The city of golf carts

> We don't necessarily need simpler cars, we need better electric bikes. Or electric motorbikes/scooters. Or golf carts. Just like so many creatures in nature evolve into crabs, personal transport appears to evolve into golf carts. The Japanese have kei cars, which are just heavy golf carts and there exist cargo bikes, which are just underpowered, three-wheeled golf carts. There are even golf-cart oriented towns: ▶ this video

My issue isn't needing to pedal, it's the lack of proper bike lanes with physical barriers away from cars. If I could get where I wanted to go without worrying about a car coming into the bike lane, or the bike lane just being a swatch of paint on the road, I would bike much more often. I just moved away from a city that got it's first protected bike lane... but since it was just down one road, and could be walked in under 10 minutes, it wasn't all that useful to me. There were also many spots where cars and trucks still obstructed it. While it's a start and better than nothing, there needs to be a serious investment in infrastructure. I feel like this is a "build it and they will come" situation. Peachtree City, GA is an example of that. They built a ton of golf cart paths all over the city, and everyone just takes golf carts everywhere instead of full cars [1]. It looks fantastic. Said city also did some things during COVID to make temporary protected bike lanes with a bunch of construction barriers. It wasn't until they removed it that I found out that was the purpose. I don't think anyone else got the memo either, as very few people used them. It just made traffic horrible, as we lost lanes everywhere, for what looked like a construction project that never started. [1] ▶ this video

In addition to going into highly dense cities and inserting autonomous cars into existing driver regulation; an interesting auxiliary strategy could be to partner with a master planned community that was designed from the ground up (physically and regulation wise) to be an autonomous first town where the majority of vehicles were autonomous and the majority of home owners were pro-autonomous cars. The roads and pedestrian crossings could be much clearly marked with RF transceivers, etc. and the inclement weather could be pre-considered. HOA agreement could have a "I agree to co-exist with autonomous cars" TOS clause and perhaps a built in monthly subscription. I think a ton of home builders (Lennar, etc.) and senior community developers (Ventas) would be interested if only as a PR concept. I also think a lot of remote Techies/senior citizens would be interested [1]. Sort of like this but replace golf carts with autonomous cars.[2] [1] link [2] Tom Scott - City of Golf Carts ▶ this video

Something I've been wondering is in what region(s) Ebikes are becoming popular - it seems to be mostly the UK, East Asia, and maybe some larger coastal US cities. Hopefully this will (in the US) lead to cities taking the idea of low-speed vehicles more seriously, which are a good fit for medium-density US cities with room for putting in grade-separated paths. For a bonkers example of how it isn't all that hard in moderately wealthy US new development, see Tom Scott's video "The City of Golf Carts" [1] which describes the Atlanta suburb of Peachtree. [1] ▶ this video

Peachtree City, Georgia has an expansive golf cart road network, and is useable by teenagers. Tom Scott did a good video on the city: ▶ this video