For those of you who didn't attend Bill Mitchell's lecture, you missed out... He introduced his research for the city car being developed at MIT. I really sustainable solution to transportation within cities. A few comments (or problems) I had with his lecture are:- He mentioned the implemenation of this vehicle could advocate for more people to move to cities, creating a more dense population.... I guess in theory that sounds good because it would create a smaller footprint for a larger portion of population, but many other problems would be introduced if cities continued to grow.
- There is an inherent problem with these being owned by the public at-large... people want to own things and assert there status. With the use of bikes (as he mentioned is currently being done in Paris) this seems less important than with a motorized vehicle... so I feel that argument was flawed.
- I honestly think these would be better utilized in suburbia to supply transportation TO the city (not within it)...
- I wonder how safe these are? He mentioned no safety was "compromised" in the design, but what does that really mean?
Anyway, for the most part I thought this was a really cool idea and would love to see them utilized in the near future.
1 comment:
my problem with this idea was its objective of easing vehicular congestion in cities. Because these things are so much smaller, he mentioned you could get 100 or so on a city block where you currently can only get a fraction of that in cars. The problem comes when all the people who currently dont drive because of costs and parking issues will now drive because these cars take those issues out, inevitably leaving us with more cars taking up the same amount of space if not more than the current cars do!! Additionally, since there is no ownership over the cars, history has proven that people do not take care or respect things they do not own. so what would that mean for these vehicles? And lastly, what happens on that busy day when you leave something important in it and walk off??
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