Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) "Space Travel on Earth" (tm)

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Comment by Larry M. Aden on January 29, 2009 at 12:02am

Face it, Folks, there is no such thing as a sustainable city!
If you still believe there is, then, you either believe in fairytales, or, you are slightly mentally retarded.
Throughout history, humans have repeatedly built cities, and deserts in an effort to support them.
What was that definition of insanity, again?

Comment by Eric Koch on January 25, 2009 at 8:34am

Choosing What Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil

http://www. worldchanging. com/archives/009304. html

Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil

Sarah Kuck

As we draw nearer to reaching the point of Peak Oil, it benefits us to imagine what our cities will look like in a world without oil.
Does this conjure up images of cities turned into urban farms just to produce enough food for us all? Do we devote all our energy to growing, bartering and trading the food we grow? Or will the city become divided, with the wealthy moving to the center while higher costs of living force lower-income families to the outer-ring suburbs, where access to goods, services and transport will be limited?

If we start now, we can choose what we want our cities to look like in the future. We can make them the resilient, sustainable centers of culture, justice, art and creativity that we hope they will become.


Author and Professor Peter Newman is asking us to imagine and then get to work building these urban centers. His book and talk, both titled Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, ask audiences to honestly look at what will happen to our cities when we reach Peak Oil. During his 90 minute presentation last night at Seattle's City Hall, Newman explained to the full house how peak oil will soon change reality as we know it; and how if we choose to make it so, we can take this challenge as our opportunity to create a functional, just and sustainable world.


Picturing a future where we do nothing resulted in some frightening scenarios: ones where we are barely getting by and injustice is running rampant. But, as Newman explained, picturing a future in which we respond to the challenge by building resilient cities results in images of a flexible and supportive, flourishing society.


In order to build the new resilient city of the future, Newman said that “we need to stop building extra urban road capacity and urban scatter; we need to start building electric renewable cities with much greater localism in the economy and infrastructure.
”

“We need both at the same time," Newman said. "Or they will undermine what we need to do together.
”

Here are a few exceptional points, summarized from Newman's worldchanging presentation:

End Agglomeration Diseconomies
The freeway is a failed technology. Freeways don’t actually ultimately help people get where they want to go any faster; they simply scatter people and economies. Freeways fail as public spaces; as infrastructure, they are dinosaurs. Their impact on cities is not good for economics or people. So we should stop building them. We should instead organize and advocate for rail systems so we can reclaim and rehabilitate our open spaces. Car-dependent cities can begin to reclaim freeways by investing in rail transit and building up local economies around station hubs.


Density, Walkability and Affordable Housing
High quality, high rise developments in the city will increase walkability, and decrease the number of trips taken by car. These developments will function best if developers work in partnership with land use planners. To end the division and disagreements that high density development creates, we have to require all developments to allot 15 percent of space to social housing, and require 5 percent of the value of a development to go toward social infrastructure, like landscaped open-to-the-public space, public art, community centers, schools, arts facilities.


Complete Streets, Smart Grids
Cars won’t go away completely, even though the oil we currently use to power them will. The cars of the future will run on alternatively produced electricity. We can link the extra energy produced from solar and wind production systems to the batteries in our cars with Smart Grids. These energy linking systems help buildings and transportation power each other. (Read more about Smart Grids on Worldchanging here and here.
)

Eco-villages colonizing the fringe
Build eco-villages on the outskirts of the urban ring. Built with their own water, power and sewage systems, we can turn the crumbling suburbs into self sustaining eco-communities of the future.


What We Need to do Now
Newman gave vibrant examples of each of these ideas happening in cities all over the world, from Seoul to London, Copenhagen to Vancouver, B.C., these cities are proving that this is possible.
All we need now, said Newman, is imagination, post oil strategies, partnerships and demonstrations, and above all HOPE!

Let’s get to work.

Comment by Eric Koch on January 20, 2009 at 5:22pm

Anarchy....with out a leader......we all must police OURSELVES too a VERY high standard..

INTROSPECTION ANYONE??????

the orriginal pourpous of money....stripping away endless power struggles...WAS.. to facilitate agreement.

that doesn't mean AGREEMENT can't happen with out it....

agreement costs ZIP it's that simple.....who's got the money and Why?....Did they make that money by makeing the mess that Daryl and the gang have to now clean up?.......Hmmmmm.....let's all pause for a moment and see if we can come up with a solution to the problem,shall we?

Comment by Mark J Warren on January 20, 2009 at 12:46pm

I would like to see you get this done.

Possible Route - Nafta Super Highway - I-35 - Texas to Canada

Mark

Comment by WALTER REED on January 20, 2009 at 11:12am

Hi Daryl:

Brilliant. Hughes attempted a version of ETT back in the 1970's, but failed to gain the right-of-ways necessary for such a demo link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. You may also be aware that a new structural capability has been developed which may assist you with economic structural fabrication of the vacuum tube; It's called Sxyzicity and they have initiated a website; http://www.sxyzicity.com

I've pushed for and maintain, that to put our economy back on it's feet, the most important component is to capitalize the independent American Inventor for such projects to justify growing our decimated manufacturing industry, putting folks back to work, creating new wealth, and affording leadership in world trade with new product for market demand and a growth of exports to worldwide markets. Our 'leaders' just do not seem to understand that.

You have a great day,
Walter

Comment by Eric Koch on January 20, 2009 at 10:05am

A RE: letter to Larry

really good ta have ya on board as a friend....my friends list is a mix of attempts to localize and pure randomness...although i have a mix of favorites in the crowd.

Larry wrote:
"you will see that my arguments are based in facts, and that we are not so far apart."

Yup...couldn't have said it better myself...The thing is "facts" although we live in the information age,are still,for the most part, regarded as Intellectual property and/or trade secrets...corporations bank these facts,and what you have then is banked data and research ,that will only be supplied in the form of meet-able design goals.....the key word being "meet-able".

so lets just say our goals shake hands at the essence, and my "facts" are based on earned trust....if they tell me they can do it....i say: GOOD, THEN DO IT DAMIT !!!!!....i have a car and HATE IT!!...i know every casting, nut, and bolt, the electronics, wire color coding...out of necessity.....i like gizmo art as much as the next guy ,but i want to diversify....and to waste my energy, talent, and money, on a shit gob of ridiculously obsolete point A to point B infrastructure,is more than i can bear to tolerate any longer!!!.....I know this to the core of my innards, and hope you can find it to understand.

regards, rulgert

Comment by Eric Koch on January 14, 2009 at 10:32am

Copy,Paste,and Send to everyone you know.

America is sitting on an amazing untapped wind resource,the wind corridor that stretches from Texas to North Dakota...our population is stabilized but our agricultural lands are devastated from decades of food exports.

with bio-char production as dump load regulation,in conjunction with power storage solutions the wind power capacity can go in at an astounding rate...the wind fixes the soil ,the soil sequesters the carbon and gives life......our entire world is unsustainable as is, and the changes required don't stop there...what will it take to get you out of your arm chair?

Mr.Pickens is out of his....and i'm sure as hell not going to tell him to sit down.

http://action.pickensplan.com

Comment by Eric Koch on December 18, 2008 at 10:49am

Commence Anarchy!!!!

find your place in the future...(any one who thinks someone else is going to do it for them is dead weight)...if nothing else..get the message out.


..Big turbines+big wind = bang/buck. leave the NG in the electrical power pie and promote people powered people transport and community NEV cargo fleets for grid blasting,and pv installations for reduced grid load.use excess capacity as an opportunity to phase out old,non-combined cycle, coal plants. wile phasing in ETT maglev to replace continental flights and interstate traffic.


stop at one consider none = less mouths to feed..(no time for day care or labor/delivery here)

suburban conversion project....suburban basements are reconfigured to earth sheltered green houses for food production..garages become houses with reconstruction leftovers....cold climates get south facing glazings at Latitude +21 degrees...two runs of 6' culvert pipe between basement and garage for thermal transfer.

Comment by Eric Koch on December 15, 2008 at 8:55am

Yeah,Thanks....just found the group....as a MagLev proponent of many years i can see EET is the" one up" of the ultimate transit system.

LET"S DO IT !!!!

of course, for common folk like me that means conserving energy and reconfiguring current systems to allow those who are "in the loop" ,as EET finds function, to continue eating 3 squares a day.....in a world where some think we don't need ETT because we can run cars on NG,Yeah right...might as well just run them on fertilizer,........http://push.pickensplan.com/group/suburbanconvertionproject

Comment by James Tracy on August 30, 2008 at 8:05am

Good Luck Daryl.

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