A Car-less Day

I'd love to see a completely car-less day in a major city. Just one day where the madness, the spectacle we have created stops, one day where we are not living completely beyond our means. Our transportation system is a perfect example of the many failures of our society, one of these failures being the inability to apply technology in an intelligent way that would produce resource efficient outcomes and maximising the benefits to humanity.

The system we have produces individual transport, requires a higher consumption of resources, more work to be done, simply because private capital can get rich out of our absurdly inefficient system of individual transportation. This inefficiency is a perfect example of how the market fails miserably to provide intelligent solutions to problems such as moving people around from A to B, so as we now stand, our present transportation situation is a nightmare of absurd proportions, a train wreck in slow motion.

There are approximately 700,000,000 cars on the planet using up the earth's capacity to absorb carbon and using up precious, non renewable oil at a dangerously unsustainable pace. We’re on track to use up all of the recoverable oil well before we have a way to replace it for transportation, let alone all of the other uses, including to produce fertilisers, which we need to feel our population of 6.7 billion, plastics, clothes, synthetic chemicals etc.

Replace 700,000,000 cars with electric cars? I find this proposal as absurd. Who in their right mind would conceive this as possible, let alone desirable. Sure a few cars, but all of them? Plus the extra 400 million we're predicted to need over the next couple of decades? Individual private transport is a sham perpetrated by consumer capitalism, it is not efficient in any way, it's not cheaper for the individual citizen, in fact we're all paying through the nose for this system every single day.

Public transport, that is well planned, well funded, publicly owned, is the only way we're going to even get close to solving the crisis that we have on our hands.

There is no justification for such an inefficient system of transportation. Individually owned, private automobiles cause accidents, traffic jams, constantly break, need to be repaired, maintained, etc. Traffic jams are significant! Workers might work 8 hours a day, but spend 2 hours in traffic! If at least 1 of these hours can be avoided, then that is 10% time saved. In a city with 1,000,000 workers, that's a lot of labour, a lot of free time for families, a lot of time for anything. Absurdly wasteful

Most of the fuel used by cars goes into pulling around the weight of the car around. Think about it, your car weighs about one or two tons! You weight considerably less, maybe 10-30 times less, so roughly 90-97% of the energy used to move you is wasted! Is this really the best use of non renewable, expensive, polluting oil resources? Is this the best humanity can do?

Electified public transport is vastly superior and more efficient. If trams went everywhere and often, our society wouldn't need to work so hard, we'd all be wealthier and have more time, the air would be clean, we wouldn't produce as much Greenhouse gasses and we wouldn't be vulnerable to future oil prices and the devastation of peaking global oil production rates.

I'd really like to see these tram networks run on heliostat style solar thermal power stations, very efficient, renewable, cutting edge, base load power utilising thermal storage. Australia should produce the components for these power stations, build them here for cheap renewable power, then export the components to the world. Green Jobs! Turn around the tide of our shrinking manufacturing sectors, the service based economy is fools gold, based on debt driven consumption. Let's build a green economy, create jobs and create wealth for Australia!