Next wave for city parking: 'shrink-to-fit' cars

[KevinFromTexas]

http://www.statesman.com/business/ne...t-2416607.html

Next wave for city parking: 'shrink-to-fit' cars

By Steven Ashey
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: 8:14 p.m. Saturday, July 14, 2012

For all their attractions, electric cars can be hard to justify on a practical basis. Factors like a comparatively high initial cost and a limited ability to make long trips cut into their viability as mass-market transportation.

But runabouts like the Hiriko, a two-seat microcar prototype designed specifically for urban car-sharing programs, offer a promising solution to gaps in today's transportation network. Short-distance car sharing with electrics could help bridge the gap between a commuter's home and mass transit — the so-called first-mile problem — or from mass transit to the workplace, the last-mile problem.

"The first- and last-mile problem has been growing steadily during the last 50 years as cities expanded," said Elizabeth Deakin, professor of city and regional planning and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's often just too far to walk to a mass-transit station."

[202_Cyclist]

This is great. I've been using Car2Go's Smart car, which of course is very easy to park but this is even better than that. I would like to get one of these.

[ardecila]

That's a very expensive car ($16400) for what you get.

I also take issue with their description of bike-sharing, car-sharing, etc - all of them are "gaining acceptance" at a slow but steady pace. It's unrealistic to expect transportation to evolve at the speed of cell phones and computers. Cars first arrived in cities at the beginning of the 1900s yet horses-and-buggies persisted in cities until the 1950s, because it took a long time to build the infrastructure that cars could exploit. Urban streets remained crowded and congested places where traffic was the limiting factor on speed, not the theoretical top speed of a car engine. We had to ram large boulevards and arterials through our cities, devise traffic-signal systems, riddle cities with parking spaces, and finally build huge expressways before cars became a viable means of everyday transportation.

Likewise, it will take time for us to build the bike infrastructure that is necessary before the majority of the populace can start using them daily in true Copenhagen style. This applies to personal bikes as well as shared ones. Hilly cities may never see the cycling popularity of flatter ones. Likewise, car sharing really needs to be every block or two before it's convenient enough for most people.

[KevinFromTexas]

I don't think hills would be a problem for bicycles in cities. Just look at San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. And even Austin is tops in Texas for bicycle commuting, and we're the hilliest city in Texas. Not to mention we have 100F+ heat in the summertime with 70% humidity.

Anyway, here are a few videos of the Hiriko.

• Video Link

• Video Link