Image links to Treehugger article.
I’ve been thinking about this article in a roundabout way lately and thought to search for it again. The city up for discussion is the ever so lovely Venice. There’s no auto of any kind here. You walk. Can you imagine how much healthier you’d be? And all the details you’d get to notice? It seems like a much calmer way for your brain. You could walk into the street without worrying about being hit with tons of steel and neither would animals. Deliveries and pick-ups are all done by hand cart. “Garbage in particular is fascinating; there is pickup every morning of something, plastics one day, paper the other and then garbage, all done by handcart. They have to do it quickly because of the rats. It is labor intensive but it is efficiently done.” Now what if we had a city like that here in the states? Have some spread out buildings. What if we had cobble stone walk ways to get to nearby shopping. You could ride your bike if you needed to go out a little further. Maybe a stretch of road connecting city to city that buses and semis use. Could you imagine the drop of pollution? There’d be no access of food buying at the grocery store because you could only buy what you could carry. All food could be fresh that day! Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds like an awesome way to go! Will SimCity allow me to create this?
Addendum: It has been brought to my attention that I left out some things. o:) I was really just excited about the idea that I thought the negatives were just minor things. But they should be known. But one would have to imagine that roads or land would fair much better than water. But for Venice, “Garbage in particular is fascinating; there is pickup every morning of something, plastics one day, paper the other and then garbage, all done by handcart. They have to do it quickly because of the rats. It is labor intensive but it is efficiently done. Deliveries are not so efficient. To do construction, cement mixers have to be brought in by barge and then pumped down narrow lanes to workmen running it in wheelbarrows. Redi-mix concrete only lasts a certain amount of time from when it was made to when it has to be placed; getting it into mixers, barged to the site and placed must take careful planning.” And emergency response times would definitely lag. But from what I hear they do now too, so maybe it would put their but in gear. Haha! AND for those of you who keep getting dinged, there would be no more traffic violations! And apparently there’s a ton of places of car-free areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places
Also since it’s in the ballpark, in a way this is about living simply, I’d also like to throw these articles out there.
Freedom and Choice: Breaking free from the tyranny of reaction
http://www.tricycle.com/trackless-path/freedom-and-choice
Balancing Happiness and Consumerism in the Digital Age
http://www.treehugger.com/gadgets/balancing-happiness-and-consumerism-digital-age.html