Culture
CityLab Daily: ‘Shangri-La for Electric Vehicles’
Also: Can Amsterdam’s cyclists and pedestrians learn to get along? And Indonesia’s capital move concerns environmentalists.
Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Sign up for the CityLab Daily newsletter here.
Himalayan milestone: Roll over Tesla, meet the Safa Tempo. For a brief moment in the 1990s, Kathmandu, Nepal, was at the vanguard of the zero-emission transportation revolution, thanks to a locally manufactured three-wheeled electric vehicle called the Safa Tempo. The city had more than 600 of these battery-powered micro-buses, constituting the largest all-electric public transit fleet in the world by 2000. Owned and operated by local entrepreneurs, Safa Tempos turned one of the world’s poorest cities into a pioneer for an extraordinary new idea in green transportation—but only briefly.