I have often made this topic in posts so I thought why not create a thread for this for discussion and readership.
Privately-owned personal transport vehicles ( cars and two-wheelers ) are I believe the biggest form of pollution in the world, directly through their usage and secondarily through their production. This is multiplied by the many manufacturers producing multiple models per year. The hundreds of millions of middle class people in the world, especially in relatively newly "liberalized" and Capitalist India and China, are exhorted through media campaigns and word-of-mouth to buy the latest vehicle model. To purchase these vehicles the middle class and others indulge in a lifestyle that is polluting and not in harmony with Nature and idealized society. Even the supposedly Nature-friendly electric vehicles like Tesla are no good. So these vehicles not only lead to pollution but also to needless accidents, crime ( including "anti-social behavior" ), chaos and general disharmony. Ask me, who comes from India where all these factors are in extreme.
The simple solution for intra-city travel would be therefore to ban all privately-owned personal transports and replace them with 40-passenger buses and six-passenger taxis ( with sufficient luggage space ) that have been more in number and efficiency. Though privately-owned service vehicles ( food and grocery delivery vans, construction trucks etc ) can be owned. This idea itself is a fine idea and it has precedent too. The planned city called NEOM in Saudia will have no private cars and the planned district of Shezhen city in China called Net City will also have no private cars.
So what could be the form of the intra-city buses and taxis ? There is a good new development in vehicles called Cyclorotors which are aircraft that in modern form have electric motors attached to four hubs at the sides and the hubs have movable blades and when the hubs are spun the blades I think create a force that lift the aircraft and move it forward. The below vid was made known to me credit
@Hamartia Antidote. It is a test vehicle from the Austrian company CycloTech and of course I think in full form the hubs will be enclosed with a mesh for safety :
Such a vehicle could not only be used for buses and taxis but also for police vehicles, ambulances and food and groceries delivery vehicles. The fuel for these vehicles can remain petrol which can power the electric motors until the time that new longlife battery technologies like the
NDB or research into how
the electric eel produces up to 860 volts with a power to stun or even kill crocodiles, do not come about. At 05:21 mins in the below vid there is a visualization of a Russian project called CycloCar which can carry six people or 600 kgs of cargo and has a range of 500 kms with a top speed of 250 kmph :
I think ground vehicles for most things are passe and the future is of the Cyclorotor. And there's no point holding two-yearly climate change conferences if the biggest source of pollution - privately-owned personal transport - is not banned.
---
@fitpOsitive @Bilal9 @Indos @ps3linux others.