption it didn't try to pass a law restricting the number of cigarettes each person could consume in a day, which is more or less what CAFE was trying to do for gasoline. Rather, it just slapped a big (and highly regressive) tax on each pack and let the consumers figure out what to do about it. (OK, OK, it's not a perfect example, the attack on tobacco was actually multipronged -- but the tip of the most obvious prong was a tax, not an attempt at rationing.)
