[ExI] ape haulers again: was RE: The silent PV revolution

[spike]

>...From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
...

>...Do you think after the road is glass-smooth there will be any issue
keeping the cars in the lane, especially during wet/winter conditions?...

Glass smooth was  a bad choice of words on my part.  The surface finish is
the same as we have now on new pavement, still gravel in a tar matrix.  What
I meant was to provide a smoother lane by staing on top of any flaws in
pavement by frequent resurfacing to accommodate smaller diameter wheels.

Even this may be unnecessary.  Yesterday I was at the San Jose Tech Museum.
They have a new display about high efficiency ape haulers.  One of their
ideas is a three wheeled single seater, two wheels forward, one aft.  It
still used standard mass production tires, so if we accept the weight
penalty and rolling drag penalty of those wide tires, then current standard
road surfaces would still work.

Regarding Mikes point about bobsled courses, I have a notion that we would
put the low speed lane on the right, with a wall on the pokey-man's left but
none to his right.  It would take most of the space we currently think of as
the break-down lane, however we could arrange a way to still have a
breakdown lane, to the right of the pokey-lane.  The divider wall would need
to be intermittent, with a space about ten paces in length every 100 paces.
That way if some silly prole manages to run her Detroit out of fuel, she
could still coast to a gap, cross the slow lane and get over to the
breakdown space.  It isn't an ideal solution, but it has an advantage of not
requiring any new pavement.

Another alternative is to take the paved surfaces currently being converted
from carpool to toll lanes, use that for low-speed lanes.  I am imagining a
series of overpasses at each freeway exit which lift the low-weight narrow
vehicles over the exiting and entering high-speed traffic.  That would also
allow the use of bicycles on the freeways and autobahns of the world.

spike