+1 for Cargo bikes, but otherwise if your bike infrastructure sorta sucks, the Citroën Ami and counterparts from Fiat etc are pretty common in European cities… easy to park too.
NIO does battery swaps in minutes, in China and Europe. I believe you can also perhaps get different ranges but if not, would be great to swap between a 50kwh pack for normal use and say 100+kwh for your road trip.
Then again battery charging/weight tech is getting pretty good pretty fast.
If you like repairing the vintage Vespa, great project and that sounds fun. That’s worth a lot!
But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.
Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.
My only counter to this is that after, what, two _decades_, Apple _still_ has not added the ability to adjust number boxes with the up/down arrows on the keyboard (like text size for example). A designer would have included this on day 1, it’s such a common UI pattern in design tools.
If anyone on the iWork team is reading this, _please_ get to that Radar.
A sensible approach I saw in the BMW i4 was to keep the defrost buttons around, among relatively few buttons. (I forget if the climate temp controls were physical too though.)
IIRC Vigo, in Galicia (Spain) struck me as a case of a decently dense city that used roundabouts at relatively compact intersections in the city center, along one street at least: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CwZYypxT5SjBr1QE7?g_st=ic
Yes. This bug makes the UX on mac just feel broken and frustrating reminds you every time you do it. Tried to bear it for a year but I use text replacements so heavily that I had to switch off eventually. Firefox: for the love of Jobs, fix it!
Took Lisbon to Donostia-San Sebastián before Renfe canceled it in 2020. Basic hostel-like sleeping experience, but really nice and something that should exist.
Would love to take these more often if there were more (any) west to central Europe connections! (perfect routes for it too, since the flights are long and the infrastructure is less high speed)
A car+sleep train would be amazing to bring back, too.
I got an e-Muli, which is a sorta “short john” but where the front basket folds and handlebars pivot 90° so parking it is a bit more slim, more or less the footprint of a normal bike. It’s amazing — a little heavy so probably not luggable up stairs, but small enough when basket is folded that I prefer it even on errands where I don’t need the cargo space, just cause it’s electric (nice to throw a backpack in the front basket and close it, too. A little pricey since it’s made in Germany, but absolutely worth it:
https://muli-cycles.de/en
I think your reverse cycle ac would be an air-to-air heat pump. Air-to-water is more like your heat pump water heater, with the hot water then going through radiators.
always good to have zoning, either via small separate heat pump or with a retrofit like AirZone (not sure if something similar is available there) which modulates the flow to each duct from the air handler.
I believe I’ve read this was also due to Iberian gauge high speed rail technology not really being existent at the time Spain started building HSR in a hurry for Expo ‘92? in Sevilla, and they’ve continued using standard gauge for it (to the benefit of the link with France).
However the huge investment in HSR (longest network after China, but low utilization), has also come at the cost of the local and regional train network (which still use broad gauge, yes there are gauge changing trains, but the broad gauge network is languishing).
If your goal is just lowering R0, sure… but a lot of countries prefer to lower deaths, which is why they start with the older population / those with health conditions.
electrify now!