Prepare for Change

  https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/24/business/drive-thru-fast-food-chick-fil-a-urban-planning/index.html   Magnets of traffic and congestion, drive-thrus discourage walking, public transit use and visits to neighboring businesses. They also lead to accidents with pedestrians, cyclists and other cars, and contradict the environmental and livability goals of many communities. A host of cities and regions want the sprawl to stop: Atlanta lawmakers will vote this summer on whether to ban new drive-thrus in the popular Beltline area. Minneapolis; Fair Haven, New Jersey; Creve Coeur, Missouri; Orchard Park, New York, and other cities have banned new drive-thrus in recent years .   * * * * * If we want to prevent urban sprawl and turning our cities over to cars instead of people, we need to take steps to make local access more reliable.  

  https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/opinions/homelessness-solutions-houston-model-eichenbaum-nichols/index.html   Then we made three crucial decisions. First, we decided to work together as a collaborative system, aligned around a standardized set of goals, processes and strategies, rather than as individual organizations and government entities each trying to chip away at the problem. Today, more than 100 entities in the Houston area are working together and combining their efforts and resources to move the needle on reducing homelessness. Our collaboration includes using a centralized database to capture information and track the service needs of people experiencing homelessness and using a standardized assessment to determine which housing and/or service interventions best suit each household. Second, we embraced the data-proven best practices of Housing First , a strategy focused on getting individuals and families out of homelessness and into ...

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/06/europes-richest-country-made-public-transport-free-could-other-countries-do-the-same   The tram has exclusive right of way and has priority at crossings so is never stuck in traffic jams. This combined with the fact that it’s free encourages more people to use it. Bausch sees it as a measure of the success of Luxembourg’s transport transformation. Cars haven’t completely disappeared and the country still has the highest car ownership per household in Europe. Around 230,000 people cross the border into Luxembourg each day for work and 75 per cent of these journeys are made by car. “You shouldn’t argue against something, but for something,” Bausch says. “I do not make policies against cars, but for another mobility system in which the car has its place.” * * * * *     Luxembourg has spent years working on making their cities more livable by turning away from cars as the major mode of transport.  It's working!   ...

  https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-bikes-popularity-sustainability-evs-2023-4    "According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, more than half of all trips in the US are under 3 miles .  A University of Oxford study found that swapping a car for a bike just once a day slashed an individual's transportation emissions by a whopping 67%. Another study found choosing an e-bike for 15% of one's miles traveled cut their transportation emissions by 12%.  Fast, fun, and convenient, e-bikes are already helping people make that kind of shift in their daily lives. " * * * * * While many cities in the US don't have good bicycle infrasctructure, e-bikes should make that somewhat easier as they gain popularity, since travel distance for the average rider will substantially increase.  This will make a larger part of the city available to any plan to ride a bike rather than a car.  E-bikes don't need special charging stations, plus they can contri...

  https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/22/why-porsche-mercedes-and-gm-are-betting-on-silicon-anode-batteries.html   Batteries made with silicon instead of graphite — the commonly used material in battery anodes today — have been shown to enable significantly higher energy density and faster charging.  “Silicon anode has 10 times higher energy density than graphite,” according to CEO Kang Sun of Amprius Technologies , one of the companies working on the technology. “We’ve demonstrated that we can charge to 80 percent in under six minutes,” added Jon Bornstein, the company’s chief operating officer. Amprius is already working with Airbus , the U.S. Army, AeroVironment and BAE Systems on early iterations of its silicon-anode batteries.  * * * * *  Is it easy to switch battery production plants to a new method easily?  I certainly hope so.

 "Despite all of the recreational opportunities for bicyclists within the Black Hills region, bicycling is the least utilized method of commuting to work in the Rapid City Area. According to American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2017, only 0.4% of residents commute to work via bicycling. Pedestrians made up 3.7% of work commuters, and transit riders made up 0.6% of work commuters." * * * * * At least here in South Dakota, not many people bike to work.  While Rapid City has a very nice bike trail that winds along the creek, much of the city has no real bike trail, so you're fighting cars in many places.  Hopefully bikes can be given a higher transportation status so more people will choose that method, weather permitting, of course.

  https://www.salon.com/2023/04/09/is-a-post-car-future-actually-possible-experts-say-yes-heres-how-we-could-get-there/   "If there was efficient mass transit so that everyone can sort of theoretically get around, I would say [that] is pretty close to what is in place in Europe," Fulton told Salon, where Europeans have managed to maintain a functioning society despite using cars far less often than Americans. Yet Europe is still an imperfect example because even there, automobiles are so ubiquitous that they still consume a large chunk of transportation time. The key difference is that while Americans overwhelmingly rely on cars to get around, Europeans have an infrastructure that mixes cars more robustly with alternatives like buses, trains, bicycling and even walking. Fulton noted that the environmental situation in Europe is better than that in America because Europeans rely less on cars, which suggests that there are lessons from their experience. * * * * * T...