“Ebike ambulance hits the streets of Paris”
“According to their designers, Emergency Bikes can reach urban Paris locations approximately twice as fast as traditional ambulances.”
https://newatlas.com/bicycles/ebike-ambulance-emergency-bike/
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mastodon 4.7.3There are many ideas and projects that make me hopeful for the future. I’m collecting them here.
Topics: degrowth, regenerative agriculture, urbanism, public transport, improving education, restorative justice, ranked voting, sustainable construction, etc.
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The response time for Paris firefighters has shortened because of bike lanes
https://cyclingmagazine.ca/advocacy/paris-firefighters-response-time-has-shortened-because-of-bike-lanes/
• “Bike lanes help traffic flow”
• “Lanes can be used for [first responder] vehicles”
“Recipes instruct us to preheat our ovens even though it’s unnecessary and a waste of energy.”
Instead: “Depending on your oven, add six to eight minutes to the stated cooking time.”
• Minor benefit of preheating: cooking times that work for all ovens
• Only food that requires preheating: home-made pizza
• “[…] you can save a bit more energy by switching off the oven five to ten minutes before time’s up, and letting food finish cooking in residual heat.”
https://www.orlandomurrin.com/post/why-you-don-t-need-to-preheat-your-oven
Munich: temporary tiny house above parking lots.
Article in German: https://isarblog.de/event/reallabor-zuhaus-haidhausen-muenchen/
My take: It’s not really that good a use of space: In that particular location, I’d rather have trees—there’s room for apartments elsewhere. But it shows how much public space is taken up by parking lots.
Replying to
@cwebber It’s amazing what solar does for regions with flaky or non-existent electric grids.
Finland’s longest and highest bridge (*) is only for pedestrians, bikes and trams – but not for cars: https://zagdaily.com/urban/helsinki-opens-one-of-the-worlds-longest-car-free-bridges/
“[Henk Swarttouw, President of the European Cyclists’ Federation] said the project reflects a broader shift in European transport policy and ‘gives a clear message as to which modes are being prioritised.’ By visibly favouring walking, cycling and public transport, he said, it signals a long-term commitment to modal shift.”
(*) https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/finlands-longest-and-highest-bridge-opens-to-public/
It should be relatively easy to make bike theft so risky that virtually no one would do it anymore: The police could plant a ton of “bait bikes” in order to catch thieves.
I wish that were a higher priority.
Old-school bikers try out an electric bike: “I thought to do the test, I need a mate. And I need a mate who is the most set in the ways person I know.”
Spoiler: They both enjoyed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcb5WOLjsDk
Replying to
3/
• Talking about “sustainable cities” felt abstract to Ukrainians (“first things first—e.g., we need housing”). The term “healthy cities” provided a more useful perspective.
• Designing a bomb shelter: If it’s only designed for safety, it becomes depressing because then all it is, is a reminder that the outside is not safe. Bomb shelters that work well are also used in normal daily life—e.g., a movie theater.
Škoda DuoBell: a bicycle bell that can be heard through noise-canceling headphones
https://www.skoda-storyboard.com/en/skoda-world/skoda-duobell-a-bicycle-bell-that-outsmarts-even-smart-headphones/
The research is free to download: https://cdn.skoda-storyboard.com/2026/04/Skoda-DuoBell-Research-final_cf127752.pdf
If you live in Munich, you can take a look at the Baumentscheid initiative which tries to get more trees planted in Munich (which ranks near the bottom in Germany when it comes to how much area is covered by greenery): https://www.baumentscheid-muenchen.de
The UN has published a new approach for measuring how well a country is doing.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is still a frequently used metric, but: “GDP ignores inequality and poverty. It does not capture environmental degradation. It misses non-monetary dimensions of well-being, like health, education and peace.”
The report explains how to fix that: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2026/05/press-release-united-nations-proposes-new-global-dashboard-to-measure-progress-beyond-gdp/
[2025-08-02] “Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year”. How?
• Most important factor: speed limits: “the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed of impact from 40 to 30 km/h”
• Traffic calming measures (narrower roads, trees, etc.) slowed down drivers.
• Improvements to the pedestrian and cycling infrastructure helped “reduce car use and, with it, the number of serious accidents.”
Something being either true or false is a core element of western culture. However, it also limits our thinking (scientifically etc.). Buddhist philosophy goes beyond that dichotomy: https://aeon.co/essays/the-logic-of-buddhist-philosophy-goes-beyond-simple-truth
Replying to
2/ The city of Kassel (Germany) provides a loft for pigeons – which has two benefits:
• Humans can control their population, by swapping real eggs with plastic eggs.
• They get proper food, fresh water and a safe home.
• The doves spend 80% of their time in the loft and leave their excrements there.
Video in German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqsDOM-9lS4
Burkina Faso: “Yacouba Sawadogo (1946-2023) was known as ‘the man who stopped the desert’. Starting around 1980 during a phase of severe drought, he successfully created an almost 40-hectare forest on formerly barren and abandoned land.”
“Sawadogo’s remarkable success builds on experimenting with traditional planting pits for soil, water and biomass retention, called ‘zaï’ in the local language.”
https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/yacouba-sawadogo/
*Really* changing one’s world view (when you find out things are different than you thought they were) is a profound, deeply unsettling experience. I’ve had that a few times in the last few years and it wasn’t fun.
Anyone who goes through that has my sympathies—no matter what they thought before. (Note that that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be held responsible for what they did before.)
For many people: positive feedback > no feedback > negative feedback
(They prefer to not give or get negative feedback.)
Me, personally: positive feedback > negative feedback > no feedback
(I’d rather know where I stand.)
The annual UN COP climate summits aren’t working—due to sabotage by petrostates and fossil fuel lobbyists. Therefore, Colombia and the Netherlands proposed to “create a place for a ‘coalition of the willing’ to come together to work out the practical steps of a true global energy transition. Including a timeline for phasing out fossil fuels and a financing plan to make it fair.”
https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/santa-marta-conference-fossil-fuel-transition-can-be-turning-point
24–29 April 2026, Santa Marta, Colombia: https://transitionawayconference.com/
Underrated and important: “Active Listening Skills”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra6L83XwLko
How to design a bike that’s robust and easy to service (to be used in remote areas)?
Buffalo Bicycle S2:
• Two gears, via two(!) chains
• Drivetrain with two cogs: “The cogs, chains, and chainrings on this bike are always moving, but only one gear is ever doing the work.”
Benefits:
• The drivetrain is much more robust than, e.g., a derailleur.
• Should one chain break, you can still drive the bike with the other chain.
Article: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/02/why-it-makes-perfect-sense-for-this-bike-to-have-two-gears-and-two-chains/
Product page: https://worldbicyclerelief.org/s2/
Replying to
@fzimper@bildung.social Ganz clevere Strategie von den deutschen Banken ist, Wero gleich direkt in deren Apps einzubauen. Das verringert die Einstiegshürde. Sogar meine Mutter hat schon davon gehört – weil es in ihrer Sparkassen-App aufgetaucht ist.
“[…] a new project from the City of Yokohama is aiming to tackle the issue of food waste through a new type of locker-style vending machine installed in key places throughout the city that serves leftover, unsold food at a discount.”
“All of the bread in the Kannai Station locker regularly sold out within a few hours every day.”
• Employees of bakeries can go home earlier.
• Bakeries get new customers as more people discover their goods.
https://businessyokohama.com/blog/2025/01/08/japan-sdgs-locker-food-waste-vending-machine/
“Nox Mobility has raised €2 million in pre-seed funding to develop a new generation of overnight trains.”
“Unlike traditional night trains, where passengers share compartments, it is developing trains that provide each traveller with a fully private space.”
https://tech.eu/2026/04/22/nox-mobility-raises-eur2m-pre-seed-to-rethink-europes-night-trains/
Replying to
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green It’s sad that most schools still make students feel bad if they don’t fit a mold that is in many ways arbitrary.
“Rail Baltica Progress in Lithuania: Q2 2026”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTJF4fWjLYA
“Rail Baltica is an under-construction rail infrastructure project that is intended to integrate the Baltic states in the European rail network.”
“As of 2025, the completion of the phase 1 single-track railway from Tallinn through Latvia (Riga) to the Lithuania-Poland border is scheduled for 2030, with completion of the double track railway to follow dependent on funding.”
Interesting railway plans: “The East African Railway Master Plan is a proposal for rejuvenating the railways serving Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, and building new railways to serve Rwanda and Burundi. The objective is to further the economic development of East Africa by increasing the efficiency and speed, and lowering the cost, of transporting cargo between major ports on the Indian Ocean coast and the interior.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Railway_Master_Plan
Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IK3YE6TrTU
Replying to
2/ Infinite Battery, a French company wants to change that and has designed a modular, repairable battery pack that does not use welding:
• 36V do-it-yourself kit without cells: €199
• Cells: €49.95
Thus, when the cells eventually fail, a “new” battery pack is relatively cheap.
Website: https://infinite-battery.com/
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfiH7PKu-XE
Our political system is democratic (to a degree). Our economy isn’t: Employees have remarkably little say. Similarly: customers (if there is a monopoly or an oligopoly).
A goal for our future should be to make companies more democratic—e.g.:
• Flat hierarchies
• Worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, etc.
• More consumer protection
“‘The planting season is now,’ but war in Iran has sparked a global fertilizer shortage”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/the-planting-season-is-now-but-war-in-iran-has-sparked-a-global-fertilizer-shortage
I still believe that the future of humanity lies in living more locally – e.g., via bioregionalism: https://earth.org/bioregionalism/
Regenerative agriculture helps with that because you don’t need fertilizer: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/the-regenerative-farm-working-to-improve-soil-without-fertilisers
Congestion pricing: “New York’s traffic experiment is changing the city”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69jd6MSy9uk
Final analysis of 2025 Iberian blackout: Policies left Spain at risk
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/final-analysis-of-2025-iberian-blackout-policies-left-spain-at-risk/
Replying to
2/
Cities & villages after a war:
• What is required for returning? Answers were relatively similar: safety, home, job. What do people miss most? Here, answers varied widely: The most common themes were nature, culture (festivals, urban art, etc.) and people (friends, neighbors, etc.). These themes are often ignored in city planning.
• City planning: How are refugees going to be integrated? How can friends live together? How can cities make sure that war veterans are taken care of? Etc.
“Tree City USA is an annual national recognition program designed to raise awareness of the value of community trees, set foundational standards for communities of all sizes, and celebrate community improvement.”
https://www.arborday.org/our-work/tree-city-usa
Mamdani shows that politics can work *for* the people (all the people). He shows that politicians can care.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2ZAnLjiSCrI
It's getting hot New York. Here's how to prepare for a heat emergency.
Interesting idea for fixing pot holes in roads: PatchPal.
Fill the hole with PatchPal bags that contain an asphalt mix. As cars drive over them, the bags compact into a permanent fix.
Benefit: No need to wait for central authorities to fix pot holes.
As for the bag: “The outer bag is made from biodegradable netting that naturally breaks down over time. It holds the mix long enough for full compaction, then disappears without leaving residue or microplastics.”
Replying to
2/ “For the government, the growth in EV sales is a vindication of its import policy, which in turn has been made possible by its investments in electricity infrastructure. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam, completed in 2025 at a cost of $5 billion, produces 5,150 megawatts of power. Combined with other generating assets, including wind farms and solar, the country has excess generation capacity, which it sells to neighboring Kenya, Tanzania and Djibouti.”
Replying to
2/
• Con: A bit weird—a motorcycle with pedals.
• Con: You lose some power due to the indirection.
• Pro: No gear shift or chain—which helps with maintenance.
• Pro: Regenerative braking saves energy and reduces wear.
• Pro: Can be used as a home trainer and generate energy via pedaling.
• Pro: Has a reverse mode that’s useful for large bikes.
Some PBW bikes even let you directly transfer the power from the pedals to the motor—in case the battery dies.
Seattle: “World’s first light rail on a floating bridge: For I-90, Sound Transit had to invent ‘a brilliant solution’”
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/light-rail-track-floating-bridge-i-90-sound-transit/
It’s now April 2026 and the new light rail line is finished: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD-D1z3g-Pc
Interesting eraser: When its corners become round after use, you can heat it and reshape them to restore their sharpness.
(Probably not any more sustainable than other erasers, but it always feeling like new has other benefits.)
In Cambodia, Southern giant pouched rats are used to detect landmines:
• Rats have a sharper sense of smell than dogs.
• Due to their light weight of 1 kg, a rat does not set off mines and can therefore move freely and quickly.
Speed – checking 200 m² (about 14.14m × 14.14m):
• Humans: 5 days
• Rats: 15–20 minutes
Material:
• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kgb2-KXzFE
• The rat Magawa even got a statue for his services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
“Emerging Economies Embrace Electrification Over Oil and Gas”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82uq9hblH4U
Significant benefit of new electrification technologies: They can be deployed locally and require no central planning.
Replying to
2/ Additional benefit of Stockholm tree pits: They store water (“sponge city”)—which helps with flooding and droughts.