Local knowledge has it that it is fairly easy to row from Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico by leaving early in the morning to catch the right current and arrive there by nightfall. Iceboats had been clocked at 144 miles per hour back in 1914 to hold the speed record for many years to come. And in the next few years it's predicted that catamaran sail boats will be capable of speeds over 65 miles per hour. In the fastest unassisted self-propelled sport, elite long-track speed skaters go over 40 mph coming out of turns. And top speeds for human-powered recumbent bicycles have exceeded 80 miles per hour.
The liberty part of the Bill of Rights, being able to move is intuitively trivial with profound benefits too obvious to ignore. Those lacking human-powered transport are disabled and self-propulsion is main stream mobility, not alternative transport. "Transportation Alternatives" is archaic usage from the 1970s energy crisis. This is a cognitive problem and one of technological naivete. Eco-friendly design is often better design because it leverages the tremendous value of natural systems -- largely comes free -- while not destroying them. It provides very elegant commonsense strategies for building things that work a lot better.
This would be a very cold planet without solar heating. On a planet that is heating up it only makes sense to use solar to the logical extreme since large scale use not only provides clean emission-free energy, it reduces the global temperature in the process since the energy is used for other things besides heating.
Heat is simply the distributed kinetic energy of microscopic particles moving in random motion accelerating as the temperature rises. Natural phenomena remarkably capture and concentrate this kinetic energy in thermals, light breezes, winds, and in the tremendous dynamos of tornados and tropical cyclones. Much of the kinetic energy of the world's winds is converted back to heat by frictional dissipation. How extraordinary would it be to capture the enormity of kinetic energy in the world's giant storms for both the fantastic power and awesome cooling as well!
Buildings that get most of their heating and energy from the environment using solar, geothermal, and other free natural resources have the potential to work a lot better, especially when things go wrong because if designed correctly there is much less to fix and fewer externalities to depend on.
Transportation that extracts energy locally, naturally, and from what is being transported (i.e., us!) also has the potential to work a lot better.
Hybrid human-electric transport resulting from very effective design and development initiatives, may well provide the best solution to local transportation.
It has taken hold in the developing world because there is little choice; but, not completely since, when affluence arrives so does automobile technology. For it to take hold in the developed world, industrial design will have to meet certain challenges reducing the differences in practicality, comfort, and safety between human-scaled transport and automobiles and should be achievable at a greatly reduced cost compared to what may be perceived as other options.
Safe local conditions accelerate success!
Ongoing use of cars is a seemingly intractable problem in a world trying to deal with climate change and extreme environmental degradation. Designing hybrid human-electric vehicles to take their place in many instances may be a very viable solution potentially for distances of 100 to 200 miles.
Sustainability
Optimize use of the environment to supply human needs with minimum ecological degradation.
Sustainable transportation
Since people are quite adept at moving themselves develop methods to optimize human self-propulsion.
Implementation
Hybrid human-electric agile monorails fully address the local transportation cause of climate change by using a minimum of energy, materials, and infrastructure and producing a minimum of emissions.
Since humans are quite adept at moving themselves there is terrific benefit in developing methods to optimize human self-propulsion just like there is terrific benefit in optimizing use of the sun.
Benefits
Dramatically reduce deaths and injuries, ecological degradation, costs
Advance accessibility, reliability, quality of life
Safe travel that includes young children, the elderly, and the disabled.
No one is killed or seriously injured by easily preventable error and happenstance.
Provide a scalable solution to one of the major human causes of climate change.
Provide a practical solution to the devastating health problems caused by sedentary lifestyles.
