http://www.ck12.org Chapter 3. Making A Difference
the scheme by paying a subscription fee ofC10 per year and may then hire bicycles free for all trips lasting less than
30 minutes. For longer hire periods, users pay up toC1 per hour. Short-term visitors to Lyon can buy one-week
subscriptions forC1.
Figure 20.15:A Vélo’v station in Lyon.
Other legislative opportunities
Speed limits are a simple knob that could be twiddled. As a rule, cars that travel slower use less energy (see Chapter
Cars II). With practice, drivers can learn to drive more economically: using the accelerator and brake less and always
driving in the highest possible gear can give a 20% reduction in fuel consumption.
Another way to reduce fuel consumption is to reduce congestion. Stopping and starting, speeding up and slowing
down, is a much less efficient way to get around than driving smoothly. Idling in stationary traffic is an especially
poor deliverer of miles per gallon!
Congestion occurs when there are too many vehicles on the roads. So one simple way to reduce congestion is to
group travellers into fewer vehicles. A striking way to think about a switch from cars to coaches is to calculate the
road area required by the two modes. Take a trunk road on the verge of congestion, where the desired speed is 60
mph. The safe distance from one car to the next at 60 mph is 77m. If we assume there’s one car every 80m and that
each car contains 1.6 people, then vacuuming up 40 people into a single coach frees uptwo kilometresof road!