zerakith

They've been saying this for a while and nothing has come of it.

Conventry is big enough to warrant at least a full light railway but the UK constantly tries to cheap out on public transport.

To my mind the interest in this technology should he targeted on how much viability it opens up for small towns/villages

The article suggests that they have not decided whether to support new models of Pixel but will support current models until EOL

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.

Estimating and including carbon footprint of recipes would be great though challenging

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.

Its really stood the test of time and deserves appreciation.

A prequel that manages to be interesting without severely overstepping or ruining canon. Walking the delicate line between character driven and plot.

I mean in universe it's one of the oldest.

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