Silence, one bike – or one plug-in hybrid – at a time

Riding around town the other day, I had a picture of what streets of the future might be like, as a super-silent Toyota Highlander hybrid crept past me. Of course the biggest problems that more bicycles on the road will solve are the escalating release of carbon into our atmosphere and our insatiable thirst for energy. But a curious byproduct of our desperate need to make use of every possible solution we have available might be more silent streets.

Think about it. How magical would it be to replace the roar of car and truck engines burning fuel at their most inefficient with the quiet hum of electric motors and the whir of bicycle chains? It doesn't take an engineer to figure out that those stops and starts downtown and residential areas are murder on gas mileage, often driven by our perceived need to accelerate as quickly as possible to the next stoplight. Toyota and other leaders on the hybrid front have turned that on its head, recycling the energy generated from the constant braking in urban areas and funneling it back into forward motion.

Now, with companies like General Motors beholden to the will of the masses – not just as the easily hoodwinked consumers who chomped down so hard on the sport-utility craze of the 1990s, but as (hopefully) more savvy investors who will demand ventures into technology that will be profitable and stem the hemorrhage of oil from the earth and carbon into the air – an affordable plug-in hybrid seems to be within our grasp.

Neil Winton at the Detroit News would counsel me to temper my enthusiasm, but I'd argue the closer we get, the more exciting the potential. Predictions about battery life, range and consumer enthusiasm are conservative, he writes. If that's the case, fair enough – it wouldn't be the first time car companies have fallen woefully short of expectations. But maybe we just need to take the time to envision the wondrous and unanticipated ways that our world might change – ahem, enter the quiet cul-de-sacs and hushed avenues of the 21^st century, part of my own tenuous hopes – for solutions to go viral. Winton himself points out that in Germany, and undoubtedly most developed countries where nearly everyone owns a car, most trips top out at around 30 miles: tripping to the grocery, running the kids to school, hopping to the gym. You get the idea.

Sure, we in the media hype, and in many cases overhype, a good deal too many proposed solutions, such as the exciting idea to pepper the oceans with iron flakes, hoping to encourage the growth of carbon dioxide-absorbing algae. So avoid the hyping the naysayers too, and don't be afraid to imagine the possibilities.