Transportation within a habitiat

From: "victoriatangoman"
To:
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2002 8:43 PM
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Transportation within a habitiat
(...)

> I'm not so sure that we've reached the ultimate level of comfort and
> convencience with our car culture. After hundred of years of society
> developing in orbit, with constraints not faced on earth, I can't
> quite get comfortable with the concept, that they would, when given
> the capacity to do so, go back to what we think is the ultimate in
> comfort and convenience, and introduce a car culture. But they
> COULD. :)
>

Oh, well, the car culture is not a pleasant idea to me either, but I wrote
"that a civilization using personal automotive vehicles (or "cars" ;-) would
almost certainly develop". That is not necessarily the same thing of saying
that a "car culture" would develop. My concept of a "car culture" is a
culture where a person without a car is basically crippled, that is:

- Anything is many leagues far from anything. "Walk distance" is an utopia.
- Public transportation is nonexistent or extremely deficient.
- There aren't walkways in most of the streets.
- Driver's licences are THE id document.

When I visited Orlando, in the U.S., in 1996, all of the three items above
where met by local conditions.

(...)
> Yeah, true, but neither can we build a habitat for 3 trillion people
> either. :))) So where does that leave our debate?
>

Well, we can (theoretically) build the country-sized (say, over 100,000
square kilometer surface area) space habitats housing tens of millions. So,
the potential need for cars in space habitats still permeates the debate.
;-)

(...)
Lucio Coelho