Bicyclers Unite - Ban Automobiles



It is wear as much as tear freeze/thaw cycles, rusting rebar, etc. Although your point is important,
the amount trucks pay versus the damage they do is far apart. Look at an old unused runway - it
falls apart all on its own.

"Curtis L. Russell" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> On 17 Feb 2004 09:03:39 -0800, [email protected] (Bill Meredith) wrote:
>
> >> As to energy, we fail to add in the energy required to make and service
cars
> >> and build and repair roads, which together is about as much as the cars themselves burn.
> >
> >A few things come to mind, first you need to maintian roads for the bikes and the truck traffic
> >in any case, so ther would be little saving there.
>
> Since one loaded truck causes more damage than many automobiles - I read somewhere that
> automobiles were effectively not impacting the road repair process much at all - banning cars and
> keeping delivery trucks would produce few savings.
>
> If no trucks used the road, evidently weather has a bigger impact than that of the small users,
> like cars and bikes.
>
> Curtis L. Russell Odenton, MD (USA) Just someone on two wheels...
 
On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 00:16:46 GMT, "Daniel Ballagh" <[email protected]> from
EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net wrote:

>> So get rid of your cars and start riding your bike. Does anyone know how to get this
>> revolution going?
>
>The biggest problem is urban sprawl. With commuting distances growing farther every year we are
>creating a society that will be unable to bike commute realisticly unless your willing to ride 50
>to 100 miles a day spending 2 to 4 hours to get to work and back. We need better city planning to
>make bike commuting feasible.

Or people willing to live closer to work even if that means no lawn and no single family dwelling.

--
[email protected]
Water.
45
 
"Robert Haston" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...
> "Bill Meredith" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> >
> > There is no problem with energy limit even at our current level of technology, we still can fall
> > back on the atom and the coal supply in the US is still a thousand year one not a hundred as you
> > wish to claim.
>
> HA! - Prove it
>
> The accepted figure is 200 250 years. If you used it to replace oil, this cuts that figure by over
> half. That doesn't include the costs of converting it to usable forms, to replace petrochemicals
> such as asphalt and coal oil; which eats up much of the energy content. If it becomes evident that
> we can't afford releasing the massive amount of carbon (that's why coal is hard and black) this
> would take an even bigger chunk.

Lord you do have to laugh, a hundred years ago would have been 1904 and you would have been yelling
that we was about to run out of whale oil<grin>. I can just see you stating that in only a few
decades we would need to give up our lamps, as we ran out of whales and therfore should start now to
go to bed early<grin>.

Two hundred years, ok I will go along with your nonsense that would mean that we would need to worry
in the year 2204 about giving up our cars!

Somehow given the rate of technology advance, a two hundred year time frame to come up with other
energy sources seem to imply that we don't have a problem for now or in two hundred years.

Of course looking for non-problems seem to be a disease for some of us, such as the y2k problem.

Hmm I wonder if I do a google search I would find your name on postings dealing with the end of our
culture duue to all the computers shutting down on Jan 1, 2000.

Come on nonsense is nonsense and there is no lack of energy now or in the future.

Bill Meredith
 
I really don't get why people are so willing to buy houses so close together you can practically
lean out your windows and shake hands - as long as your houses don't touch.

I guess part of the problem is there are really no American examples of "hi-low" development, where
the worthless side yards, etc. you save by living in a row house get returned as a nice playground,
pond, etc. Europe has lots more of this. Watching the Tour de France I was paying more attention to
how you would see miles of country side, then houses all clustered together before more countryside.
I saw the same thing in Sicily coming back from Iraq.

"Kevan Smith" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 00:16:46 GMT, "Daniel Ballagh" <[email protected]>
from
> EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net wrote:
>
> >> So get rid of your cars and start riding your bike. Does anyone know how to get this revolution
> >> going?
> >
> >The biggest problem is urban sprawl. With commuting distances growing farther every year we are
> >creating a society that will be unable to bike commute realisticly unless your willing to ride 50
> >to 100 miles a day spending 2 to 4 hours to get to work and back. We need better city
planning
> >to make bike commuting feasible.
>
> Or people willing to live closer to work even if that means no lawn and no single family dwelling.
>
>
> --
> [email protected] Water. 45
 
> Wrong. Our cities evolved in a society where we pay people up to a 100% subsidy to drive. For
> example, what if taxes paid for school (education) but not bussing (transportation) People would
> pay more to avoid paying a
few
> bucks a day to bus kids. They would live where city bus excess capacity could carry schoolkids
> (like East Albuquerque). They would demand
connected
> neighborhoods and safe streets. Most kids would grow up riding a bike as transportation, not as a
> toy. The seeds and fertilizer are subsidies, the mature plant is sprawl.
>
> Besides, it is just stupid to fight bad laws with otherwise unnecessary urban planning laws.
>

What I was trying to say was that our cities are growing so spread out that a typical commute for
many major cities is often 25+ miles one way. That make it very time consuming to cycle to work and
prevents most people from doing it.

Today many cities are trying to re-vitalize themselves by getting people to live closer to the
downtown areas. This of course helps the downtown areas economically but it also reduces traffic
since people are able to walk or even use public transportation rather than drive. Of course this
concept is not new, the older cities like New York have been doing this for years but when the
automobile became popular the urban sprawl began. This has caused longer commute distances and
traffic jams. Unless we re-visit our city planning/public transportation we are only going to make
matter worse.

Dan.
 
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