It’s really cool to see how many new inventions they needed to adapt it for operating in Ghana. Honestly wish we could make something like that work here.

That is so amazing! The second half really takes me back to my last Chicago to Emeryville trip. But I was never so brave to do coast-to-coast. My neck would be soooo sore by the end.

Hopefully using this for transcontinent flight will be the one use. Since we should be able to build electric high speed rail everywhere that we travel over land.

Also the rooms are gonna be $300/night which is insane by my standards but I guess makes sense for a luxury hotel.

That is absolutely amazing. And I think they said they’ve been using it for 10 years already!!! That is just the coolest thing ever. Can’t wait to finish the whole video. I love Kirsten Dirksen.

Oh yeah, that’s a bit too intense for me. I’m just trying to get the word out wherever I can lol.

Not sure exactly what the lemmy.world thing means, but yes this was me and my partner! Quebec was great!

I definitely preferred Montreal to New Orleans. Felt far more European (like having a decent Metro).

lol, it’s more a statement about us (and I’d guess the average US resident) than about them.

Haha, no I flew last in 2019. Did a 6 month tour in the US in 2021 and have just been doing more local tours or renting bikes since then. I’m planning on saving up and quitting work for a 3+ month journey around Europe in 5 years or so. That’s the plan at least, we’ll see whether life says otherwise ;)

I’m planning to fly transcontinental once every 8 years for the rest of my life, but I’m being pretty strict with myself for anything shorter than that and going train or bus. For me it’s not exactly about the personal impact as much as doing it to make it easier for others in the future to do better. So every time I “suffer” a little because I take an extra day to travel by train/bus, I just think about how my doing it makes it more likely that train service with bikes will get easier for the next person to do the same thing. (Also I live in the US so most routes are much much harder than pretty much anywhere in Europe from what I hear.)

Totally amazing and the very most solarpunk way of doing it imho. Especially that really beautiful classic train getting the retrofit.

This is me except I spent a year working on farms and now I absolutely want to write code that automates farming because in reality it is backbreaking and quite monotonous. Hobby farms are leisurely but actually feeding yourself and others is exhausting.

It’s strange that they didn’t include the food offset by the ebike though. This link tries to give a comparison between the two accounting for a typical European diet (which is also far more sustainable than the typical American diet).

https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-environmental-impact/

A person riding a bike has to consume extra food to burn energy in their muscles to propel them. The energy has to come from somewhere. There are CO2 emissions associated with producing food.

Imagine upping the size, running the vacuums on renewables and automating it though. You could distribute farm fresh veggies to the doorstep of everyone in an entire city. I think that’d be solarpunk as hell.

It sounds a lot like you want us to be silent so you don’t have to think about it.

Most people intellectually understand that torturing and killing animals is wrong and they don’t want to do it. But they can put it into the back of their minds unless the vegans in their life remind them of what they look like to us.

And personally, I firmly believe that getting those little reminders from my friends added up over years for me until I realized it was worth it to make the change.

Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I do. People get uncomfortable for a second, but I feel like I have to remind them what their actions look like from my perspective. I’ve realized that if I don’t make jokes, they just never think about it!

The challenge that isn’t covered here is that the grandeur of Singapore is far far easier to achieve with authoritarian centralization than the anarchic style of solarpunk. And people are compelled by the grandeur of a large expensive project in different ways than the DIY scale.

So how can a ragtag group in SF or Berlin make something that captures imagination just as well as Singapore?

If you’re around Madison, WI I’m running group campouts now! Have one coming up this weekend and will do more over the summer.