Richard Register, Ecocity Builders
... The biggest things we build – our cities – are creating the biggest problems we have. More precisely stated, the built infrastructure of our global civilization is the literal, physical foundation for much or probably even most of the crisis of colliding crises we find ourselves in today. Why? Because cities are not planned and built on the measure of the human being, but instead on the measure of the automobile and massive amounts of cheap energy to run it. These car-based, scattered, energy profligate cities demand a greedy share of the earth's bounty and exude CO2 enough to transform the atmosphere and climate of a whole planet.

...Specifically this is what I mean: First, European cities at levels of prosperity comparable to those in the United States use about one quarter the land and one quarter the energy per person as the typical American city of cars and sprawl. Second: train, streetcar and rail based transportation systems are around eight times as efficient in terms of energy and delivery of goods and passengers as the car, truck and highway system. Two lines of track side-by-side equals 16 lanes of freeway. That is massively significant. Considering that, promoting cars of any kind and neglecting rail at this point in history borders on insanity or stupidity. Freeway building should stop cold in its tracks right now.

There’s more. Considering European cities are swamped in cars despite their history originating as pedestrian cities, and none of them are going all out for ecological redesign, the land required for lively, livable, ecological cities is likely to be more like one sixth the area American sprawl occupies with a particular population. Taken together, as indeed land use patterns and transportation modes are one seamless larger whole pattern, we begin to see the enormous import of those numbers. Considering factors represented by these number that are this significant and considering that an industry building such an infrastructure would be building less in terms of material resources if more in terms of healthy services, then, should we choose to build upon these factors, a redesigned city/civilization infrastructure could run on about one tenth the energy and a small fraction of the land consumed by the city of cars. That city is sweeping – no, paving the world, and engulfing the atmosphere of an entire planet in a historically new mix of gasses, aerosols and particulates.

Those small sounding numbers of gigantic consequence, 8, 6 and 10, are key. Factor of 8 for transportation. Factor of 6 for land use. Factor of 10 for cities, towns and villages designed for people instead of cheap energy transport machines, that is, cars and trucks. These numbers will come back over and over to stab us in the back if we don’t pay attention to them

Full Article:

Restore the Earth, Rebuild Civilization -
Proposal for a Global Rebuilding Program

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