Thoughts?

In 1957, Valencia experienced a devastating flood that forever changed the city’s relationship with the Turia River. Nearly 3/4 of the city was inundated by floodwater and over 60 people lost their lives. The following year, the city embraced a plan to divert the river around its western outskirts to the Mediterranean Sea.

A park wasn’t the city leadership’s first idea—in an effort to alleviate traffic congestion, they envisioned an elaborate highway system through the heart of the City. But by 1970 the citizens pushed back and protested the highway proposal under the motto “The bed of Turia is ours and we want green!” By the end of the decade, the City approved legislation to turn the riverbed into a park and commissioned Ricard Bofill to create a master plan in 1982. The plan created a framework for the riverbed and divided it into 18 zones. Currently, all but one of the zones has been developed.

The resulting design establishes a monumental 5 mile green swath within a dense and diverse urban fabric, including the historic center of the city, and has an average span of 600 feet, from bank to bank. The park comprises over 450 acres and is characterized by bike paths, event spaces, active recreation fields, fountains, and many notable structures.

A bit more history and a lot of pics of the park in the former riverbed.

Fun fact: now the traffic bridges don't go above the river, they go above the park.

Openstreetmap, for those interested in a detailed view.

Do you know of any other weird parks like this?

A conventional ship with an easily deployable and retractable kite sail system burns less fuel than one without it. It's a type of hybrid vehicle, that has two propulsion methods, the main reliable one, and the supplementary one, for fuel efficiency. With the system installed and the kite in use, the ship saves an estimated 15% of fuel. However:

"There's a structural problem slowing down the process: ship owners (who have to make the investment) often don't pay for the fuel – that's the charterer's duty. The charterer on the other side doesn't charter the ship for long enough a period to make installing low-carbon, but potentially expensive, untested technologies pay back."

The lack of carbon emissions regulations for shipping and low fuel prices have added to these difficulties. The shipping industry is responsible for around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually, which is about 2.5% of the world's total CO2 emissions.

A company behind these (SkySails GmbH), while technically successful at cutting shipping costs and carbon emissions, has faced economic difficulties. Since then, the company (reborn as SkySails Group GmbH) has switched to land-based airborne wind energy systems for electricity production from high-altitude winds.

What do you think? Yay or nay? Is this technology dead in the water? Not worth the effort? Will we see ships like these in the near or distant future? What needs to change?

Some good reads:

http://www.vos.noaa.gov/MWL/apr_09/skysails.shtml

https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/lets-go-fly-a-kite-skysails-and-climate-change/

Instructions are in the this ticket: https://github.com/dracula/freecad/iss...