A car-free town in the Amazon serves lessons for pedaling to net zero emissions
A car-free town in the Amazon serves lessons for pedaling to net zero emissions
If I lived in a place with basically perpetually summer weather I’d ride all year and ditch a car too.
So fuckcars but only when its sunny?
Frozen North checking in, just passed 1 year car-free biking everywhere, rain, sun, or snow. No such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
And people that are too used to being comfortable all the time.
I remember when Elon Musk was peddling the hyperloop idea and he was saying that we could make tunnels everywhere. At the time everyone was obsessed with cars, but perhaps it's an idea worth exploring for making bicycle travel feasible all year. Imagine a network of air conditioned tunnels across the city that people could ride in and never feel overly hot or cold.
So fuckcars but only when its sunny?
Ya well except if it's too sunny and hot ;)
I don't believe you. What you're describing in regards the weather is most of Australia and it's even more car dependent then the US. If you were there, you'd drive.
It's snow bound northern Euro countries that are way more advanced in being car free then sunny warm countries. Have you seen Manila? Jakarta ?
Vietnam was bike centric for decades before Northern Europe. They just did it by making cars impossibly expensive for most people.
And besides monsoon season, is pretty nice to ride in.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Although there is no independent measure of municipal carbon emissions, this riverine community with one bicycle per capita and "the fittest legs in the Amazon," as Salomão boasts, stands out in a region still in thrall to fossil fuel-driven urban sprawl.
"We want people to come see for themselves," he added, in a nod to the scores of diplomats and heads of state set to gather next year in Belém, the storied Amazon port and host city for COP30, the headline United Nations climate summit.
Rain and floods driven by increasingly rogue weather are an existential threat in southern Brazil, as the lethal deluges in Rio Grande do Sul state this month have made devastatingly clear.
"When the floods come, we raise the furniture and fridge, put on flip flops and slosh into the streets to have fun until the waters recede," says Adiel de Souza Santos, 32, who sells açaí, a popular rainforest fruit.
One of the enduring paradoxes of the Amazon basin is that the same bounteous waterways that power the world's ninth economy and make Brazil a renewable energy standout often leave nearby towns in the dark.
By turning off the combustion engine, resisting the tarmac temptation and abiding by centuries-old ways of the river, the town is a real time experiment in how to navigate an increasingly uncertain world where unruly climate change is overturning the rules of sustainable urban habitability.
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