The sustainable, livable, and economical high tech cities of the future

Our current cities and why they stink

Highways, stroads (which are streets and roads combined), and cars. This is the the city a regular North American lives in. North American cities are designed in such a way that the only option to travel is by car. This is absolutely bad for the environment because there are still gas cars that emit air and noise pollution. So then, just switch to electric vehicles, right? Well, not so fast. First of all, that requires A LOT of lithium mining, and that is absolutely bad from the environment, and when you let electric cars go at high speeds, the noise pollution is basically indistinguishable from gas cars. The outrageous thing about most shops in North America is that the parking lots are bigger than the shops, which absolutely shows that North America is in a crazy love with cars, and that's just bad.

What is a stroad?

In the last section, you heard me say the word stroad. Now to understand what a stroad is, we need to understand what a street and a road are. A street is a destination. It is quite narrow, and it has many shops and building close to each other. A road is something that lets people get from Point A to Point B. A road is wide to encourage people to go at high speeds. A stroad combines the wide lanes of a road that encourage people to go fast but also connects the buildings next to the stroad with it, meaning that people going on the stroad have to constantly try to watch out for incoming traffic to make sure they don't crash. Stroads are also bad for pedestrians as they don't have sidewalks like roads do. So all in all stroads are inefficient and dangerous which means that they should be turned into a road or a street.

(A typical U.S city in the present)

U.S cities in the past

You see though, U.S cities weren't so bad in the past. The U.S was the world leader in streetcars and trains, and the U.S had livable, walkable, and cyclable cities. The majority of people got around by public transport, and the suburbs had their houses closely packed to each other. Then, after WW2 some guy who had gone out of his mind said "hey let's make America more car dependent and less people friendly it will help the economy" or something like that. So guess what? The government created the Federal Highway Administration and started building the interstate highway. At the same time, the government started tearing down streetcar and rail lines and making streets and stroads for cars. The creation of the interstate highway did connect major cities all across America, but that was already achieved by rail. To make the interstate, neighborhoods, shops and businesses had to be torn down, and because this was in the age of the Jim Crow laws, most of the neighborhoods, shops and businesses that were torn down were colored.

The ideal city of the future

The ideal city of the future would restrict car movement and make cars the least efficient option for transport, which would discourage people from driving. Bikes can travel on the same roads as cars and buses would have their own designated roads. There would be a world class subway or metro system and modern streetcars would go down every street. There would be meeting places outside of work such as cafes and in the suburbs, houses would be closely packed together and you would have high speed rail to get to places. So because of high speed rail there would be way less airplane flights than today. This sentence might sound weird, but a good city has kids that go to places by themselves on bicycle or by walking at a certain age. It promotes independence and self reliance. Now, you may say that's impossible but there are some cities that are leading the way in this vision. We will be doing a case study on one of these cities, and that is Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Case study: Amsterdam

So why Amsterdam? You see, Amsterdam managed to successfully separate walking paths, bike roads, car roads and bus roads from each other. It also has done an excellent job of making biking the most efficient option for travelling. The bike roads in Amsterdam are spacious 2 way roads that often intentionally go through parks and have trees over them to make biking feel peaceful. Also you don't have to stop anywhere except Point A and Point B. To find its way into my blog, Amsterdam has around 515 km (so 320 mi for my U.S readers) of bike roads, and it's rated the 2nd most bike friendly city in the world behind Copenhagen although Copenhagen got some of the details wrong. At the traffic lights pedestrians, cyclists, and public transportation goes first, and the cars just have to wait. The traffic light senses if anything that is not a car comes and then after that it just goes to green so that they can continue moving. Amsterdam has these bicycles called bakfiets that have these baskets in front of you that can store anything you can fit in a car. You can take your kids to school in a bakfiet, you can tie something wider or longer than a bakfiets basket to it, and you can take cargo with you like a car, but you can't take things that fit in an SUV but don't fit in a car in or on the basket of a bakfiet, but SUVs in Europe are rare, so you're better off with a cargo van. In Amsterdam, you'll find world class bike parking at Amsterdam Centraal. Because the entrance is a sic travelator that looks very modern and cool, water makes it slippery so that you can't ride your bike down it without slipping, so you have to walk your bike down the travelator.

Gallery