Why and how to joyfully move our butts around town, without mucking the place up.

Human Scale Cities And Transportation For Cleaner Quieter Cities

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Tags: Lifestyle

Replacing gasoline cars with electric cars simply continues the pattern of driving around in cars. While our society has a hundred years or so experience with this pattern, it is a relatively new pattern, and carries with it problems that aren't solved by ending the use of gasoline. Cars require a lot of land for highways and parking lots, to the tune of 7-10 parking spaces per car. Cars, in the modern model, also promote sprawl, the wasting of humanity's finest lives in the drudgery of driving, and stamping urban or suburban cities on top of what should be farmland growing food.

The freedom of travel given to us by cars is immensely valuable, while at the same time is degrading. The value is the freedom to head out at any time of day or night, who cares whether the bus system is running or not at 3AM, you can just head out the door and start driving. But thee are many costs, some of which aren't widely recognized. One example is the drudgery of "driving" in stop-and-go traffic, and the constant risk of accident or death while driving. Another is the unsustainable pattern of overconsumption that is, in large part, due to individual car ownership.

Many say what we need is instead cities built to a human scale. Cities where walking or bicycling is the norm, rather than cars and highways. Cities that are fun to explore, with all sorts of nooks and crannies of shops stuffed into corners of alleys, and so on.

What is the natural speed of humans? Cars on the highways, airplanes in the skies, high speed trains, they all move very fast, much faster than the vehicles our ancestors used. While it is an interesting question to ponder what is the natural speed of humans, this question was first asked a hundred years ago when cars started to be common, and there was a negative reaction to the speed and how people would die just by traveling at such immense speeds like 50 miles/hr.

It's clear that human bodies evolved for walking, which should mean our bodies can naturally and easily interpret the world while traveling at a walking pace. Any faster and we would have a hard time interpreting the world.

Cities designed for human scale travel, are fun to explore while walking. For example, a city street with wide sidewalks, shops on the ground floor, side alleys solely for human travel, and enough population density that people naturally flock to walking among the shops. This is common in Europe, and is part of the European charm, the vibrant street life with plenty of people around to interact with.

Cities designed for car-based travelers are spread out, because when whizzing by at 70 miles/hr it is impossible to take in the sort of jam-packed street scapes designed for pedestrians. This is why big box stores are so big, and have such huge signs outside, because those big signs can be seen from far enough away to make their presence digestible by someone driving in a car.

The current housing market debacle has been caused by the automobile mentality. The value of a house lies in its ability to put people where they need to be. The automobile allowed people to pretend they needed to be 20, 30, even 40 miles from their work and as long as gas was cheap, they could get away with it. Now that the price of oil is getting tougher on budgets, the concept of location, location, location is pushing reality back into their hallucinogenic lives. This is forcing people to rethink how they choose where they live. Too many are spread out in the exurbs among people who they have nothing in common with except that they don't spend much time there outside of sleeping. These people are not living in a place because they love it: they live in places that are a little "kingdom" of isolation where they think they can buy happiness without sharing their property and time as the human herd animals they evolved to be.

Meanwhile, not everyone is trying to "come to America" anymore. Many are trying to get out and live someplace where they have health care, if not just sneaking across the borders to obtain medicine. America has become a fortress of resource denial. Any time that happens, a revolution will eventually arise that redistributes the resources so that they can be utilized more evenly. I am not in favor of redistributing wealth: that's a fool's game. The problem is the boom cycle, not the bust. Restrict the accumulation of wealth in the first place, and small communities will have a chance to thrive. Allow opportunistic competition without regulations, and you always end up with a toppled tower of Pride.

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