At the very best there are design choices here that are limiting its overall performance in order to make it cheaper and less invasive to install. Similar to a BRT.
It is possible that there is a use case for lower density areas where the lower costs could help make or break a business case.
To my mind though a city or large town is not the use case we know the answer for that and its regular light rail done consistently and coherently across the country to achieve economies of scale (as they have done in France). Sadly, the UK can't get past its ideology that money spent on public transport infrastructure is a waste whereas it is an investment in functioning economies.
I don't think its arrogance just a reflection of the current level of understanding earth systems. We have grown in capacity and reach to be affecting the fundamental systems of life. Those systems have been self-healing but we are causing unprecedented significant and wide reaching change and there's a non-zero chance we will hit positive feedback loops that completely disrupt the mechanisms of life on this planet.
Its a very minor point of disagreement but its just to acknowledge the scale of impact we are making. We've been fooled by how good earth is maintaining life that its less fragile and precious than it is
This is a common reply I see. I'd argue our impact on the very systems of life is now large enough that there's far from a non-zero risk that we do in fact take the systems that sustain life on the planet with us.
So the planet as rock in space is indeed likely to outlive us but the planet as a host of life is less clear cut.
There has never been a species before that has pulled so heavily on the web of life and that's why its even more important to fight with every last breath to try and fight to protect the only source of life we are aware of in the universe.
I am for free public transport from taxation there are some important caveats that would need to be worked out though:
We currently have low capacity relative to latent deamnd capacity (mostly at peak times) and at the moment that is managed through fares. We would need a system that manages demand in another way.
Our transport system is in large need of upfront investment to stop the current managed decline so you'd want a way of making sure that making it free doesn't mean the government is now more limited
Its also worth noting that its unlikely to be a direct swap in of current revenues with additionally required taxes as there are projects that are very costly that could be redirected and any successful mode shift away from cars would also carry a net positive economic effect on the whole treasury.
Potentially in the short term what could help is a 'sunk-cost' ticket similar to the bahnpass where you still pay but do so yearly and get access to any trip anywhere. It makes it more competitive with cars which have massive sunk cost effects which make every trip seem cheaper.
Also a result container ships scale on volume not mass so a trip that has a capacity for 1000 acoustic bikes largely has a capacity for 1000 ebikes since when shipped they use up the same volume (excluding cargo bikes)
There's a couple of issues at play which mean it doesn't work exactly like that.
Firstly larger ocean freight don't scale proportionately to weight linearly. So even if we assume that ebikes would mean a full doubling of the weight of a given trip it wouldn't require double the energy and therefore emissions to do the trip. It will depend on the exact vessel but an estimate from here is for each additional 100 ton of mass to a container ship it would use an additional 0.0714 of a gallon of fuel. Its very cool physics which is largely just down to the sea doing most of the work carrying the weight itself (the same works for different reasons for rail but all other modes have much closer to linear scaling).
The other factor is that in practice the energy and emissions are the result of whole systems and trips are not always operating at ideal conditions. So its quite hard to judge what actually changes in a while system if there's an increase in some weight of some products.
These are the reasons that additional weight in ebikes doesn't come out to a huge increase in shipping emissions when its all worked through.
edit: paper uses imperial ton not tonne - corrected
Which is actually another interesting thing about public and private transport. Doubling the trips by public transport does not double the emissions but doubling the number private trips does
These type of calculations do indeed account for that. They often rely on local average occupancies so areas with good well used buses can be lower or areas of low utilisation higher
My comment was tongue in cheek. Solar and AC are a good combo.
I'd argue there's still a energy+climate reckoning coming where energy won't be as abundant as it has been and high energy use activities (like AC) will be more challenging. the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) of renewables/low-carbon are much lower than peak fossil fuels.
Incidentally I'm the same as you I'm so socialised on sleeping under something I do it regardless of temperature
I think the usual consensus is Linux Mint (and its a solid distro) but I think the best advice is not to be afraid of trying different ones and finding out what works best for you.
I'm not saying we shouldn't consider this in urban design but I've seen a number of cycling schemes be ruined because of the advice that no gap greater than 1.5m can be left to prevent this sort of attack.
I can't help but feel we shouldn't be accept living in a fortress in order to avoid universal access to machines that can cause such damage.
Personally, I'm planning additional physical storage of photos off site. Not yet configured but planning for a subset of photos deemed too important to lose to be automatically printed and stored on physical media (DVDs).
In general I'm hoping it to promote a more careful approach to what media really is important to keep.
At the very best there are design choices here that are limiting its overall performance in order to make it cheaper and less invasive to install. Similar to a BRT.
It is possible that there is a use case for lower density areas where the lower costs could help make or break a business case.
To my mind though a city or large town is not the use case we know the answer for that and its regular light rail done consistently and coherently across the country to achieve economies of scale (as they have done in France). Sadly, the UK can't get past its ideology that money spent on public transport infrastructure is a waste whereas it is an investment in functioning economies.