Can’t get there from here? “Transport: A Survival Guide,” the summer 2011 issue ofColors, the magazine published by Benetton, asks us to imagine the day when the planet’s oil supply finally runs out. Vividly photographed and accented with fact-rich footnotes, it offers alternatives that are largely grass-roots and low tech: a boat made of Styrofoam and plastic bottles or tricked-out bicycle taxis (complete with radios) from Kenya, or the profusely decorated, three-wheeled motorcycle carts called chakdas (complete with instructions on how to make them) from Gujarat, India, that can carry up to 15 passengers. But there are also rickshaw-pulling robots made by a farmer who lives in a village outside Beijing and a solar-powered car designed by an inventor in Jiangjiang, China. The car may look like a tin can covered with solar panels, but when the inventor took it out for its first test drive in 2008, he passed a line over a mile long of drivers waiting to get into a gas station.
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