In middle school one of my science teachers was really great and thorough, the kind of teacher that you remember the things you learned years later because they made the classes memorable.
We would drop things off the roof of the building and record with slow-mo cameras to calculate the formula for gravity, he lit hydrogen balloons on fire and you could feel the heat. The coolest day of the year was when we got to play with his “hovercraft”. He had repurposed a Vacuum cleaner to create a baby hovercraft.
It was basically a small platform, with a plastic tarp on the bottom that had little holes and when you turned the vacuum on it would expel the air and the little platform would ever so slightly lift up and glide across the ground.
The reason I remember it so vividly was because each of us students got a chance to sit on the chair atop the hovercraft platform and the teacher would push us down the hall and we’d “hover” from one side of the building to the other.
I am forever grateful for the teachers who go above and beyond to make learning fun for students with no reward to themselves.
You had the middle school science teacher I wish I had but never did. This was one reason I decided to send my kid to private school. When choosing schools my wife had a bunch of criteria but the only thing I really cared about was interviewing the middle school science teacher and we picked one with a great science teacher. My kid had a had a terrific time in that class and I got to experience middle school science done right through homework projects and dinner time stories.
The incidental lesson learned is that a private school board, principal and administrators who do the hard work to build a system and culture able to attract, hire and nurture one really great teacher tend to attract more than one. About half my kid's middle school teachers were extraordinary. When selecting schools just remember culture starts at the top and administrative regimes can change by eras so look at the recent history of board, principal and key staff turnover. I found out later the great principal who hired the teachers we loved had left the year before we started. Fortunately, it usually takes a few years for things to change much and our kid graduated middle school last year. I feel kinda bad for students starting there now though because some of the best teachers are starting to leave.
> the middle school science teacher I wish I had but never did. This was one reason I decided to send my kid to private school.
I had one of those teachers, albeit in (California public) high school. We're still in touch. Between the union fights, bloating administration and top-down mandates requiring him to dumb down his textbooks, he's looking for a job in the private sector.
That's sad to hear. BTW, my post wasn't intended to argue for private schooling in general but more that teachers matter. There are some truly wonderful public school teachers. The problem is if you're not lucky enough to live in the right area of the right district at the right time, there's not much you can do about it except opt out.
I remember seeing those hovercraft designs in the back pages of some magazine (Boys Life? Something else?) for mail order and always wanting one. That’s so cool
As a young child, one day at school we had to fill in a "travel to school" questionnaire. I remember finding it funny that one option was "hovercraft", when the only one applicable to me was "walk".
Years later, I lived on the edge of Southsea Common in Portsmouth, and would regularly walk past these hovercraft terminals. The hovercraft do make quite a roar, as the article says, but were always fun to watch. I especially enjoyed "take-off" (if that's the right term?) when they would slide back off the beach into the sea and do a 180 simultaneously.
They do like to advertise the Portsmouth hovercraft service as being "unique", and say that no where else has such a service. So it's interesting to read that hovercraft are being used for regular services elsewhere in the world, such as in Japan, "to deliver passengers straight to the doors of the airport terminal across the Oita Bay without the need for a quay or even a connecting bus." Clever!
Several times I got the hovercraft in Portsmouth across to the Isle of Wight. One time I recall seeing a group of school children, presumably on their way back home to the Isle of Wight after a day of school on the mainland, and it brought back memories of my childhood questionnaire. I guess that option wasn't quite so ridiculous after all.
> One time I recall seeing a group of school children, presumably on their way back home to the Isle of Wight after a day of school on the mainland
Depending on when this was, I might have been one of those kids. Back in… 1995?[0] My school in Havant sent us there for a week to some activity centre whose name I forget, where I was knocked unconscious by a trampoline.
[0] Such a nerd that I am, the week containing Wednesday 29 March 1995, which I remember because of which episode of TNG my dad recorded for me to watch later.
You've misread the type of children they saw - an awful lot of schools, like yours, did (do?) trips to Isle of Wight and that activity centre, but the comment you replied to was talking about seeing kids who lived on the IoW doing their daily (presumably) commute back from their school on the mainland.
I know that PGS students sometimes travel over from the IoW, but is that mainly because it's one of the only private schools in the area? Do state school students make the journey as well?
>Such a nerd that I am, the week containing Wednesday 29 March 1995, which I remember because of which episode of TNG my dad recorded for me to watch later.
Not been on that one, but I did get the chance to do the channel crossing from Dover once in one of the big ones. That was fantastic. I’d seen them on TV but it didn’t prepare me for the visceral reaction of seeing these giant machines lift off and glide around. It really was like Thunderbirds in real life.
For people who live on boat-access islands in cold climates, hovercraft are a common way to get to school in the early winter and spring when the water isn’t navigable by either boat or snowmobile. Obviously kind of niche though.
I recently digitized some old family videos, including 20 minutes of watching hovercrafts "starting" and "landing" between Dover and Calais. Crazy machines.
Having had to suffer weekly trips back and forth from my home in Dover to Calais on those monstrosities I can tell you they are the least comfortable form of transport I have ever encountered. Every trip for me was 45 mins of non-stop vomit, regardless of the weather.
I much preferred the boat even though it took several times as long. Plus, the boat had arcade machines.
Loved Calais, though. Don't know how it is now, but in the 80s it was a very quaint little French tourist town.
> Every trip for me was 45 mins of non-stop vomit, regardless of the weather.
March 1976, I did the Calais-Dover hovercraft crossing on a night of bad weather in the Channel. I was fine and actually enjoyed the motion — until the hovercraft got to Dover and had to cross maybe 50 yards of beach to get to the terminal, and then I got queasy from the vibration off the sand.
Mustard has a good video on the birth and death of commercial hovercraft, focusing on the Channel ferries. TLDW: the economics didn't work, hovercraft were too expensive to operate, were not reliable in bad weather and could not compete against much cheaper/barely slower services (like the Chunnel).
I went on a SRN.4 across the channel; I’ve never felt so sea-sick! Maintenance costs must have been huge, since it was powered by turboprop engines. All the cost of an aeroplane, none of the speed or comfort.
When I've travelled by air, "comfort" has never been the first thing to come to mind as I've shuffled through security, sans belt and shoes, hours before my flight's scheduled departure time.
I agree that there's a lot that's impractical about hovercraft - especially when for crossing the channel there's so much competition: ferries, the tunnel, and (as you mention) flying. For people who want to take their car across, as I understand it the hovercraft took about as long as the eurotunnel does now to cross the channel - but the tunnel has much more capacity.
I’ve been on the cross channel hovercraft in bad weather. It was just as bumpy as being in a small speedboat in bad weather. But it was huge and insanely noisy and the experience seemed to last forever even though in all of that sensory overload I had no real concept of time.
If it had operated closer to Cuba the Americans would surely have used it as a form of torture.
Unless you've experienced a hovercraft in chop, it's probably hard to imagine. It's similar to extreme turbulence but more jarring and for the entire flight.
Hydrofoil from Sorrento to Capri in choppy seas, on our honeymoon. Was the stuff of nightmares. My wife said we’d have to live on Capri because she was never setting foot on a boat again
I went on them multiple times. When the sea was rough the crossing was incredibly rough. When it was smooth, crossing into France straight up a beach felt like magic.
We went to France on these (Dover-Calais) about 30 years ago, I was roughly 10.
They were incredibly exciting, loud, bouncy machines. Huge spaces to drive into, they floated around like toys when maneuvering, made my mother very sea sick.
I loved it. My parents suffered them as it was before the tunnel and much faster than ferries.
As a child I wished we could do it all the time. As an adult it’s obvious why they didn’t take off. In even calm seas they were bouncy and we suffered delays that never stopped the ferries. The ferries offered more ports, nice restaurants, and cabins on the longer trips in western France or down to Spain. A far nicer way to travel. The hovercraft were like doing an NYC to NY trip on a WW2 DC3.
But, they were so much fun I’m glad to see them back. I wonder how they’ll do against the tunnel now.
I remember seeing hovercrafts arrive at a terminal in Normandy back in the eighties as a child. We just went there to watch them come and go. I never traveled on one. Apparently not the most comfortable ride in rough weather. But impressive machines and very cool to see these huge machines slide from the sea onto the land.
These days we have other options for traveling fast across water. There are some interesting companies that build electrical boats with foils for example. But, I could see hovercraft making a comeback.
Electric hovercraft should be a lot less noisy and a lot cleaner to operate. They are in any case optimal for short distances. So, they wouldn't need an insane amount of battery even. The main challenges relate to charging them up quickly and cheaply with minimal hassle. Any inefficiencies could be offset by the power being relatively cheap.
For hovercraft to really take off, they'd have to be a lot more efficient and quieter. I don't know if there's anything that can be optimised about the enormous amounts of air blowing throw that thing; lots of other things are rapidly becoming quieter and more efficient, including PC cooling fans, so maybe there's room for improvement. Maybe electrification will help. But I suspect hovercraft are doomed to remain a niche.
Maybe they could use the fans primarily when in very shallow water or on the beach, and lower a water-jet propulsion pod on a fin for when they're in deeper water. Likely this would be significantly more efficient overall, even taking into account the small amount of drag from the fin.
A hovercraft could come up on land, which might simplify loading and unloading. But I don't think this is enough of an advantage.
The weakness of hovercrafts in their earlier heyday was reliability, maintenance, and overall cost. Hydroplane ferries also have higher costs, but there are still some running to this day, so these must not be as high.
As air taxis and other electric aircraft start to benefit from economies of scale in the future, multirotor ground effect aircraft (think Ekranoplans) could also benefit. But the other electric aircraft would likely outcompete them, except on a few very high traffic routes.
A big advantage air taxis have, is greater flexibility in loading and unloading.
I've been following Griffon for a while. I don't think there's a huge renaissance in the offing but their business seems to be surviving. I think it has quite important military, rescue and scientific research uses quite apart from transport. The technology is developing greatly in areas such as the shafts, engines and so on I believe. I think that if they do manage to go electric or hybrid electric it might make a big difference to the economics which could increase the potential market a bit.
I remember going across the channel in a hovercraft - I think I was 6 years old because the only other possible time was when I was 3 and I don't think I'd remember well. The weather was terrible and I remember feeling seasick.
I'm going to Portsmouth this summer to give it another go.
Living in Portsmouth UK, I see a huge hovercraft all the time, maybe the largest in the world for passengers, taking people to the Isle of Wight. I sometimes forgot that they are pretty rare. They are great for kids as they really feel like an experience.
Hovercraft troop transports are already A Thing, and a fairly significant modern use of the technology. They're mostly appropriate where there's a need to transport significant numbers of troops across flat-but-variable terrain (snow, ice, water, marsh/swamp), and where there's limited potential for enemy fire (artillery, missile, aircraft attacks).
The US have around 100 LCAC and similar vehicles, with a cargo capacity of ~60 tonnes, or 120--180 troops, each.
Hovercraft might prove useful in some cases for traversing minefields, but would be hampered by terrain (hovercraft have poor hill-climbing and slope-traversal characteristics), and might best be utilised after major combat risks are reduced, as part of de-mining operations.
I wondered about supplying troops across the Dnieper river in Kherson. The vehicle wouldn't have to stop at any point and wouldn't need a bridge or a road.
They would probably be rather more expensive and yet another thing to maintain and not carry that much. Ontop of that where would you hide them so that the opponent wouldn't concentrate effort to remove them? The more effective they were the more they would get targeted and be difficult to protect.
I really just think that nobody has tried - there probably aren't such a lot of hovercraft "on the second hand market" that can be bought and fixed up to go and the only ones in large supply are very small recreational vehicles.
They'd set off at least some kinds of mines, and also they don't do well on very uneven terrain. Beaches are fine but not so much fields pockmarked with artillery craters and crisscrossed by hedges and ditches.
So is everything, youd be surprised how much time nuclear powered aircraft carriers spend running diesel generators, well, maybe "you" wouldnt. Just saying what you already know, everything the military touches costs too much, im sure hovercrafts are difficult with the skirt and fans, I would just say we dont know whether people would be willing to cough up for it. Crossing the straight headed into Seattle I could see navy guys from bremerton spending the extra money, for instance.
Started my career as a Reactor Operator (injury sidelined that a couple years in), then moved to expeditionary aviation, which led to LCACs.
Seen quite a bit, and you aren’t wrong.
Honestly, a choice I made any given day running my section had more impact than my lifetime of private choices for emissions. Just another thing to fight with as far as ethics after retirement.
Oddly relevant. A man and his daughter drove a quad over ice and went through it in the Netherlands last weekend, and the girl passed away earlier today. :(
I really enjoyed travelling between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight by hovercraft and heartily recommend the experience to anyone who hasn't tried it.
Reminds me of Red Alert 2's amphibious transport. The Kirov is also a zeppelin, huh. I have a new appreciation for the alternate history in RA2, of technology that was hyped but fizzled out. Tesla coils as well.
Why the supersonic passenger aircraft's time might have arrived
Why the hydrofoil ship's time might have arrived
Why the ground effect vehicle's time might have arrived (Ok, that's a bit far-fetched)
...
I read a lot of these articles along the years, but it always turned out that the time hadn't actually arrived after all - one notable exception being electric cars...
Sometimes technologies seem to be going nowhere until there's a breakthrough. It's not the usual course (which is to go nowhere and stay that way) but it does happen. It would be interesting to see what characteristics the success stories have that made them different.
Another one I'll bring up is reusable rockets. Talked about for decades, then SpaceX made it practical and won big with the first stage of the F9. I'll argue Musk identified what was holding back previous efforts: that is, they were more optimized for raising funding from government (with all the associated political baggage) rather than achieving practical results.
A perhaps more common course for late blooming technologies is long evolution in niche markets until they break into the big time. Overnight successes that take decades. Photovoltaics are of this kind.
Sometimes a technology blooms because of advances made elsewhere. Arguably EVs have come because of advances in power electronics and Li-ion batteries that came from other industries.
Well in the case of the hovercraft, it had already. Just not enough to be ubiquitous.
I had the chance to live in Calais in the early 90's and seeing the Princess Anne and Margaret in operation. They were one of the coolest form of transportation.
- Airships were the original form of air travel before airplanes obsoleted them, still have some use for publicity (Goodyear blimps) or recreative flying.
- There are a few maglev lines in regular service in China. There were others in other places before.
- Concorde. Not anymore though.
- There are quite a few hydrofoil ships in operation today.
- Ground effect vehicles are just planes that fly low. They exist, but I am not aware of passenger service with these.
Yup, these are all niche technologies - some of them (airships) had their time, but today they are all much less common than the alternatives ("regular" airplanes, regular trains, regular ships). Interestingly there is also a parallel between hovercraft and supersonic passenger airplanes: their best-known applications (Concorde and the hoverferry across the English channel) both started in the 1960s, were never really profitable and were discontinued once the original vehicles were getting obsolete in the early 2000s.
Japan has had an operational maglev for years as a local train. The Linimo was built for the 2005 Worlds Fair and has been in regular service since, so it’s not just China.
There's a small but loud group of activists in Atlanta who are sure aerial gondolas are the answer to the city's transportation woes. Looks like Vancouver (Burnaby) is actually going to do it for connecting Simon Fraser University to the city below.
The system in London works, but was not built in a very useful place. While it's a handy way to get from the O2 arena to the Excel convention centre (something people needed during the 2012 Olympics), it's very rare for a longer journey to be made quicker by connecting to it - most of the time you can go to a different station and change. While it is part of the London Oyster fares system, it costs extra to ride.
The ”AI" needed for "autonomous" drones is basically just PID controllers. Autonomous flying vehicles already existed in the 70s, although not so much the hovering sort. For instance Tomahawk missiles with TERCOM navigation are originally from the 70s.
Around that time they also developed various missiles and torpedoes that could be fired in a general direction, which would then enter search patterns and look for targets on their own using radar or sonar.
It's what was meant by autonomous at the time, and isn't terribly far removed from what most autonomous drones are doing today. Today they might be using machine vision to identify targets, in the 70s and 80s they could do signal analysis to match sonar or radar signals to a database of signatures from known baddies.
"Electric cars" are a patently ridiculous concept. I guarantee you in the future we're using personal electric vehicles (scooters and variations thereof), not "electric cars".
> "Electric cars" are a patently ridiculous concept
Weird take when electric cars are widespread and are for many people the best form of travel available (e.g. particularly people who live rurally with rooftop solar)
They might be overhyped but to call them a "ridiculous concept" is at this point itself ridiculous
It’s definitely important to scope where car replacements are most successful. And it’s not rural living. It’s in more dense urban and suburban areas, where most of your needs are within 2 miles, and also that there is decent public transit.
They're a legacy crutch due to the existing ICE infrastructure. Eventually clean-slate implementations will outcompete the massive waste of maintaining the infrastructure originally built for something that doesn't even make sense anymore.
You don't need a 2000 kg car-shaped monster just to get one person to his office job. That's a historical artifact because ICE engines can't fit onto man-sized vehicles.
In the future most vehicles will be man-sized and powered by electrical motors. "Cars" will exist only for hauling freight, and probably only ever occasionally rented, not owned.
This appears like wishful thinking to me, because motorcycles have been available for a century, but people still almost always prefer cars if they can afford them.
Cars keep you much better protected from temperature, weather and traffic; it seems very unlikely to me that people will just forgo these comforts to rent electric rollers in the future.
Keeping a similar total number of privately owned cars, but almost all electric, sounds MUCH more likely to me.
> Cars keep you much better protected from … traffic;
I think you mean car traffic. Cars create most of the dangerous traffic conditions that exist in our cities and neighborhoods.
While the GP’s post is idealistic, so many places are working to make non-car travel safer, it’s not hard to imagine a future where people choose more convenient modes of transportation as they feel safer doing so. Bikes as an example, tend to be easier to park, avoid most traffic issues (never really get stuck in traffic) and generally don’t have to look for parking at your destination. The only downside is their utility is generally mostly for local travel (last mile) of about 2 miles.
My guess is that for people that live within 2 miles of their work, school, and other needs, you’ll start seeing most households drop to a single car, with electric bikes making up most of the utility needs. It’s hard to predict a timeline here, and is highly dependent on a communities attention to making roads safer for non-car users. But for communities that do make those safety improvements you see big upticks in bike usage for things like taking kids to school, daily food shopping, and travel to work.
No; I mean that a car protects reliably in case of an accident. When on a bike, roller or on foot you are MUCH more likely to bleed or break bones. Bike-on-bike crashes can be fatal, even if there were zero cars or trucks around.
Living within 2 miles of work for the majority sounds just improbable to me without falling back on short-term renting (maybe even then). Outside urban centers- impossible.
True, though based on the statistics around this most people tend to only bike about 5 miles. After that, it’s really only the folks committed to not driving at all.
Cars are a massive waste of energy and resources compared to other transport options we have now.
Societis/cultures who ignore efficiency will be eventually forced to adapt against their will. It's just market economics.
(E.g., you can be obstinate and waste a significant chunk of your income just for the perceived comfort of a car, but over a few generations these people will lose in economic competition to people who act rationally.)
"People won't do something if it's not efficient" is quite a take. Demonstrably wrong, too. People will happily trade off more energy consumption for personal convenience.
As PV goes down its experience curve, the cost of operating an electric vehicle will fall. As batteries go down their curves, the cost of the vehicles themselves will fall. This will naturally push the equilibrium tradeoff point to larger, more energy intensive vehicles.
As someone who’s adopting bikes for most of my utility needs, food shopping, dropping kids off at school, one thing I can’t agree with is that cars are more convenient. In general, I find cars to be far less convenient. They are annoying to park, often get stuck in traffic, and generally are just annoying large boxes that you need a lot of space to maneuver. Using a cargo bike for most of those needs on the other hand is far more convenient. Cars are definitely more comfortable, especially on rainy days. But even on rainy days, I often choose to ride (if it’s not a crazy storm) as it’s still more convenient.
Cars are only inconvenient in a few dense urban areas. In the places where most Americans live/work/shop/recreate there is plenty of free parking and traffic isn't too bad.
You appear to have misunderstood the Census definitions. Most of what they label as "urban" or "suburban" is hardly dense by urban planning standards. The people living in those places mostly have a surplus of parking.
The census has a broad definition of urban, which is why I also linked the Bloomberg article that is a more articulate piece on what we should define as urban. Even using that, more than 60% of Americans live in urban environments.
The question is about convenience. Cars and parking, parking lots, moving through them, being stuck behind one or two cars traveling into and out of a parking lot. Even if there is ample parking, you generally have to walk longer distances from that than you do when you bike. That is why biking can be more convenient than driving. It’s not that you have to search for parking for 30-40 minutes at both ends of you trip, it’s that driving has all sorts of annoyances, like random traffic from crashes, lots of waiting at signals, lots of waiting for others to get their cars out of the way in parking lots. That’s always been my experience driving, and that includes the very rural place where my parents live. When you travel into town for groceries, you still have to deal with moving a car through all of those situations. If I’m closer than 2 or 3 miles to where I’m going, my preference is definitely not driving, because overall it’s more annoying than biking.
> People will happily trade off more energy consumption for personal convenience
This must be why European cars are generally smaller than American cars. It has nothing to do with the lack of tax breaks on large vehicles, historically higher gas prices, and notoriously smaller parking spots. Nothing at all. Europeans just like smaller cars, right?
And let’s not get into why half of Asia seems to ride around on tiny little 50cc vespas/scooters. I’m sure that’s just more comfortable there what with all the extremely hot weather and monsoon rains.
You use money to buy energy. Wouldn't matter that you're money-bound if gas was free. With gas (energy) not being free, people are voting with their wallet to say they would rather spend their limited funds on things other than energy.
For example: Going bonkers crazy on insulation is a common thing to do in Europe. We had TV ads for triple-pane windows back in the 1990s in a country (Slovenia) where re-doing your windows costs an annual wage or more. Because over N years it comes out cheaper than paying for energy.
Energy is so cheap in USA, at least in CA where I am, that even in 2024 seeing double-pane windows on a house is rare. Let alone triple or quadruple pane, which have become the norm back home.
> Cars are a massive waste of energy and resources compared to other transport options we have now.
Comfort is something we spend energy and resources on. This is a good thing.
You could potentially argue its too much energy/resources but that's not a determination you can make, not having access to people's internal emotional states. Some people really like giant fuzzy toys, some like nothing more than flying and some like fancy VR.
We should let people spend the energy/resources they earn on what gives them the most comfort/enjoyment or we'll be Typical Mind Fallacying our way to collective unhappiness.
(The above assumes that the externalities of cars are correctly priced in in the form of car insurance, road tax, congestion charge and fuel duty)
I was struck on a visit to Tel Aviv how absolutely every economic class had a form of powered transportation.
The low rung was the scooter/bicycle and the expense and convenience went up from there.
The streets are absolutely clogged with every level of transportation and everyone was busy and going fast.
Quite a contrast to rural New England but obviously the future. I see a college professor riding a one wheel about 2 miles from campus going up an incline that stretches for 2 miles. The road turns to dirt as it crosses state lines to Vermont. I dislike the ride on my bicycle. I stopped him once and I think he said he had 40 mile range!?
Admittedly our experience is probably very different, I live in London where there's great public transport, so most people use that/ bicycles to get into their jobs. Despite that, I still own a car that I regularly use to get out of the city into areas that aren't remotely well served by public transport (think an airfield in the middle of nowhere). The infrastructure around renting a car is too much of a pain in the ass at the moment, and far too expensive. I think the inflection point is ~12 rentals or so per year to make it cheaper to own my crappy old car with insurance and maintenance.
In Japan, electric Kei cars do quite well at half that weight, even in rural areas with heavy snow. For example, 2022-2023 car of the year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Sakura
You need the car if you want to go reasonably fast (much more than 20-30 mph) and stay reasonably safe. You also need the car if you want to haul enough groceries to feed a family for more than one or two meals, or if you want to transport other people who may be too old or young to go cowboying around on an electric scooter. Electric scooters are pretty much only for young urban adults with no children.
Like it or not, cars aren't going anywhere. A scooter lifestyle might work for you but it doesn't work for a large enough portion of the population that your wishes for society will never come to pass.
Btw, electric scooters are possibly the most idiotic form of personal electric transport; electric bicycles are much safer. The geometry of a scooter, small wheels far below the center of mass of the rider, makes them fundamentally unstable at any speed. Considering bicycles exist, scooters are completely senseless and should probably be banned outright. You are far more likely to crash a scooter by yourself, simply by losing control of it, than to crash a bicycle. Scooters really are for young people who still think they're invincible; which explains why most riders don't even wear helmets.
> wheels far below the center of mass of the rider, makes them fundamentally unstable
Having the wheels far below the center of mass of the whole system (rider + scooter) makes them MORE stable, a bit similar to reversing a car with a long trailer instead of a short one. Compare to something like a racing recumbent bicycle, where the center of mass is really low. Those are very hard to balance at lower speeds.
You're so high above the wheels on en e-scooter (or just a regular kick scooter) that you can easily swerve (i.e. laterally displace the wheels, but not your torso) around a pothole or a puddle without changing the direction of travel. That's the opposite of instability.
The small wheels of scooters make them more likely to death wobble. I have personally witnessed it happen literal to the name, the rider cracked his skull because he wasn't wearing a helmet of course.
Bicycles naturally stay upright. You can push one without a rider and it will roll alone until it loses speed. Try the same with a scooter and it will immediately fall.
Some scooters are susceptible to death wobble, that's true.
The fact that you can push a bicycle without a rider and it will roll, while most small-wheeled kick-scooters will fall, is not caused by a higher center of mass, but by the geometry of the front wheel, mainly the steering angle, fork offset and trail. Without a rider, a) the center of mass isn't even that different and b) it doesn't really matter how they behave without one, because the rider is part of the system.
> if you want to haul enough groceries to feed a family for more than one or two meals, or if you want to transport other people who may be too old or young
This is a "once a week" situation. As time goes on it will become increasingly hard to justify the cost of something you use once a week, especially when other options (groceries delivery) are cheaper and more convenient.
P.S. Scooters are popular because they don't need skill to ride, despite being worse in other respects. As time goes on this, too, will change; learning to ride some sort of PEV will be normal.
How many "once a week" situations do you have? I go out to breakfast most weekends with my spouse. Which one of us should ride on the spokes when its 20° out? Do we have to drive seprately now?
Grocery delivery sucks. You have to order too far ahead, actual delivery time is too unpredictable, you can't personally inspect the items, and sometimes you get inappropriate substitutions. Any suggestion of grocery delivery as a substitute for cars is just totally disconnected from reality.
Americans will continue driving to Costco. There is no conceivable future where this minor transportation cost becomes hard to justify, especially when you factor in the cost savings of buying in bulk.
Grocery delivery is neither cheaper nor more convenient as a general rule. I've only used it once in the past 20 years when I was on crutches and doing a full grocery shopping was awkward.
Grocery delivery is cheaper because they save on real estate costs. (You can keep most of your stock in a warehouse with only a small area for walk-in service.)
This is already happening where I live, because it makes economic sense. (They can sell upscale and more varied groceries without paying for upscale real estate.)
YMMV. For me in the UK — where all supermarkets except the discounters will deliver cheaply — it's ENORMOUSLY more convenient: it saves me hours a week that I'd otherwise spend at a supermarket.
All of these concerns are predicated on sprawl-based land-use patterns, which themselves are dependent on the automobile. The largest impact of private motorised transportation, after climate, has been on the built landscape.
What was replaced were dense cities and compact towns, along with more distributed rural living, though the traditional form of that, still found in some places in Europe and elsewhere, is of small towns from which farmers travel to their (nearby, but not immediately proximate) fields.
In the city/town example, where the total urbanisation rarely extended more than a few kilometers or miles (as in low single digits), one would walk to shops or the market square, and purchases were carried, occasionally pulled in carts or wagons, or later delivery by the merchant was arranged.
Some goods, particularly fresh / readily spoiling ones (milk, eggs, ice) were delivered by cart door-to-door.
I'm not saying that we necessarily are returning to a similar circumstance, though it's a possibility you and others on this thread seem not to even consider. I'd suggest that this is an error. What a post-carbon world will entail is much more expensive private vehicle costs, where EVs seem to runs 2--4x the cost of an equivalent ICE vehicle, which would make ownership more challenging and various alternatives, including smaller transport options (bicycles, electric bikes and scooters, "city cars", and the like) more viable. I'm going to suggest that the Uber/Lyft ride-hailing revolution has proved a failure with many of the purported benefits (less traffic & congestion, universal availability, lower cost, less demand for parking) falling well short of advertised potential.
And I'm not claiming that the transformation will be instantaneous. Mass-market automobiles first appeared in 1901 (Ford's Model T and equivalent General Motors offerings), whilst tract suburban development didn't gain significant momentum until the late 1940s (Levittown, PA), and weren't fully mature until the 1970s, a lag of a half to three quarters of a century. De-suburbanisation may well follow a similar timescale. And yes, it's worth noting that there were a few minor road-bumps on the path to suburbanisation (the Great Depression, World War II).
> Considering bicycles exist, scooters are completely senseless and should probably be banned outright.
Scooters can be quite convenient due to smaller size.
In general, banning things that are too risky for an individual's taste seems wrong. Individuals should be allowed to take risks with their own bodies as long as they are fully informed of those risks. Skiing or having children might be too risky for me but imposing that preference on others isn't showing empathy.
Many single people exist who shop using a backpack, in the peer comments there is an example of a Japanese small car of the year that suits people of a different country.
World-wide car sales 2023: Around 70 millions
Cars sold in the US in 2022: Around 13 millions.
Even if you are talking only about Light Trucks and SUVs as an exclusively American choice, most customers in the BRICs and the most affluent developing countries now prefer a SUV if they can afford one. The only reason light-trucks and SUVs don't outsell light cars in those countries as much as in the USA is the income differential.
Cars per-capita? Well, the US has more cars per-capita than almost anyone, but not by a so big factor, it only has 2x the number of cars per-capita then, let's say, Brazil.
So, no, for what is worth, people seem to prefer to have a personal car as soon as they can afford one, and as soon as their income increases they also seem to have the same american stupid desire for trucks and SUVs.
Nonetheless, large families throughout time and space have somehow managed to survive without a yank tank, this suggests that while they may be desirable they are hardly neccessary.
They’ve also managed to survive without running water or antibiotics. And if you’re really worried about overpopulation, we could go a step further and eliminate the entire practice of medicine. Large families went without modern medicine for thousands of years, plus then we wouldn’t need to worry about maintaining road infrastructure for ambulances.
I have a cargo bike, I carry two kids on it to school and back in the mornings and afternoons, avoiding the crazy car traffic other parents create at drop-off/pickup, and also can carry up to six bags of groceries (easily) which is generally enough food for a week or more.
We use our car to travel longer distances, like soccer tournaments over 5 miles away, or on the very rare case I need to haul something really big (which is such a rare need it’s worth just renting a truck).
The average number of people in a car is probably somewhere between 1 and 2, but if a group of people who know each other have to go from A to B, it is reasonable that they may try to get in a single car. If nothing else, because parking in major cities tends to be a nightmare, and finding a spot for one car is easier than finding N (reasonably close) spots for N cars.
> If nothing else, because parking in major cities tends to be a nightmare, and finding a spot for one car is easier than finding N (reasonably close) spots for N cars.
A vehicle which isn't moving is not performing its job as transport; and is instead wasting space. Your scenario is better served by public transit, which doesn't require any parking (outside of official maintenance depots, etc.). It also scales to groups of several hundred, whilst a car can only take around 5 individuals (perhaps a few more in a minivan, but that just makes the inefficiency of moving it around and wasting space on parking even worse for the entire rest of its lifetime!)
I think the interesting thing about many childless people is that they literally cannot even process how the needs of a family with children may differ from their own lived experience.
How far in the future are we talking? It seems unlikely that we’ll manage to rebuild our infrastructure so that cars are no longer required in less than two generations.
Secondly, this is a timeframe of about 30 years. Making dedicated lanes for PEV's is not that hard. (I bet the urban planners in big cities are already making plans, considering how much of the delivery services have already switched to PEV's.)
I agree that we can greatly reduce our reliance on cars in the next thirty years, but I'm certain that cars will still be a significant fraction of our transportation by then. Not everyone lives in a city and many cities have too low density to be practical for public transport and small electric vehicles alone. Changing that takes a lot of time.
We would drop things off the roof of the building and record with slow-mo cameras to calculate the formula for gravity, he lit hydrogen balloons on fire and you could feel the heat. The coolest day of the year was when we got to play with his “hovercraft”. He had repurposed a Vacuum cleaner to create a baby hovercraft.
It was basically a small platform, with a plastic tarp on the bottom that had little holes and when you turned the vacuum on it would expel the air and the little platform would ever so slightly lift up and glide across the ground.
The reason I remember it so vividly was because each of us students got a chance to sit on the chair atop the hovercraft platform and the teacher would push us down the hall and we’d “hover” from one side of the building to the other.
I am forever grateful for the teachers who go above and beyond to make learning fun for students with no reward to themselves.