Zero VMT Vehicles

Zero VMT Vehicles

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Overview of ideal vehicles

There are huge differences in systems that have to accommodate a few hundred pounds at a time than ones that have to accommodate 35 tons.

Guess which ones are easier to design, cost a lot less, and work a lot better?

One way to substantially reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) is the broad implementation of vehicles that produce virtually no emissions and require minimal energy amounts, both sufficiently far below averages for vehicles captured by the VMT metric to be considered negligible and allowing them to be called zero VMT vehicles. Completely human-powered vehicles such as bicycles fit in this category, as well as hybrid human-electric vehicles such as the Aerorider pictured below. Since cyclists go about three to four times faster than pedestrians with comparable improvements in energy efficiencies and reduced emissions, when bicycles are used for many of the trips taken by walking, benefits can be as much as three to four hundred percent (of already extremely low values) on top of substantial increases in practicality and the convenience of getting to places in much shorter times.

Ultimately, if zero VMT vehicles replace standard vehicles there may be justification to consider them negative VMT vehicles; doubly so if they can serve as modular components of transit systems to greatly improve systemic efficiencies, practicality, and costs.

http://www.aerorider.com/en/aerorider.html

With research into large-scale removal of carbon from the atmosphere currently considered inevitable, it will be much more, if not impossibly difficult, if emissions are not drastically reduced. Which means that for the transportation sector there is significant urgency to develop and broadly implement minimal energy and emission technologies idealized as zero VMT vehicles.This may be much more practical at least in the short term than broad implementation of large, heavy, personal electric vehicles and major conventional transit infrastructure improvements, which may not really provide suitable remediation, and dramatically reducing sprawl by conversion to optimally-scaled shoe-leather communities where most trips can be achieved by walking.

Subpoint

It is important to understand legacy systems. They are old, often deeply entrenched systems that do not work well but cost a lot to replace. More importantly though, they cost a lot to maintain and they cost a lot to upgrade and they do not do the job well. In the long run legacy systems cost a lot more to run than it costs to replace them.

The current state of transit is legacy technology. The concept for moving a lot of people quickly is to pack a large number of people into very large heavy vehicles and move them fast. Large vehicles require very cumbersome, inflexible, and expensive infrastructures for support.

Since it is only people that are being moved, using modular vehicles the size and weight of human beings, and optimally much smaller, is a much better, more agile and cost-effective way to move them. Bicycles would be the first step in achieving such systems, by converting 40% of New York City travel to cycling, as in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Borrowing from successes of Parisian Vélib and German public bike systems, scaled up to significantly service New York’s 8.5 million daily commuter population, will be the most expedient cost-effective first step implementing modern and immediately valuable transit improvements.

While advanced industrial design and development of vehicles and transit systems will achieve much during the next steps it is easy to undervalue bicycle technology as a pivotal, very elegant solution. Bicycles are the premiere, very successful, zero VMT vehicles in the developing world.Over 600 million bicycles served as serious transportation in China at the start of its industrial revolution. Many hundreds of millions continue to this day providing very important services not only in Asia but in Africa to include the delivery of critical medical supplies to impoverished areas for the United Nations Global Fund. The inherent advantages of bicycles are that they only require human energy; they allow a person to travel four times faster than walking and that being low cost, very small, and light, have the extremely important transportation attributes of being readily distributed to provide immediate no-wait transportation on-demand; precisely the critical services required by fast-paced modern societies. Just as cars have been described as The Machine that Changed the World, NYC travel converted to 40% cycling would start a similar paradigm shift but with a much broader and very positive sustainable outcome.

And, what might happen?

Forty-percent cycling in New York City will be transformational. Mortality for car accidents with pedestrians and cyclists will become statistically insignificant and the amount of noise, dirt, and danger produced by cars will plummet. Large areas of public space will be reclaimed for people. Manhattan Island could easily become a Venice-like fairly-land green renaissance tourist destination of intimate diverse locales: some secluded, many packed with people, busy, fast and rich, yet easily accessible. Glimpses of this are appearing now at places like Union Square and during the Summer Streets events. The burgeoning boroughs in variegated patchworks of ethnicities and cultures will have their own delights and grow rich providing housing of the requisite human capital, talent, for huge tourist, arts, news and media, sports, finance, high-skill manufacturing, design and innovation, medical, and academic industries. An incredible urban environment with lots of water fronts, waterways, plazas, broad peopled avenues, and easy, convenient distributed and on-demand transportation for everyone. And, a transit system in a state of constant reinvention to move the daily millions; modular to the extreme, with components limited in diminution by the varieties of human sizes and needs for comfort and convenience: to be agile, above ground, adaptive, fun and fast; in the sun, immersed in weather, and under the stars.

ALSO ON THE LIVABLE STREETS NETWORK

Vehicle-Miles Traveled

Safety in Numbers

REFERENCES

Each source is referred to by the same number every time it is cited. Please keep citation style consistent.

[1] Legacy Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_systems)

[2] Public Bike Systems (http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm126.htm)

[3] Bicycling Science 3^rd Edition, David Gordon Wilson

[4] Bicycle Safety in Numbers, Scientific American, 60-Second Science Podcast; September 10, 2008 For a city to improve bicycle safety, the prescription actually is to put even more riders on the streets

[5] The Machine that Changed the World, described as "The Story of Lean Production", ironically ignores the benefits of traveling light, lean low-carbon transportation, and the extremely lean infrastructures required by this technology.