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A system of bike highways that will render cars 90% obsolete.

Ok, so I may be biased against cars. I think they are dangerous, noisy, smell funky, and are a nuisance to bikers like myself. That said, I have this plan to make them basically obsolete. See, being a recumbent biker, I know that a car is no faster than a bike -except going up hills. What a car really is, is an elevator that not only elevates the passengers up hills, it also b brings the entire elevator up with them. This sis terribly inefficient and would never have caught on except for the fact that people like to have the freedom to go wherever they want to, even if it means using all of our Earths rescources up. Which brings me to my idea: Instead of having the elevators themselves (cars) goign to the top of the hills, just haver a network of bike elevators that would lead to hamster-tube like bike ramps designed to take you whwerever you need to go anytime of the year. This would be as fast as a car, especially if they were recumbent bikes. To make it even better, we could all have recumbent bikes with batteries attched to the brakes so we would generate electricity whenever we break, like a hybrid car does except much smaller battery. If you are a relatively fit person, you could easily generate more energy going down the ramp than it took to elevate you to the top and then give that energy back to the grid at the bottom. So basicaly we could pay people to use the public-transportation system. Also, this systme would be muchg more resistant to water and ice damage as well as not needing repainrs as often from the stress of having large vehicles on it. I can't put hard science behind this, but I think that these tubes would need far less maintenance and might be cheaper to build, than a road system, which costs about a million dollars per-mile with current building methods.

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Macsen : Human-Being Added on March 23, 2006
by Macsen