Here's your chance not just to be the mayor, but the original city planner as well! Imagine a medium sized city that would be developed with modern, low carbon transportation in mind, and other strategies to reduce the average citizens' carbon footprints.
What would that city look like? Would that make you more likely to want to live there?
Sustainable City >
Sustainable = Walkable?
A couple of years ago, I watched a TED talk where a civil engineer gave a talk about a "walkable" city. She was talking about making New York City more walkable, and, as a test, she shut down a portion of Broadway, opening it up for people to walk and sit on benches by trees. While I think this was more of a social experiment (and economic, because stores received more visitors), the idea of a walkable city often comes to my mind when I hear about the concept of a sustainable city. What if they go hand-in-hand? Of course sustainability encompasses much more than transportation, but I think that we could possibly see more sustainability if we made our cities more walkable. Not only would the transportation aspect of our carbon footprint be reduced, but, I think, if people are in more direct contact with their environment (rather than simply driving past it, for example), they are more likely to care about it more.
Adeya,
Although I love the idea of a walkable city and think that it would be an excellent solution to both many health problems (Walking is shown to be effective at curtailing type 2 diabetes here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/f … cle/192010 and a brisk walk's caloric expenditure is actually comparable to running at a jog http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Calories_burned … nd_walking), I think that most cities are too big and spread out to effectively be converted to walking first metropolises. If I was to walk from my house to my school (which are in the same city), it would take me about 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon if I were to walk very quickly. This does not even include the time it would take me to go to afterschool activities such as water polo practice. With this taken into account, I would have to leave my house at 4:30 am and get home at 8:00 pm in order to make everything happen. While I wish that this was practical, sadly I think that walkable cities are impossible in the modern America.
For small areas I think that this would be a great idea. But what about the bigger cities in which you cannot walk from place to place.