If You Could Design Anything to Improve the Way We Live, What Would it Be?

Not bike lanes everywhere, but "safe lanes" in urban and suburban areas.

Lanes where one could safely use small, very efficient cars, bikes, whatever and not be threatened by large trucks and SUVs. Not even by Camrys.

Look at Toyota's 'rolling chair' that was just posted. Imagine scaling that up a bit so that one could have a 'weather bubble' and enough space to carry Johnny to daycare.

Something like that would be 1) easy on energy, 2) relatively inexpensive, 3) fast enough for much of our short hop travel, and 4) very easy to park.

I would design an entirely different transportation system. It would be a hybrid of public /private transportation.

It would be to solve the problem of 'public transit is just good for the other guy', me, I've got such a weird schedual, I just can't carpool or wait around for the bus.

And its true.

We all need control of when and where we drive when we are off freeways, but we all could travel stuck together in automated 'trains' while on the freeway.

So:

You would ride in small lightweight private electric vehicles about the size of wheelchairs with enclosed 'weather bubbles' to get to freeways.

At the freeway ramp, you simply turn off your engine and your private vehicle would be grabbed by an automated electric opensided train that was designed for transporting 50 or more at a time of these private transportation units.

At your freeway exit, your vehicle would be removed and reactivated so you would once more have control of it.

Because the electric 'vehicle train' was automated it could go at high speeds plus move the individual vehicles on and off quickly. Because the whole side is the loading dock, theres no human-caused delays at each exit, waiting for a crowd to amble through the door, like on a bus or subway.

The design would be uniform so all the robotic parts in both the 'vehicle trains' and the individual units would work together. In that sense it would be like public transportation, and would be designed for and purchased by cities or towns as sets the way buses are.

Then cities would make the units available to citizens at a cost. Because its a uniform design it would not be as expensive as a car, because it would not need ongoing advertising, design, retooling and testing expenses, and would be mass produced.

(...like they now sell us those big rolling plastic garbage containers that work efficiently to be grabbed and unloaded into garbage trucks.)

Sounds like someone's been watching "Minority Report."

If you redesign the cites for people instead of cars, then you won't have a need for a car anymore and you would get to work or the store or whatever much faster, safer, and in a eco-friendly way.

If you redesign the cites for people instead of cars, then you won't have a need for a car anymore and you would get to work or the store or whatever much faster, safer, and in a eco-friendly way.

Most bike lanes suck. Statistics in Germany _show_, that with most bike-lanes the bike-accidents rise. And not due to heavier usage, no, if you remove bike-traffic from the street, the car-drivers start to overlook it. And thus overrun the bike at the next crossing.

Bike lanes on the street? With a small painted strip? Leads to car-users driving as close as possible to the strip and endangering the bikers more (see also the british study regarding safety-distances to bikers with/without helmets).

One thing in traffic-planning to encourage more biking is just to enforce car-owners to keep the minimum safe distance to a biker. Which is at least 1 meter. Which is taught in driving-classes but neglected as soon as you sit in your ton of metal.

The bike lanes in Chicago are great, but you don't always expect them to be there when you make a turn(in a car), all of the sudden your are in a bike lane. Most of time the roads the lanes are in are just big enough for 2 lanes of traffic and 2 lanes of parked cars. The bikes have to dodge car doors and pedestrians walking between cars. Scary.

Having previously lived in urban China for some time I'd say they have a relatively advanced means of transporting en masse via bike lanes. The best of these actually create mini boulevards with curbs/grass/trees separating an area between the road and the sidewalk designed for bikes. This would require massive re-engineering of our urban spaces and is probably fiscally impractical. Also the environmental implications of such a conversion should be considered as well. However it is by far the best solution I've ever seen long-term.

Maybe I'm reading "Cycle Lanes Everywhere." To me it says that the only lanes will be cycle lanes. Nix the cars, nix the hazard, nix the pollution, nix the waste.

Yeah, but bikes don't work for those of us who are not as young or as fit as we used to be, and perhaps without health insurance to cover injuries from falling off or getting hit.

So I would suggest pedal-powered 4 wheel vehicles with a 'weather bubble' for 'rest of us'...

I think about this all the time. I would close the city off to all but emergency vehicles and construction vehicles, and the latter would need a permit. There would be bike stations everywhere; a light rail system and a handicapped bus for getting people from the rail to their destinations. Taxis could operate but they would have to be bike, horse, electric or solar carts. There would be horse stations as well... I would utilize horses for as much city work as possible. It would slow things down, get people back to agriculture, and end pollution woes in the city limits. Horse manure is compostable and would be gathered for city gardens. Everysingle thing used in the city would have a recycleable purpose or be recycleable : anyone caught not recycling would have to pay a fee, fees would pay for salaries for workers to recycle non-willing folks' trash.
People willing to live within city limits would have full access to free transport anywhere within the city as long as they are not a criminal element. Criminals , instead of languishing in jail, would be put to work building or working in gardens etc. They would necessarily build their own houseing and grow their own food, make their own clothes. People would still have the option of living any way they choose within the city but they would pay for bad choices such as using too much heating fuel... there would be fines, fees... all of which could go to education.