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|  hybrid human-electric agile monorails Still, primitive industries run on the detritous of ancient life exhausting vast tracks of arable land, fertile oceans, and life as-we-know it as dystopian images “Soylent Green” and “Road Warrior” approach ever more rapidly from a not-so-distant future. Science describes our position with the environment as a war-like emergency yet the academy, most of the scientific community, most environmental groups, the world's major industries, and most of the global political establishment are failing to address this with the level of extreme urgency required by a very dangerous situation. We exist in an immediacy of incredible paradox as humanity's most aggressive weapons addressing the climate change crisis are and will be of the most extraordinary benevolence toward nature and the people of this planet and toward a near-utopian outcome where, even now, half the people of the developed world born in the year 2000 have life expectancies of 100 years. US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood: "For example, we could upgrade the entire 2,250 mile East Coast Greenway, a network of bike routes stretching all the way from Key West to Maine, for only one-fifth the cost of a single recent I-95 bridge over the Potomac." Peter Drew's proposal for new bike lane markings: Towards an Eco-Transport Future Powered by-and-for Life Lean and Low-Carbon Mobility Proposal for a Transport Revolution The enviromental footprint of transportation systems based on cars can very simply be reduced to 1% by reducing the size of vehicles to scales compatible with human power: 1. Any vehicle that can be easily human-powered sets the upper limit of the scale (size and weight) of vehicles used on and off public transit. 2. Electric power and modularity gives vehicles the broadest range of accessibility and functionality both on and off systems.
The first statement sets the scale and gives an idea of the maximum practical size and weight of vehicles. Of course, they can be much smaller and lighter and practicality is assumed. Existing mechanical systems can reduce emissions from simple walking by two-thirds.
If a vehicle is easily human-powered then, in many instances that may be the most practical way to power it. There are many instances where being limited solely to human power is not practical and where the second statement applies. The elderly, disabled, and women with young children may not be able to easily move -- or move at all -- with human power alone. Going up steep hills is another issue and electric assists improve on the practicality of these vehicles. And, electric powering can extend the speed and range to that of any land-based vehicle in particular, use simple mechanical collision avoidance and control such as monorails and guide ways. Modularity makes it easier to adapt these vehicles to various requirements as-needed including electric powering, traveling on systems, increasing the ability to carry additional loads, and traveling with people just to name four. Systems can provide many advantages including advanced safety, speed, range, automated control, low-cost, and elimination of the need for high energy density storage such as fossil fuels. There is a huge war brewing: A battle of unprecedented kindness for a planet where human civilization continues to thrive and advance into states increasingly utopian. Unfortunately, we often are our own worst enemies, petty, cynical, tenacious, formidable. There's this senior designer from GM that will tell you that cars don't fit in the future http://www.earth.columbia.edu/videos/watch/116. They are too big; use too much space -- not enough space on this planet when you consider India and China -- and resources; kill too many people. So, ultimately, the migration to eCars is not much more than a glorified "Cash for Clunkers" program. With the world's largest industries deeply entrenched in the automobile industry -- insurance, finance, electronics, automobile, advertising, media -- the concept is that the automobile industry is "too big to fail" and all the "experts" do not seem to see a clear transition from this highly destructive and wasteful technology; Oh! the jobs that will be lost they cry! A clear clean transition does exist and it is quite straight forward and easy and will produce a much better world. And, there will be lots of extremely interesting and rewarding jobs! This has been the trend throughout the advance of human civilization and there is good reason to believe that it will continue. Key transportation professionals should be confronted to explain exactly why they do not think that human powered and hybrid human-electric powered transportation is serious transportation deserving of resources typical of the other forms. Small vehicles are those vehicles that are small enough to be practically powered by human power. A large-scale switch to running cars with green electricity will cut emissions terrifically. But, the key issue is that a large-scale switch to global mobility based on small vehicles will cut emissions much better to a completely sustainable level, quite possibly to less than 1% of current emissions. Part of this issue is to provide logical arguments on how this new mobility can be crafted to be much more practical, convenient, and safe; can provide better accessibility, performance, speed, range, etc. than current systems and is completely achievable in the extreme short term. Small vehicle transit -- such as currently embryonic public bicycle systems -- may be just starting to appear on the radar of advocacy groups addressing rapid action to mitigate and adapt to the climate change crisis and, hopefully, much more advanced small vehicle transit will soon become a mainstream idea as one of the critical solutions to the rapidly accelerating crisis. Urban Ecological Amplification Concept Life is intelligence and virtually the same. Nature provides everything. After all, human capital is a part of the vast store of natural capital. Just as cities serve as centers of intelligence amplification they can serve as centers of ecological amplification fully addressing the current crisis as engines of ecological repair. Rather than net drains on the environment cities can be reinvented to provide net-zero and ultimately net-positive ecological amplification including dense ecosystems to adequately address the current situation along with the requisite reinvention of the very nature of civilization itself. In the process of solving the extremely critical and difficult problem of accelerating ecological devastation the solution sets should be quite beautiful, elegant, and far-reaching. So far, nothing proposed or otherwise seems to come close to doing this. Human intelligence as a natural attribute is enhanced through greatly improved communication and interaction. Human mobility as another natural attribute is greatly enhanced by bringing people closer together serving as a replicable model for global human mobility which can be rapidly reinvented to incur less than one percent of its current environmental drain with the viral implementation of small vehicle transit.
Guinness World Records (TM) have certified PAC-Car II, from ETH Zurich, as the world's most fuel-efficient vehicle.
PAC-Car II reaches 5,385 km with hydrogen equivalent to 1 liter of gasoline in Ladoux. This is the new world record! (28 June 2005)
(Equivalent to 12,669 miles per gallon!) "You're a very lucky generation because in 25 years you can end poverty and save the planet and no other generation in history has had that opportunity. So don't miss it! It will be really rewarding and interesting. You can tell your children about it. And, the joke of it all is that it's only a matter of focus and effort. That thing is not going to break the bank. What we've been doing did break the bank! But, actually helping the poor and helping the environment costs within a few percentage points of GNP. That won't break the bank. That will actually save the world." Jeff Sachs, Can We Save the World Economy? October 20, 2008 www.earth.columbia.edu/worldeconomy/
There are huge differences in systems that have to accommodate maybe a few hundred pounds at a time than ones that have to accommodate 35 tons. Guess which ones are easier to design, cost a lot less, and work a lot better? Maybe it's about time automobiles lose their status as the dominant consumer product and morph into a completely new model for transportation with vehicles becoming very low cost with extremely low or no energy requirements, produce virtually no emissions, substantially less than human weight and size with minimal ecological impact and very safe; and be prime components in and outside of highly modular, agile, resilient transit systems; basically faceless low-margin commodities like telephones ages ago.
And the likes of cell phones perhaps exemplified by Google G1s and Apple iPhones to become the dominant high-quality consumer products facilitating communication, education, computation, the arts, and general intelligence amplification among many other low carbon yet extremely important aspects of daily life. And, morphing from the age of hyper-industrialization to the age of intelligence machines will cease from causing both ecological and human devastation to create a kind of reverse resonance to the old jokes that "size matters" and "the ones who die with the most toys win". What Will Become of Homo Sapiens
************************************************************************************************ With the global economic downturn and a growing awareness of the intractable problems caused by automobiles especially with regard to environmental devastation, cycling dominance should improve. Key for accelerating dominance will be large-scale public bike systems and intense focus on industrial design and development of bicycle and similar technologies that meet developed world needs in terms of safety, practicality, comfort, speed, and range. Protected bike lanes like cycle tracks are one simple advance. Easy-to-use folding full-size bikes like SwissBikes and recumbent tricycles like Trice are others along with power assists provided by small electric motors. Development and innovations that would allow this technology to serve as both standalone vehicles and modular components in mass transit would provide it with a formidable advantage since it would most likely facilitate safe, hands-free, automated travel. The successes and accelerating proliferation of public bike programs such as the Paris Vélib system is another major advance as it provides in excess of 200,000 rides per day. A New York system scaled appropriately would likely provide over one million rides each day easily qualifying it as serious mass transit here and now. Global Car Sales Down 21.8% for Toyota originalThis may give some indication of a sea change; but not conclusive. While this downturn on car sales is correctly attributed to a global economic contraction it may also be indicative of a transportation system that is a tremendous global burden since the economic impacts on personal computer, internet, and cell phone technologies seem not nearly as devastating. Reports of accelerating use of cycling to get around in the developed world may provide more important insight into how things are changing. Bicycle use will be high in those undeveloped places where people cannot afford cars where increased automobile use indicates that large numbers of people are coming out of chronic poverty; which is a good thing. A new developed-world sustainable transport and mass transit model, not based on cars but, based on small modular transport and transit vehicles will go a long way to stop increases in global automobile use and will in all likelihood be extremely cost-effective doing much to assist impoverished areas in pulling themselves out of difficult poverty traps. Optimally, with broad deployment of a new light-weight developed world transport and mass transit model, small modular vehicles become low-cost commodities greatly facilitating human mobility and a new vision of global civilization not unlike that advanced by personal computer, internet, and cell phone technologies. Wherein personal computer, internet, and cell phone technologies facilitate direct contact with the human mind providing substantial amplification of computation, communication and thought, hybrid human-electric and similarly scaled and adaptive vehicles provide direct contact with human self-propulsion extending mobility in the physical world in an extremely elegant and sustainable way. With minimal energy use and emissions very close to that required for humans to live, transport vehicles become no more of a burden than the cloths on our backs with all the advantages. ************************************************************************************************
"Although solar cell technology for converting the sun's power into electricity has improved steadily in recent years, high costs and inefficiencies have kept it from being a serious replacement for fossil fuels. A few high-tech heavyweights—IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard (HP)—hope to change this using the same formula of mass production and commoditization that helped them make personal computers mainstream over the past three decades." -- "Solar Sell: Companies that Mass Marketed PCs Turn to Photovoltaics," New York Times, Larry Greenemeier, June 26, 2008 original The same can be done for transportation now with comprehensive industrial design and broad implementation of safe, very practical, low-cost transport weighing less than 100 pounds. The key issue is: Can General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Tata Motors design and manufacture this type of vehicle? Tata Motors already has a $2500 vehicle real close if not the spot-on global price point unfortunately emulating conventional automobiles, but, most likely has the ability -- like so many others -- to design and build these futuristic vehicles here-and-now! Great, inexpensive pleasurable transport and transit for people to truly enjoy their cities and escape when they want to go lightly and spread the wealth. 
SwissBike Advanced Mobility Montague Military Bicycles Folding 
TriceQ (for quick) 
TriceQ Folded One practice among many experienced travelers is to travel light! Current mass transit is legacy technology based on very large, heavy, over-powered vehicles with the intent to move a lot of people fast by packing huge numbers of them into these cumbersome and often uncomfortable vehicles and moving them fast. It does not account for people having to travel on their own to and from these vehicles, nor does it account for wait times and the lack of resilience and reliability in systems based on this awkward way to travel. Rapid transit is much more effectively achieved when individuals can rapidly move themselves. If a transit system can provide assistance especially, in high density situations, or during off-peak hours with automated steering, collision avoidance, and direct non-stop highway style travel all in place, so much the better! During low-use off-peak transit systems are awful because of costs. Peak transit is also a nightmare because of costs. This need not be the case. With most legacy technology there gets to be a point where it costs too much to use any more and should be replaced by newer, better methods. This is the situation of transportation today. The costs are too low. The risks are too small not to start the changeover. Small, light, hybrid human-electric technology promises cost savings, levels of resilience, convenience, practicality, and comfort that will far outstrip initial development investments within an extremely short time. Imagine if we did cell phones the way we do transit . . . . . . real caveman style! We'd all need backpacks just to carry them around. And, we're actually still traveling in caves! Foldable feather-weight transport The disparity between current travel practice and capability is alarming and embarrassing! Crystallizing the rush of science and technology, a new extraordinary era will takeoff when-and-if carbon nanotube material science (or similar) morphs into a broadly implemented practical reality making highly convenient, rapid, and safe, accessorized clothing-like foldable feather-weight transport -- conceptually similar to Klepper kayaks -- the way to go. ( carbon strength record) New York City is the perfect place to design and develop transportation that will change the world with distributed on-demand vehicles less than 100 pounds on-and-off ultra light monorails. ". . . technology has the wonderful property of being nonrival . . . . "The fundamental reason for believing that prosperity can spread to all corners of the world is that the very science and technology that underpin prosperity in the rich world are potentially available to the rest of the world as well. . . the internet, computer operating systems, vaccinations, insecticide-treated bed nets, mobile phones -- the benefits are more that others are using the technology. Such technologies are often called network technologies, and the benefits of mass use are called network externalities. Fittingly, we live in a networked age, where the advent of such technologies has soared." - Common Wealth, Jeff Sachs Bikes are great! But, with car sales continually increasing around the world -- about one thousand new cars a day in Beijing alone -- bicycles do not meet developed world requirements for "serious transportation". Ever-so-light improvements will fuel a more sensible transportation reality. With air-resistance as cycling's major energy sink, light improvements for vehicles less than 100 pounds include:
Streamlining -- Low-to-the-ground recumbent design with as much fairing as practical allowing for Real seats -- Web-style like Aeron office chairs could be a good place to start
Hybrid human-electric -- 400-watt to 600-watt electric hub motors for urban environments and 1500 watts for longer trips at up to 80 miles per hour where 1500 watts is the power of an electric hair dryer or about 2 horse power.
Distributed on-demand -- Scaled to fit in urban housing for immediate use and zero wait times, minimizing peak speed requirements by providing high average speeds for maximum convenience and practicality. Safety -- Carbon fiber (Fiberforge), Kevlar, and, potentially carbon nanotube roll-cage and air-bag protections -- and other innovations -- to greatly reduce mortality and injuries from accidents. Ultra-low mass vehicles greatly reduce the inertial forces that cause catastrophic damages. Ultra light monorails -- Provide collision avoidance, automatic steering, better accommodation of snow and rain and keep vehicles upright with minimal environmental footprints having widths in inches rather than several feet more typical of conventional roads. No conventional roads required; not even in tropical rain forests. Putting up rails will be like putting up fences and they can also provide power and energy to minimize storage requirements, a major issue with electric motors though superior to internal combustion engines (that "burn stuff") since electric motors provide greater torque and no direct emissions. Ironically, electric locomotives are required to pull the huge coal trains to electric-generating plants. Diesel engines do not produce enough torque. Low-cost magnetic levitation -- Inductrack and Halbach low-cost permanent magnet arrays can potentially eliminate human-electric vehicles' use of wheels-on-rails reducing moving parts, wear-and-tear, and facilitate safer high speeds. Linear Motors -- Linear electric motors can provide automated high-density transit solutions with fewer moving parts and safer high speeds as they have been proposed for shooting rockets into space. MagneMotion 
ENERGY HOG: The brain uses up 20 percent of the body's power, a fair amount of which goes to keeping neurons functioning properly.
© ISTOCKPHOTO/VASILIY YAKOBCHUK Intelligence is evolution on steriods. "Urban areas are responsible for over 75% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the world. During the next 20 years, it’s estimated that greenhouse gas emissions will grow three times faster in developing countries than in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. ITDP will partner with the Clinton Foundation and local authorities in developing country cities to implement solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while addressing severe traffic congestion and other problems." - Sustainable Transport, Fall 2006, Pages 24 and 31 
Michael Chia-Liang Lin "Unfold and Ride," NYTimes 12/16/2007 By PHIL PATTON (The stackable RoboScooter, MIT) We live in an age of technological metamorphosis with mechanics rapidly changing into electronics entering an age of survival charged to put a stop to a future of mass extinction, environmental devastation, and millennia of hardship. Being instant, global, distributed, and on-demand, electronic communications is constantly expanding to be currently the closest thing to Star Trek's transponder mode and eliminate many of the reasons for travel. Travel is further being reduced by over half the world's population moving into cities where people gain terrific mobility using a variety of disruptively efficient, practical, and convenient human-scale methods. Despite a long history of non responsiveness and perceived political realities the most effective way to achieve a substantial reduction of automotive emissions is in New York City where the northeast United States is third largest economy in the world. 
City Car Heavy-weight vehicles with excessive power have dominated the transportation environment because they are extremely dangerous where light-weight vehicles 100 pounds or less using human and electric powering are truly the most practical solution. Hybrid human-electric disruptive technologies in communications, computation, thinking and learning have transformed human civilization and we are long overdue for broad implementation of hybrid human-electric transportation. Human-powered transport is low-carbon 
Commuting on wheels across the Williamsburg Bridge -- Casey Kelbaugh for the New York Times September 24, 2006 Most drivers know when to hit the brake. When will we? Cities solve the transportation problem by bringing everything close together. Cars make them 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. Humanity was not meant to live the self-imposed nightmares of much of the world's cities. We are meant to live in The Garden. When are we going to start removing cars from cities? When will we start hitting the brakes? Zep'lin flying boat ponders the future of electric vehiclesBy Noel McKeegan original 22:55 March 9, 2010 A boat that flies. Now there's a vehicle Phileas Fogg could really have used. Zep'lin is a blue-sky concept developed by industrial designer Damien Grossemy during a five month internship at Renault which imagines the use of solar panel sails and electric propulsion to liberate the yacht-like vehicle from terra firma. Setting out to "explore new design language of electric vehicles," Grossemy has come up with a land anywhere vertical architecture that incorporates a propeller drive, flexible wing and rudder system that would enable the craft to tilt sideways to make the most of the Sun's rays. Beautiful, elegant design? Yes. Workable? We live in hope! Video 
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 accelerate to over 40 mph coming out of turns. And top speeds for human-powered recumbent bicycles have exceeded 80 miles per hour. Olympian Shawnee Davis www.ecoagile.com/ShaniDavisOnEdgeNYT20100204.aspx www.ecoagile.com/AmericanSpeedskaterShaniDavisBelongsToTheWorldNYT20100213.aspx http://www.hulu.com/watch/122032/the-colbert-report-skate-expectations-speedskating-race---shani-davis http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/20/sports/olympics/20100220-davis-graphic.html  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 as literally one-half billion people in China use bicycles and virtually the entire world's population uses human-powered transport in one way or another. Eco-friendly design is often better design because it leverages the tremendous value of normally-present 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 (although this is most often miniscule because of the overwhelming amount of solar 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! Imagine this planet's heating and lighting bill without solar a huge source of energy! 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. Most cars won't fit the mid-century self-imposed environmental bottleneck through which life must pass to enter the future.
The trillions of dollars needed to support antiquated very costly transportation practices and infrastructures will not continue to be available. Reason prevails when all else fails. 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. With hyper industrialization creating broad shortages of raw materials and accelerating costs, cars will most likely be accessible to only the most affluent few. Designing hybrid human-electric vehicles to take their place in many instances may be a very viable solution. 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: There is a clear and immediate indication that hybrid human-electric agile monorails can provide the highways for human-powered transport and transit with minimal ecological degradation. 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. How extraordinary would it be to have a transportation system that produces energy rather than using it! If a million commuters' average power output is 50 watts per person to cycle to work, "siphoning" off two percent of that power (1 watt per person) to the grid produces one megawatt. 
UnoCycle EcoGeek UnoWebsite The Arc of Invention And the Making of Heroes "The Wrights’ airplane, like Goldilocks’ third bowl of porridge, was just right. It functioned convincingly and it was a system whose size and complexity was just as much as we could fully digest in our minds. That is why we name the Wrights as inventors of something no one person could ever invent. Indeed, if we hope to understand the arc of invention, we need a word other than invention for the device they gave us.
"Instead of “invention," consider the word, multigenium—literally, the aggregate genius of many. The Wright brothers were the canonical builders of the multigenium called an aeroplane. "With the arrival of a multigenium, something else happens. We’ve already mentioned exponential improvement as a phenomenon that has been observed by many and debunked by some, since it is not universal. Exponential improvement of a desirable feature of a multigenium (speed, accuracy, efficiency, etc.) occurs when certain conditions are met: The public, and technologists working in the area, must agree among themselves that some new function needs to exist. But then, exponential improvement only continues as long as it’s not limited by physical constraints. Steam engine efficiencies, for example, rose exponentially from the fully developed Newcomen engine until the laws of thermodynamics imposed a ceiling. "Exponential improvement always begins either soon before, or exactly when the multigenium takes form and we name our hero, because that is where communal agreement solidifies.
"Now another word, not a new one, but one we use in its less common meaning: crisis. Technically speaking, the multigenium, and the canonical inventor, are identified at the exact moment of crisis. "We use the word crisis so often to describe moments of desperation that we forget it really refers to an irrevocable point in the course of things where, for better or worse, a new direction is set in motion. Since the term tipping point captures that idea so well, Malcolm Gladwell adopted it (in place of crisis) in his fine book, The Tipping Point." -- John H. Lienhard is M D. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and of History at the University of Houston, and the author and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a radio program heard nationally on Public Radio. The ideas in this article derive from his most recent book, How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines (Oxford University Press).
Segway Rough numbers
A 50-pound bicycle or human-scale vehicle carrying a 200-pound person has a vehicle weight per person of 50 pounds divided by 200 pounds that equals 0.25: with 50 pounds as a weight easily carried in a backpack though probably not advised for people with bad backs.
A 67,800-pound subway car that has a 188-person capacity transports about 361 pounds of steel, glass, plastic, etc. per 200-pound person with a vehicle weight per person of 1.8 (for R142A cabless subway cars): the 361 pounds being a weight easily carried by an industrial pallet truck.
reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R142A_%28New_York_City_Subway_car%29
Try a thought experiment of 188 Segways weighing 100 pounds and costing $5,000 each on and off an automated palate system maybe similar to the UPS Worldport sorting facility weighing a total of 18,800 pounds and costing a total of $940,000 that can be used as transportation to and from the system as well; all at less than a third of the weight of a subway car and costing less and on the way to being a lot faster, more convenient, practical, and comfortable.
"The Machine that Changed the World" (Copyrighted 1990) by James P. Womack, Daniell T. Jones, and Daniel Roos describes "The Story of Lean Production" and "How Japan's Secret Weapon in the Global Auto Wars Will Revolutionize Western Industry." Recently, reprinted in March 2007 this bestselling book completely sidesteps an even more important issue: "Lean Low-Carbon Transportation" where one-half billion cyclists have been responsible in part for China's economic juggernaut; with the potential to revolutionize western industry again in providing a very important way to mitigate and adapt to the climate change crisis. 
WindCheetah  PlayPumps
Optibike http://www.optibike.com Earth: The Sequel - The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming | |
| Hybrid Human-Electric Agile Monorails
I. The engine is the payload.
II. Rail is a better road.
"Give me the place to stand and I will move the earth!", Archimedes 
A very preliminary “idea sketch.” An elevated small human-scale monorail allows people to travel above cars, buses, trucks, and pedestrians. The easiest vehicle to adapt to this system is a recumbent bicycle locked to an adapting pallet sleeve which can slide along the rail and cannot come off except by a special unlocking action. A restraining seatbelt secures the passenger in the bicycle seat to prevent falling off. Travel is in one direction on a rail. With the vehicle locked to the rail, it cannot fall over and it cannot run into another vehicle unless the other vehicle is directly ahead and going slower. Bumpers on the adapting pallets extend in front and back to cushion impacts.
Note: More recent design "ideas" (not shown) incorporate an articulating pallet to facilitate grades and turns with interstitial resilient material or springs making it a long shock absorber along the stabilizing rail. The seat is securely affixed directly to the pallet in several places for maximum safety. Ample braking is achieved (even at high speeds) with a handbrake compressing a central portion of the pallet against the rail.
Rail design Mountain Run
Long sweeping serpentine arcs across broad avenues and roads might eliminate much of the need to set rail supports in the ground like carving a way down a wide steep ski run on-the-level; could be fun; could also eliminate street clutter and ultimately provide support for shorter linear travel if desired. Clunky option Large steel plates like those used for street repair with welded elevated receptacles to insert supports similar to christmas tree stands could be another way.
Windcheetah Human-Scale Power, Speed, and Duration
Summary
Over 1500 watts (2 horsepower) is required to go above 80 miles an hour while 600 watts (0.8 horsepower) or less is required for normal urban speeds using highly efficient human-scaled vehicles.
David Gordon Wilson, an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of (“Bicycling Science” (MIT Press, 2004), calculated that Tour riders generate 400 watts of power when they are riding up mountains or trying to break away from the pack. An average person riding a bicycle and working as hard as possible puts out 150 to 200 watts, he said.
There are no comparable wattage values for runners, Dr. Wilson said, because the two sports are so different. Cyclists use nearly all their energy to propel themselves forward. Runners, he said, “spend a lot of energy bouncing up and down.”
In any event, Dr. Wilson said, no ordinary human being could even dream of matching these top athletes.
- New York Times "Just a Bike Race, You Say? Think Again" (original) July 22, 2007 By Gina Kolata From David Gordon Wilson’s “Bicycling Science”
“In cycling specifically, at the very highest power levels for a given individual (generally above 1500 watts, 2 horse power, for strong men), exhaustion occurs in just a few seconds. At a considerably lower power level, say 500 watts, a strong rider may last a few minutes; at 350 watts, an hour or longer; at 250 watts, it may be possible to pedal all day.” (Page 51)
October 2002 Speed Record on a fully faired recumbent bicycle
Sam Whittingham at 81.0 miles per hour
Matt Weaver (second in speed)
Sample “High-Speed Sprint Acceleration”
Planned Power
0.0 – 4.0 miles 350 watts
4.0 – 4.5 miles 475 watts
4.5 – 5.1 miles 600 watts
Official Result:
Matt Weaver at 78.02 miles per hour going 200 meters in 5.73 seconds
(Page 406-407) 
July 23, 2008 The Shweeb is a monorail for human-powered vehicles. It consists of two 200 metre long overhead rail circuits that vary in height between two and four meters above the ground. Under the tracks hang high performance pedal powered vehicles. Between one and five vehicles can be loaded onto each track enabling teams to race each other or race against the clock. Conceived in Tokyo by designer Geoffrey Barnett, the adventure park ride he built in New Zealand is partially a proof-of-concept for an ingenious, high efficiency, no emission urban transport system. Shweeb Video Shweeb Transport Technology 
TRANSPORT REVOLUTIONS
Moving people and freight without oil
by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl (Video Interview)  
" . . . a transport revolution is a substantial change in a society’s transport activity – moving people or freight, or both – that occurs in less than 25 years."
"The high oil prices in particular could give rise to two or more revolutions in land transport during the first half of the 21st century. One would involve the replacement of internal combustion engines by electric motors. Another would involve widespread powering of these motors directly from the electric grid rather than from on-board fuel. Together, and with necessary organizational innovations, these transformations would allow considerable movement of people and freight by land in an era of severe energy constraints and concerns about carbon emissions." THE GREAT WARTIME PAUSE IN MOTORIZATION IN THE US All belligerents in the Second World War limited civilian automobile production and restricted the use of cars, but the scale of motorization in the US going into the war put her effort to restrict the automobile in a class by itself. The industry’s claim that its manufacturing capacity could not be converted to military production was quickly disproved as the major manufacturers pulled car assembly lines apart, retrofitted as much as 75 per cent of this machinery to produce war materiel from anti-aircraft guns to heavy bombers, and literally threw the remaining material and equipment into scrap heaps. Petrol (gasoline) rationing began in 17 states along the East Coast from the middle of May 1942 and was extended nationwide by December of that year. Americans proved quite accepting of these changes to their mobility, perhaps because a majority did not yet consider cars to be essential to daily life. Poster promoting car-sharing produced by the US government during the Second World War The wartime experiment in putting the brakes on motorization revealed how quickly and dramatically the often characterized ‘love affair’ with the automobile could be set aside.
Common Wealth
Economics for a Crowded Planet
Jeffrey D. Sachs
 ". . . technology has the wonderful property of being nonrival"
"The fundamental reason for believing that prosperity can spread to all corners of the world is that the very science and technology that underpin prosperity in the rich world are potentially available to the rest of the world as well. If the rich countries are rich because they have adopted these improved technologies – power generation, medicine, transport, construction, and much more – the same improved technologies can also be adopted in today’s impoverished countries. As we noted earlier, technology has the wonderful property of being nonrival; each person, business, or country can adopt the technology without limiting the ability of others to adopt the technology as well. Unlike a given number of barrels of oil, which are available either for you or for me, but not both, the fruits of scientific advancement such as the human genome or the Internet are available for any and all, without the need to ration knowledge. Moreover, for many advanced technologies—the internet, computer operating systems, vaccinations, insecticide-treated bed nets, mobile phone – the benefits are greater the more that others are using the technology. Such technologies are often called network technologies, and the benefits of mass uses are called network externalities. Fittingly, we live in a networked age, where there advent of such technologies has soared."
-- Chapter 9; The Strategy of Economic Development (pages 205 -206) SummerStreetsMap2008 UPSWorldport AmoryLovins  Amory B. Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist, is a consultant experimental physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford. He has received an Oxford MA (by virtue of being a don), nine honorary doctorates, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood ("Alternative Nobel"), World Technology, and Time Hero for the Planet awards, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, the Nissan, Shingo, Mitchell, and Onassis Prizes, and honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects. He has lately led the redesign of $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors for radical energy and resource efficiency. He has briefed nineteen heads of state, held several visiting academic chairs (most recently the 2007 MAP/Ming Professorship at Stanford), written twenty-nine books and hundreds of papers, and consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. The Wall Street Journal named Mr. Lovins one of thirty-nine people worldwide "most likely to change the course of business in the '90s"; Newsweek has praised him as "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers"; and Car magazine ranked him the twenty-second most powerful person in the global automotive industry.
Winning the Oil Endgame, Amory Lovins Cycling in New York: Innovative Policies at the Urban Frontier http://ecoagile.com/Documents/CyclingNY.pdf | |  WindCheetah
Historical Perspective Where would we be if cycle rail development continued to this day? 
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