Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
Ships are more fuel efficient in transporting large mass anyway. shipping is the most energy-efficient form of freight transportation. Replace all roads with river ways!! All trucks with cargo ships... and some Yachts for public transport.
I unironically think we should have more canals and barges in cities, at least those with the topography and hydrology for it. Dense urbanism centered around the canals, the barges could transport cargo instead of trucks, and the water would combat the urban heat island effect. Bonus points if there are overhead wires (like for trams and trolleybuses) for powering the canal barges.
The Venetian solution!
The critical problem is controlling water levels. These naturally fluctuate daily/seasonally/yearly. I would guess this will only get worse.
On a pedestrian level, canals have the same issues as roads in forcing chokepoints, it might even be worse.
Colder climates need to worry about de-icing or freezing protocols.
On an emotional level, I miss my kayak and skating commutes from when I could take a canal.
Are there any real world examples of trolley canal barges, thought electric wires and water do not mix well? But yeah there are some ship based public transport networks, which I think should be explored more seriously. In India there are some water Metro networks like Kochi...
There is historical precedent!
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/12/trolley-canal-boats.html
And while we're at it, we can make all the sidewalks water slides. That would rule.