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

[Gina Miller]

Test

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 9:35 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
> >...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
>
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