• A ride on Glasgow’s new Subway trains (BusAndTrainUser)
• Car sales: we’ve hit a grim milestone not seen since 1981 (Slate)
• How Montreal’s New Rapid Transit Line Saved Millions Per Mile (Bloomberg)
• Japan to postpone plan to extend Hokkaido Shinkansen Line by 2031 (The Japan Times)
• The five-minute city is a new bottom-up model taking over Paris (Domus)
• BART’s new train fleet is saving hundreds of millions w/ in-house engineering (Trains)
• E-scooter companies are going bankrupt. That should alarm you even if you hate them (Fast Company)
• The Shipping Forecast – 100 years on air: Podcast (BBC)
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David Zipper makes a pleading case for e-Scooters, but fails to recognise many of the issues, or offer any solutions other than “build fully segregated bike lanes”.
Fundamentally, I can’t see what problem eScooters are there to solve that a bike or an eBike can’t do equally as well or better. Moreover, in densely populated areas where road space and parking space are both at a premium, getting people onto a frequent, comfortable bus service is a far better outcome. Better for safety, better for the environment, better for accessibility and better value for public money.
Re. US vehicle bloat, for a recent visit my son had borrowed a VW monstrosity of a full-cab pickup (Amarok ?), noticeably larger than a similar one he’d arrived in once before and filled with all sorts of hitech goodies. When I suggested, reasonably enough, that there was no need for such a vehicle apart from someone one requiring its specific features, e.g. a gang of 4+ taking a lot of equipment on-site (and even then the luxurious in-cab plushness etc wasn’t suitable for such a utilitarian purpose) but most would be bought by urban warriors, his comment was that in the USA it would be considered compact.