Art of Climbing Trees

Transport

Getting around Eutopia – Locally

Citizens’ Assemblies will do all the sums and should agree that private cars are an unviable transport solution in terms of energy/resource consumption during production, use and maintenance of infrastructure³²⁹ (i.e., roads). They create ugly, inhumane and dangerous living conditions in cities, which take up far too much valuable space. Crucially, they spoil children’s formative years of communal active somatic play⁵²). Among our primary goals is to create a convalescence home³¹² for ourselves and nurture forth Eutopians with healthy bodies and minds. Dealing with the domination of cars in cities is therefore vitally important. 

Implementing TEQs will go a long way to reducing any remaining incentives to continue with private cars. Car-pooling* can operate while we transition to lower energy solutions. Narrowing the roads by about half²⁹⁸ to accommodate beautiful public spaces and city farming will also make the bulky, overweight (and energy-hungry) buses that currently grace our city streets impracticable. We may instead consider narrow, lightweight, and quiet, modular electric public transport; modular so that carriages can be added or subtracted during peak or off-peak travel times. (We can, for example, repurpose electric ‘baggage tractors and cargo trailers’ that are no longer needed at airports). Free access to vehicles for removals, for example, will also form part of the wider public transport system. And similarly, this may also apply to people living in remote villages/where bus routes/train lines are unviable.

People with physical mobility issues can use lightweight electric private vehicles. And, of course, scooter, rollerblade and bicycle networks (powered by vegetables and dog shit³²¹) will support or even underpin the whole system. And for those who can, there’s walking – the cheapest, most open-source mobility solution! 

Cutting our ties with the private car will shrink our energy use and birth the (approximately) ‘15 Minute City’, where most things needed can be found within 15 15-minute’ walk, giving us substantial energy savings and more cohesive communities and resilience. Most of the goods/foods should be grown/manufactured within a radius of 100 miles (let’s say). Our energy-decent strategy will incentivise us to work much closer to home; taking a job with a long commute will be seen as the energy blindness of the old world.

The energy saved in the production, purchase, maintenance, and eventual scrapping of an estimated 1.4 billion cars on the road** will instead be spent on a hyper-slick global public transport network funded via GloWS¹²¹. 

Both local and global transport will be completely free, whereas global transport may initially have to be rationed using TEQs. Trading in our private cars is imperative, but it must also be tempting. The threat of climate breakdown is the big ‘stick’, and the big ‘carrot’ is free global travel. (One may also receive a number of transport kilometres annually that can be traded, donated to others, or accumulated over several years for longer journeys). In the case of performers, for example, who must travel for work, Transport rations or TEQs can be included in the price of tickets and deducted from audience members’ personal transport ration/TEQs accounts.

Of course, no-one needs TEQs to ride a bike around the world, and when all our transport is renewably powered, there’s nothing but a limited number of (free) tickets to keep us from travelling as much as we like.

Please try using the (efficient) ‘Six Thinking Hats’ method of parallel thinking for sharing your ideas.
It helps us to organise our thoughts and feelings. Wear the Black Hat for critisism/doubts; the Green hat for creative suggestions; the Yellow for positive responses, Red for gut feelings; White for information. I am wearing the Blue Hat now, when I say we are here to design Eutopia.

Simply write ‘Black’, ‘Yellow’, ‘Green’, etc, before your given response. Then, start a new paragraph for ideas of a different coloured hat.