You know, I'm somewhat of an oppressed minority myself

The best type of e-bike for replacing car trips is the cargo bike. Sturdy, capable, and often able to haul lots of cargo or even multiple humans, electric cargo bikes are rewiring cities to adapt their infrastructure for more human-centric transportation. Parents are using them to take their kids to school, businesses are using them for last-mile delivery, seniors are using them to improve their mobility, and cities are using them to replace traditional car- and truck-based services, like snow plows and garbage pickup

Is it NYC? Is it Moscow? Is it Perth? Or some other unlikely contender outside these obvious three best picks?

00:00 Introduction

00:50 What Came Before, and First Housing Attempts

09:46 Housing As A Right

13:04 Public Transportation and Housing

14:44 Comparisons To The West

20:38 Shortcomings and Historical Challenges

24:33 Conclusion

Ship on a train. Is this really urbanism? I dunno, probably not. But! Ship on a train.

for context there a street behind me that one of these should be the beg button for crossing.

• Stroads
• Parking Craters
• Car Suburbs
• Dead Plazas
• Highway Cuts
• Drive-Thrus
• Cul-de-Sacs
• One-Ways

Picture via https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/1899-military-tandem-tricycle-with-maxim/ which also includes a cool story!

You gotta have those watt bazookas though to use your tricycle technical

Several prototype military tricycles and quadricycles were also adapted for carrying the Maxim, though the ensemble was invariably too heavy to move across rough ground and could only really be used on a road. The tandem tricycle illustrated below was built by Vickers Son & Maxim. It carried two machine guns hinged and mounted at the rear. 1000 rounds of ammunition were loaded into boxes mounted onto long ‘tripod’ tubes fitted to both sides of the tricycle; these tubes were hinged and when the machine guns were ready for firing they became braces to dig into the ground to hold the outfit in place. The weight of the tricycle plus guns and ammunition was 374lbs. It was too heavy to pedal up an incline (though it could be towed by other cyclists).

Especially considering 1901 is like a good bit before derailleurs would become common. This thing's a singlespeed in all likelihood.

Pay triple the price to save 30 minutes over the regional 😎

Look at my "high speed rail"

LOOK AT IT

https://archive.is/srPlh

China will open the world’s tallest bridge this month, besting its own record with a structure that can fit almost two Eiffel Towers beneath it.

The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in southwestern Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces, stands a staggering 2,050 feet above ground, making it almost twice the height of Paris’s landmark tower.

It stretches 9,481 feet end to end, according to Chinese state media — almost the length of the National Mall in Washington — and spans a deep ravine locally dubbed “earth’s crack.”

It is the latest feat of engineering that underscores China’s outsize infrastructure ambitions.

“The Communist Party believes in building enormous projects to boost the economy and burnish political prestige,” said Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of China’s Communist Party, touted the bridge as a new “China miracle” that shows “Guizhou speed” and “Guizhou wisdom,” saying it characterizes a new stage in the country’s infrastructure development.

The bridge, under construction since 2022, passed a five-day load test late last month, state-run Xinhua News Agency reported, and is expected to open to traffic later this month. It will cut travel time across the Beipan River — between the counties of Guanling and Zhenfeng, which have a population of about 600,000 between them — from two hours to just two minutes.

The bridge is expected to bring in tourists: A transparent, 700-foot-tall observation lift will take visitors to a viewing tower atop the bridge, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported. The bridge also includes a half-mile-long glass path for pedestrians.

Li Mingshui, a civil engineering professor at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, who has advised local governments on the wind engineering and vibration control of major bridges, said strengthening transportation infrastructure is a key pillar in China’s regional development strategy.

“Unlike the U.S., which already has a highly developed highway system, many regions in western China remain poorly connected. What we are doing is to bridge those gaps and work on those weakest links,” Li said.

Local engineers have been describing their pride.

“Numerous bridge builders like me … are lucky to have caught up with the golden era of [China’s] traffic infrastructure boom,” Liu Hao, the project’s chief engineer, told Xinhua last month. Before Huajiang, the 42-year-old supervised the construction of six other mega bridges, almost all in Guizhou.

“When the Huajiang Canyon Bridge opens to traffic, I will definitely bring my daughter here to take a look and tell her proudly that ‘this is another mega project your dad and many other people have accomplished together,’” he said.

Engineers said they faced challenges including steep canyon slopes and powerful winds, and used a lighter arch design to cut the weight of the bridge by 30 percent.

China is home to a lot of record-breaking infrastructure: It already held the record for the world’s highest bridge, with the Beipanjiang Bridge, at 1,852 feet high, in 2016 displacing the Millau Viaduct in southern France for that title.

China is also home to the longest bridge spanning the open ocean, the 22-mile-long Hangzhou Bay Bridge in Zhejiang province.

But the dizzying pace of construction has also led to accidents. Last month, at least 12 workers were killed when a bridge under construction in the northwestern province of Qinghai collapsed, state media reported.

China has relied on huge state-backed infrastructure construction projects to spur growth, especially in inland regions, which have long lagged behind the prosperous coast.

China’s robust economic growth over the past four decades has been fueled by its infrastructure construction, McKinsey, the consultancy, said in a 2023 report. Much of this was financed by local governments, which has increasingly led to enormous levels of debt.

China’s leaders have promoted infrastructure as a backbone for its growth model.

President Xi Jinping has urged an “all-around” push for infrastructure to revive growth in the post-covid years. Last month, Premier Li Qiang stressed the need to “harness the exemplary and galvanizing role of megaprojects” to boost investment and domestic consumption.

Poor and inland provinces like Guizhou, a mountainous area near the border with Vietnam known for its dramatic karst landscape, have been the target of this effort as the central government has pushed a “strategic hinterland” strategy.

Despite its isolation and relative poverty, Guizhou — roughly the size of Missouri — boasts an extensive infrastructure network, with 11 airports, tall bridges and new roads.

These megaprojects are “not bridges to nowhere,” Li said, arguing that their long-term economic benefits will outweigh their construction costs.

But for Wang this approach reflects a different priority. “Rather than distributing funds to people for them to spend as they wish, officials in Beijing are much more keen to control resources to build monumental projects,” he said.

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of spending a day aboard the fuel boat and butty of "Jules Fuels" on the Grand Union canal. The day started - early! - with loading of supplies and then off we went to deliver to customers south of Milton Keynes.

One day when the water is clean, I'm going to spend a year doing the canal boat thing. It seems so nice.

Seventeen years ago, Californians bet on a grand vision of the future. They narrowly approved a $10 billion bond issue to build a high-speed rail line that would zip between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. This technological marvel would slash emissions, revitalize the state’s Central Valley, and, with some financial help from the feds and private sector, provide the fast, efficient, and convenient travel Asia and Europe have long enjoyed.

State officials promised to deliver this transit utopia by 2020. Instead, costs have more than doubled, little track has been laid, and service isn’t expected to begin before 2030 — and only between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities far from the line’s ultimate destinations.

It’s little wonder the project finds itself in a precarious financial position, fighting political headwinds, and deemed a boondoggle by everyone from federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. “In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” they wrote, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high speed rail.”

Such struggles are not unique to the Golden State, where support for the project remains strong. Although the private sector venture Brightline has seen some success, publicly funded high-speed rail efforts in Texas, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and beyond have stalled. Regulatory complexity, a political environment that favors cars and highways, and constant funding challenges stymie America’s aspirations even as other countries have spent big on tens of thousands of miles of track. Governor Gavin Newsom promises to see the nation’s most ambitious rail project through despite recently losing all federal support, but its troubled path underscores the systemic challenges of building big in America.

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