Notices by 𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇 (straphanger@urbanists.social), page 3

How one school made a street safer for kids.

Not a full-on "School Street," where all cars are banned, but a big improvement for health and safety of children.

Before/After.

This is crazy!

As of Jan 1 2024, 94% of #India's rail lines have been electrified. Up from 45% in 2015.
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"Dependence on foreign oil imports to power diesel locomotives led the country to move towards 100% electric trains, goal of net zero by 2030."

https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/electrification/how-india-made-45-of-its-railway-network-electric-in-just-five-years/?cf-view

"Yeah, but how are you going carry a real load with a damn bicycle? That's why we'll always need trucks in cities."

#Hamburg: We see your beer-keg delivery, #London, and raise you a refrigerator. Or three.

via @CargoCycle_official

#Paris has got your last rites taken care of.

A small funeral home called “Le Ciel et La Terre” (The Sky and the Earth) uses a bicycle-hearse called “Corbicyclette.”

"Bicycles offer advantages in express delivery: they can bypass traffic and make up to 2x as many stops per hour as a truck. Total cost of ownership over lifetime is less than half of a van. And they generate zero emissions."
—CEO of DHL Express

They say big trucks are just a reality if you want to make deliveries in the city.

I say there's other ways to solve the "last-mile" problem...

There's your beer kegs—sorted.

#London

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"There's no machine known that is more efficient than a human on a bicycle. Bowl of oatmeal, thirty miles. You can't come close to that."

—Not surprising that Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has known about the efficiency of the bicycle for a long time.

"Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time...Cyclists become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows."

This is a map of western part of the network of just one Canadian passenger railway in 1955.

You could really go a lot of places by train then.

And fast: 71 hours, 10 minutes from #Montreal to #Vancouver. (It's 94 hours, if you're lucky, from Toronto to Vancouver today.)
🛤️🧵

This #Paris métro station is a steampunk masterpiece.

Designed by Belgian comics artist François Schuiten, to call to mind one of Jules Verne's submarines or airships.

Where else can you find secrets of the métro?

🗼🚇🧵

Watch out for "stations fantômes," now closed, but which you can see flashing past on some lines. I got to visit St. Martin, which still has beautiful tile ads from the 1950s.

Also try to spot the original édicules, designed by Art Nouveau master Guimard.

This one's at Abbesses métro station, deepest in the city, in Montmartre.

Pro tip: contrôleurs like to trap people at the bottom or the top of the spiral staircase, so make sure you've paid your fare!

UK STUDY:

Fit amateur bicycle-riders aged 55-79 have immune systems comparable to those of 20 year olds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43308729

A century ago, Play Streets were common in NYC, closed to cars by order of the police.

An inspiring story from the UK, where parents fought to have a street in Bristol closed so their kids could get out of the house and play freely. "Playing Out" has now spread to hundreds of communities.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/07/play-streets-children-adults/679258/

Great-grandfather: allowed to walk 6 miles on his own. Grandfather: could walk 1 mile.
Mother: could walk a half mile.
Son: could walk 300 yards (to end of street).
What happened? *Cars* happened.

A flood of traffic shrunk the geography of play and free-roaming.

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(Thanks to Shrinking geography of childhood in UK, thnx to Tim Gill and Dr William Bird
for the research and graphics.)

What's the solution? One way forward—play streets.

The UK once had 700 of them; closed to traffic, but open to kids.

Noise makes it hard for residents to sleep in historic center of #Prague.

So Praha 1, the core of the city, has unilaterally declared a ban on all cars at night.

From 10 pm to 6 am, motorized traffic is banned. Note that horse-drawn carts are exempted!

https://english.radio.cz/prague-1-reintroduces-night-ban-vehicles-defiance-prague-city-hall-8824240

In the 1660s, this French philosopher came up with an invention that solved the problem of urban transport forever.

It had nothing to do with Robo-taxis, flying cars, or Tesla Tunnels.
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