Two Futures

Beijing

"A friend of mine here wakes up every morning and does his own air quality test — as many Beijing residents do: He looks out his 24th-story window and checks how far he can see. On a rare pristine day, when the wind has swept Beijing, he can see the Fragrant Mountain rising to the northwest. On a 'good' pollution day, he can see the China World building four blocks away. On a bad day, he can’t see the building next door."

-Thomas Friedman, Op-Ed Columnist, The Green Leap Foward, November 17, 2006, The New York Times

Most drivers know when to hit the brake. When will we?
Cities solve the transportation problem by bringing everything close together. Cars make transportation 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.

When are we going to start removing cars from cities? When will we start hitting the brakes?

Global heating is daunting

An important category of solutions involve simply, to stop burning things. One area this can be achieved with immediate benefit is transportation in cities where half the people of the world live and work, and in non urban areas with the potential for the greatest reduction in internal combustion vehicle miles traveled.

Over half of the working population in the United States commutes five miles or less and bicycles offer the strongest potential for reducing single-occupancy vehicle trips.

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, bicycles are second only to cars as the preferred form of transportation. Excluding this highly preferred mode of transportation does not make sense and is counterintuitive.

-- Testimony on the Bicycle Commuter Act

Hybrid human-electric agile monorails can be the new express routes
Truly effective hybrid human-electric agile monorails will provide better transportation
Safe, convenient, distributed, and on-demand
Save money, lives, and energy
Very low environmental impact and can be built without roads like fences
Provide ongoing exercise to improve health and quality of life

Increasing involvement

Since the know how and clear path to safe travel now exist to greatly reduce deaths and injuries to cyclists and pedestrians, federal, state, and local governments will increasingly implement safe human-scale transport.

Humanity faces a choice between two futures: doing nothing to curb emissions (which poses huge climate risks) and bringing them under control (which has costs but also benefits). - "A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check" by Robert H. Socolow and Stephen W. Pacala in Scientific American September 2006, page 51.