Bit cranky today are we?
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If I am driving my car, I am part of the car culture. I wear a protective shell. I see people as delays. My only source of communication is lights and a horn. When I am outside my car, I am part of the pedestrian culture, vulnerable. We are labeled by what we project.
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Maybe, but we don’t know what the neighbor has done to him.
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If I am driving my car, I am part of the car culture. I wear a protective shell.
Indeed. I call it my “car suit” – like a suit of armor, but mobile.
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How does one park on their own drive without driving across the sidewalk pavement?
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Anyone who parked there clearly wasn’t thinking about it…
And that, your Honor, is my defense.
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That’s not officially sidewalk. It is driveway with a pedestrian crossing.
And they say there’s no market for the Yugo.
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Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It’s the only way to live
In cars
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There was a Golden Age SF short about a future America where people wore tiny cars as clothes, though I forget who it was by.
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For some reason where I live, the pavement outside my terraced house is 3 meters wide, this is not in a town with lots of foot traffic, there are cars parked all along the pavement and nobody bothers and have not for 20 years.
But … but … but… he’s driving over the sidewalk! And that’s ILLEGAL!
Well, I’m just glad that in most of the world rules aren’t as rigid as you imagine them to be.
And I’d certainly argue that the utility of him getting his car off the street and freeing up a parking spot greatly outweighs the inconvenience to the public of him momentarily driving over the sidewalk. Sort of like a… what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh right, sort of like a garage.
And on a sidenote, this invention is a pure work of beauty. Beautifully conceived, flawlessly executed. Hell even the demo video is beautiful. Something tells me this took a metric assload of work to get this perfect.
Well, I’m just glad that in most of the world rules aren’t as rigid as you imagine them to be
Traffic fatalities:
India 16.6 per 100,000 inhabitants per year 238,562 total (2013 values)
United States 10.6 per 100,000 inhabitants per year 34,064 total (2013 values)
I can see your point. Freedom to drive where you damn well please is worth the cost of 200,000 additional fatalities.
Sorry but driving over the sidewalk at .25 mph on this sleepy street is highly unlikely to result in any injuries. You could plausibly argue that there’s an increased inconvenience factor since he has to park on the sidewalk while getting his dolly into place, but I think its pretty hard to argue that this should be regulated simply because its dangerous to the population at large. And I’d argue that assessing the inconvenience factor requires knowing the local culture, which we don’t. And something tells me his neighbors don’t mind this contraption at all.
And I hope he reads this thread, I bet he’d get a big kick out of someone in some far off country complaining that his beautiful DIY rig isn’t up to code.
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So this is conceptually similar to the problem of species identification in
biology. It is easy to see that a great white shark and a skate are
different. But what about a guitar fish and a lemon shark? Where exactly is
the boundary between shark and not shark?
Same issue. It is easy to say that an extreme use case is harmless. But
where exactly do you propose to establish the boundary between what is
potentially harmful and what is not? You don’t generally get to run a stop
sign just because it is a sleepy street and injuries are unlikely to
result.
People’s personal judgments differ and this is the reason we establish
bright lines. Don’t run stop signs ever, and don’t drive on the sidewalk,
ever. That is easy to police and adjudicate. How much driving on the
sidewalk is ok is not.
Also the first world. Parking on the sidewalk is common in Rome, for example, also on my street (where there are probably a dozen cars parked on the sidewalk right now).
3.4m long is huge. Better to go with something like a Vespa 400:
Only 2.85m long.
The Zündapp Janus is around the same size:
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I personally see little use in small cars. I own a one tonne van and I use it when I need to. I ride a bicycle to work. Alternatively I will take public transport or walk.
Not everyone has your options.
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