Why dont go to gyms? Surely communal facilities in which you share electricity and water etc are a positive.
Agreed. @mad_masala You almost had a perfect post up until telling people to not go to gyms 
I would say this is just personal opinion. I don’t like exercising indoors or lifting weights, but if it means paying a monthly fee to not buy your own weights or equipment and only using them once. I’m all for joining gyms.
@OrangeOrganics, @ranlee because as you said there’s electricity involved in that activity. If you want to sweat, don’t be lazy and walk the stairs (even if it’s the escalators), hike, run, cycle… lift weights… no need to run in a stupid belt, no need to ride a static bicycle while watching something equally stupid, no need of any of those things.
PS: if you need to take classes or you really need the help of some professional, well, then you go to the gym or perhaps join one of those groups in the parks.
We can argue forever whether doing activities outdoors is better than doing it indoors. There’s probably countless factors. However, I think can we agree that going to the gym as opposed to buying your own equipment and using it at home is better.
Gym = shared equipment/electricity
Home = one more set of electrical units being used for personal use
::EDIT::
Granted you had to choose to do “gym” activities.
There’s some activities, not all, that require equipment to do.
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If you go to run to the park, no electricity is consumed. If you have a normal, healthy, active life, you don’t need gyms.
Not true really though. Taiwan rains a lot and its not always possible to exercise outside. I dont go running because I have meniscus problem. Too much road running is not great on joints in general.
Gyms allow you to exercise efficiently. I can get all my cardio and resistance training done in an hour, have a shower and get to work. Even people who run a lot outside use gyms for convenience and resistance training.
Going to guess the energy usage of a few cardio sessions on a static bike per week is pretty negligible.
These are all good. Especially living in the city. Also living in a smaller place.
This is great. Why living in a city and not using a car or scooter is the most environmentally friendly thing you can do:
That’s NOT the attitude! that’s the kind of excuses I was talking about 
Stuff like that is kind of silly though. Rather than dealing with real problems such as scooter and car usage or over-reliance on air-conditioners, you are just naming feel-good measures that barely make a difference.
That’s not true. The measures I mentioned do have an effect… if taken by not just one but many people. Everybody agrees on scooters or cars use.
Which ones you say that are just feel-good measures? the gymnasium and what else?
To be fair, many towns and cities have a kind of slap-dash feel to there layouts. I’m not certain of any zoning regulations, if such things exist. So, streets are really narrow. Installing a Euro style tram network may help reduce the scooter clutter, but the infrastructure costs would be prohibitively expensive. The political cost of implementing a scooter ban would be just as high.
You know how Americans will not go for a national health insurance scheme, despite the idea it would lead to economic armegeddon having been debunked on all fronts? Same here with thyou scooters. It’s gonna take a complete societal shift to do anything related to limiting scooters.
And scooters is a big business here.
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Taichung has already discussed building a light rail service. There are lots of options, you can just have more buses. Big cities across Europe are all doing the same thing. I’m not sure about the rest of Taiwan, only really talking about Taipei and New Taipei City for now as the infrastructure is already basically in place. Congestion charge money, parking fines etc can be used to finance more public transport and cycling infrastructure.
Nobody is talking about banning scooters. Rather you make them less convenient and more expensive to run. This has been done all across the world, nothing outlandish here. I dont see why petroleum should be subsidized and scooter parking should be free, when it destroys the quality of people’s lives to such an extent. Its 2017, now is the time of the bicycle. The societal shift happens over the space of five years as people start to calculate the costs of riding a scooter. There is no point in trying to convince people to be green, you can only hit their pockets. Otherwise everything is a waste of tme, Recycling is a tiny tiny tiny drop in the ocean if you are trying to reduce pollution and dont even get me started about ‘avoiding gyms’.
I dont see this as outlandish. Taiwanese politicians and academics talk about reducing private vehicle usage all the time. Everyone knows its a problem and is killing the population here. These measures will come and have to come.
Gymnasium one is pretty silly. Sounds like you just dont like Gyms tbh,
Why not make all bicycles pay for parking as well? Bicycles can clog up streets and traffic just as bad and terrorize pedestrians. Bike lanes only work in places like Amsterdam. Eventually walkers and joggers will take them over.
How about properly synching the traffic lights and allowing right turns on red?
I fail to see how scooters add to the traffic problem. Scooters can zip through traffic easier and faster, depending on the skill of the rider. There is a dedicated scooter lane, but that gets clogged by parked cars and pedestrians. The smart scooter rider rides (illegally) in the middle of the street to avoid cars, bikes, pedestrians, and other scooter drivers mindlessly entering the street. I have lost count of how many times a car, almost always a BMW, has almost taken me out for running a light, not using a turn signal, cutting me off, AND…trying to get to the betel nut stand. If you want to ban anything, I will get behind you 100% to ban those damn things.
More buses and their betel-nut chewing drivers to further clog up already clogged streets. Eliminating scooters would just mean more cars. More cars, more congestion. Delivery services, that was once done on scooter, would move to car. That would slow the whole mess down, and raise prices across the board to cover the congestion/tolls. Have you been on the highways on the weekend or holidays?
Woe be to the politician who speaks of raising taxes and fees. This is not Europe. They hold closer to the American ideology in this regard. Good or bad.
We don’t have to agree. We can agree to disagree.
Two things the government might want to encourage when it comes to the construction of new buildings are the installation of systems that:
1: Reuse the hot air from air-cons to heat water.
2. Catch rainwater to be used for flushing toilets.
Both are quite obvious and logical solutions to save energy. Lot of people around the world can do this at home provided they own the building. Now, in a country with a lot of apartment buildings the constructors need to be enticed to install system like that. The systems should not be too difficult to figure out in any kind of building. It’s all about the cost really.
The amount of heat from air-cons not being re-used is mind-boggling. Lot of it heats up next-door units even more so that the air-cons there have to work even harder. At the very least every building should have a shaft that carries hot air from every single AC unit to the top of the building so that the hot air is not effecting other apartments on the way up.
Rain water catching on apartment buildings is probably a bit more tricky, but technically it should be fairly easy to do in a new building. Water catching system on the roof and then rain-water pipes to all apartment toilets with a valve that switches to regular water when there is no rain water available.
I think a forward-looking government would look into solutions like that. Construction companies need some encouragement (subsidies), but home owners should be open to the idea because it reduces cost in the long run, especially electricity.
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I thought you had complaints about the other ideas too, not just the gym, and that’s why you said that my ideas can only make me feel better but have no real effect!
Yes, I hate gyms. What I said is probably more for saving money than for saving electricity and so, although if many people chose to do exercise without all those stupid machines, then there would be less gyms and less electric consume for sure.
Aircons and air conditioning in general are a big one.
In some countries seasonal heat exchangers seem to work quite well but are a bit expensive.
There has to be a better way to avoid the heat island effect or at least reduce it. Like you mentioned heating water from the heated air could be a useful heat exchange system.
Was it Tokyo I read about that was using the sewer or drainage system tor reduce heat in the city?
Probably it would make a lot more sense to start with insulation of houses first, but it wouldn’t deal with the heat island effect.
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I don’t [quote=“JB_IN_TW, post:118, topic:157439”]
Why not make all bicycles pay for parking as well? Bicycles can clog up streets and traffic just as bad and terrorize pedestrians. Bike lanes only work in places like Amsterdam. Eventually walkers and joggers will take them over.
[/quote]
Because bicycles are the most efficient form of transport around. We are talking about reducing emissions. Proper cycling infrastructure with proper enforcement will equal faster cycling commute times. When more people begin to cycle others will join and you will have a critical mass. Nothing outlandish or crazy here, it’s one of the clear goals of the Taipei government and Mayor Ko. It’s one of the reasons Taipei held the global Velo-City cycling culture conference last year. Lois committed to turning Taipei into a cycling city.
I think you are being too pessimistic. Taking away subsidies for petroleum isn’t raising taxes, it’s stopping madness. Changes can happen and are being g discussed. Otherwise why are you commenting on this thread, you seem to revel in living a dirty polluted place. You don’t ban anything, just make small changes like giving more space to cyclists and reducing parking spaces. It’s all about boiling the frog slowly.
Also, who talked about scooters being a traffic problem? We are talking about them being an environmental problem. I would like the traffic to be as bad as possible as it dissuades people from driving in the city and gets them to make the decision not to drive themselves.Modern environmentally friendly civil engineers and planners want more urban traffic jams , not less !
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Removing scooters to solve an environmental problem is akin to lopping off your foot to solve a stubbed toe. Taipei, no, the entire island suffers from bad geography. Examples? I’ll give them to you. In spades.
Denver, Co. Every year, particularly in winter, the city is hit with some nasty air problems that send asthmatics and other people with respiratory issues into states of distress. Scooters are not the problem, in fact while they do exist in the Mile High city, they are more a niche, trendy item. The problem is geography. The city is butted against a stretch of the Rockies that slices the state in half. Air gets trapped in the city and the pollution cannot clear the area. Increases in public transportation options, voluntary and mandatory driving changes have not saved the day. The city issues warnings about not doing physical activity outside.
Los Angeles. Effectively the same thing as Denver. Except LA has the added curse of having dust from the deserts mix in with the pollution. (Rumor has it that the Spanish explorers noticed the orange atmosphere in the area that was caused by the sands getting trapped in the air. That is, presumably, how Orange county got its name.) Vancouver as well. Do not get me started about Sarajevo, which sits in a valley.
This is the issue Taipei has. Hell, the entire megaplex that is the western side of Taiwan. The geographical arena that is Taipei/Keelong gets it bad. Removing scooters, or even cutting them down, will do little to help the overall air situation there. Same along the rest of the island.
Taipei does have a place for bikes to ride, yet they choose to ride where ever they want and terrorize pedestrians, let alone car and scooter drivers. Strolling through Da’an park, you have to be on your toes for cyclists. Young and old, local and foreigners alike. Maybe stricter enforcement is in order. There is a thread on this.