It's not entirely new news but........

[indalo]

......just to further confuse the issue about a green transport future:

BBC News - Electric cars 'pose environmental threat'

Indalo


ps Apologies to Morphix as I hadn't seen his piece when I posted.

 

[neptune]

I thing I have been thinking about in recent days, is the Psychology of transport. We all seem to be obsessed by travel and transport. We are always rushing hither and thither, for purposes that seem logical at the time. I am no better than anyone else, and every day i travel for the sake of it, albeit usually by pushbike. Perhaps it would make much more sense to organise our lives to avoid unnecessary travel. At the end of the day, there`s no transport like no transport.

 

[flecc]

You've hit the nail right on the head Neptune. The problem isn't what sort of means we have to travel, it's the ridiculous amount of travelling itself.

Any overhead view of out cities worldwide is the same, huge numbers of cars travelling in opposite directions 24 hours a day on almost as much road space as there is living space. As if that's not too much already, it's multiplied by buses, trams, trains planes and boats. It's not only hugely costly financially, it blights the environment, wastes space and time and is potentially damaging to health and human relationships.

We live in area A, work in area B, shop in area C and have leisure activities in area D. Saying that most of us spend 20% or more of our waking lives in various forms of travelling might seem unlikely, but we do actually waste our lives in that way. We really need to take a long hard look at this system and devise better completely new ways to construct our living environments. The total of the achievable benefits is potentially immense.

 

[Deleted member 4366]

I stood outside one of our local "fitness centres" the other day watching all the cars coming and going, and I was thinking along the same lines that the people could save a lot of money and effect on the envirnment if they simply ran to the place and then ran home again without going in.