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OUR CITIES ARE TERRIBLE PLACES!!!
And the primary cause of global warming!!!!!
Streets are aging, ruts and potholes are wearing out vehicles, auto accidents are killing and maiming us, gasoline prices and rate of consumption give us horrendous problems in poisoned air; oil companies announce billions in excess profits, without a sense of guilt, redistributing wealth from individuals and small businesses in favor of themselves ( increasing the value of my mutual funds so I can feel that guilt for them), people living and working next to busy highways/freeways, slowly poisoned by the carbon dioxide that floats into their windows, and hangs around their streets. Our automobile-centric society is killing us, and is much too expensive to live in.
In the not-too-distant-future our stomachs will be in competition with our cars for first claim on grain, corn, and grits, unless, Craig Venter soon comes through with a “minimum genome.” (Synthetic Genomics).
The cost of living in the U.S. is much higher than it could be, due to the overly large real estate businesses with the need for parking lots have to pay for, and price their offerings to pay for it. Then there is the cause of our diminishing brainpower: our manufacturers are deserting this country, leaving many of us devastated. We must enter a long-term program to convert the basic structure of our cities to much less expensive places to live.
It would much easier for us to tolerate if we made the necessary changes without disturbing our lives, or suddenly bankrupting “Detroit”, “Big Oil”, and the Near East; We should give them time to adjust, and to leave the discomfort resulting from our actions to our kids to acclimate to as they evolve from our addictions to a much healthier, and more intelligent, infrastructure. Isn’t that what we want for them: to be better-off than us? The way we move about takes nearly 6,000 teenage-lives, and injures another 300,000 every year, in automobile-accidents alone; we need to make corrections.
Social evolution has brought us to the point of needing to coordinate development of our infrastructure nation-wide in the interest of self-preservation. We must do it now, for the future, or the future will suddenly appear, leaving us no time to do anything about it, which is how we’ve always done things. The inevitable depletion of world oil reserves may be far distant, but not so distant that it should not be prepared for now. Consider also the idea that other sources of fuel for automobiles being discussed and planned for will come from depletion of natural resources, regardless of what it may be; Both the earth‘s productability, and it’s results, are both depletable.
Also, the price of oil is said to be anywhere below $60 and going higher. Well! The price of oil is actually over $150 a barrel if you factor in the cost of our going to war to preserve access to it. (per Bobby Inman). Russia’s oil reserves is becoming a big factor in world tension. Oil must be made irrelevant! What follows is the only way.
As you read what follows, think of regional shopping centers that sit above their ground-level parking lots; you drive in, find a parking space, take a stairway, escalator, or elevator, one level up to the stores, and spend money; many office complexes has the same provision.
In a nutshell, toward the goal of putting communities above a parking lot and road system, and anticipating a distant future when gasoline-powered vehicle will be gone, all new buildings should be mandated, starting now, to have a duplicate main entrance one story above ground for future use. Water, electricity, and sewage provisions would be at the outside of new building foundations-not within the walls. They would be accessible at ground-level with no excavation necessary to service them. We would no longer dig basements for new-buildings other than to anchor them.
Such buildings would provide for replacing worn street-pipes/wiring/sewerage, lines before they break, at much less expense than we now spend having to excavate for access while tying up traffic.
It costs a fortune to bury, and dig up, lines; we are stuck with power cables and phone lines currently held at the top of poles and steel structures along streets, because the phone and power companies will not spend what it takes to bury them unless they could surcharge everyone along a line.
A city “growing” its own basement, on street-level, can gradually move those phone lines to safe walled-in cabinets, would sharing space with the city’s plumbing, and electrical wiring. Imagine the dividends the phone and power companies would be able to distribute with the elimination of excavation-expenses in metropolitan areas, and no need to buy new poles, and steel structures for the countryside.
This idea does not suggest anything new in the way of building styles; buildings could go up in the architectural styles they do now, as well as new. This plan allows new city business, professional, and residential, structures to anticipate the future when a street or intersection will find itself with two tiers, one for vehicles - both in movement, and parked - and one for pedestrians.
Have you ever thought how good it would be if we separated pedestrians from moving cars, and made room for them to move and park without getting in each others way? It seems to me that, putting the roads below our streets and homes gradually, avoids the impossible and too expensive task of reworking entire communities within a short time.
Don‘t you often think of the possibility, as a pedestrian, never to have to compete with cars, buses, trucks, street-repair workers and their machinery, as you walk, or drive? Wouldn’t it be great if our kids benefit from a gradual elimination of our poisonous gasoline-operated machines within their lifetimes?
From the start of this plan, trucks supplying commercial, industrial and residential buildings would run - as they now do - at current ground level, accessing these future buildings, as they develop, at their off-street basement-loading docks, just as at present buildings that have no such loading docks. Such modified buildings would not sprout up in large clusters for at least ten years from the adoption of such a plan, so you would see a “roof” over your most hated crowded street or intersection, almost before you realized it was developing, and people walking above the street, where light electric-powered vehicular traffic would move much more freely, not having to deal with parked cars, unloading trucks, or pedestrian-crossings holding-up drivers needing to making turns.
Actually, a municipality could set aside a particularly crowded main street, for the length of crowded conditions, to see how it would work elsewhere. The city could mandate all property on that street be rebuilt to specifications, or sell to buyers who will. ( Yah Vole, mine Fuehrer! ) { Hopefully, constitutional challenges and political corruption, would be kept to a minimum. Sure! }
The result would be busses, trucks, and cars, running along a road that, for the length of that block, would be covered by a level for pedestrians, a park, and restaurants, with entrances to buildings at both levels, and parking for gas-guzzlers - not at curbs - but on a parking surface below the buildings; drivers. Again! This currently exists in shopping centers, why not an entire neighborhood, or city?
In the distant future, personal transportation at the upper level would be by light and inexpensive battery, and hydrogen-powered vehicles, encountering few intersecting roads, which would eliminate serious injuries from collisions; less need for traffic lights and stop signs (round-a-bouts, over/under-passes, etc). Moving about town would be by bicycles, skateboards, magnetic or electronic rails; moving sidewalks, jitneys, and walking. As it develops, current buses and trolleys would share the city’s “basement” where they currently run.
The ground-level of commercial and industrial buildings that would share the city’s “basement” and provide for auto sales rooms,( Cars as we know them would continue to be marketed for at least fifty years). As would gas stations, and auto repair shops. There would be all sorts of other businesses to serve drivers on their ways through the area without them having to park to access street-level; entry to upper-level supermarkets, etc. would charge mush less because they would occupy half the property they currently do.
Residential communities with apartment and condominium complexes, could have gym, laundries, etc, facilities sharing the city’s basement with parking spaces for their gas-guzzlers, so they won‘t need to waste valuable space for parking on the same level as the street.
The use of gasoline would slowly decrease. We would clean the air by capturing, processing, and transferring, exhaust fumes below street-level, thereby reducing air pollution and global warming; health would improve, insurance premiums would drop, and we would lessen each year our dependence on oil long before alternate sources of energy are easily available and affordable. And, imagine filling your gas tank once a month, instead of twice weekly. ( Regardless of the price.)
( To those in the oil industry, sorry, but you and Detroit did it to the blacksmith; what goes around, comes around; My granpappy will be proud of me. )
To you who suffer for our dying trees - in and outside of cities - the restructuring of our cities would slow down their demise at increasing rates year after year .
We will, of course, enjoy spewing fumes while traveling from one community to the next while long-distance mass transportation develops, leaving our kids fewer choices as time moves on. Maybe by 2500, our kid‘s kid’s kids will do inter-city travel by levitation, and no longer have strait-a-ways to race stupid cars, getting themselves maimed and killed. ( Instead they would be able to go at each other mid-air, like “flying tigers.” )
On this subject: inter-city travel, as I illustrate in my novel, “The FECMA Conspiracy”, we could install underground rails into freeway and highway lanes to allow for drivers to lock onto them and turn off the engine for long trips. Popular Mechanics magazine published this idea in 1948, and it’s not here yet!
Cities could not, of course, embark on speedy conversion projects to achieve this state of affairs, so, after a city tries and succeeds in one community, state governments could mandate all new buildings to meet this design, or carry the burden of proving it counter-productive, considering the location. I approve of a *Federal* mandate, because a major purpose would be to rid us all of being a victim to oil. Reducing the cost of living by eliminating expensive personal vehicles will contribute to the return of commerce that had deserted us for that reason, as well as preventing desertion of others.
Every building in the city rebuilt by its owner would be designed to meet the new requirements with tax considerations. The design would produce their part of the anchor for the above-the-road street that would eventually be extended over the road.
( The height of the city’s “basement” ceiling would depend on the height of the highest inter-city truck, plus the needed space for wiring, sewerage and other piping. ) { After which trucks and vans would have to be nationally mandated to that maximum height, and a maximum length. }
Conversions would produce the merging of above-the-road streets here and there with ever-growing sections of unimpaired pedestrian and battery-driven vehicular movement above what had been the ground-level.
New and rebuilt structure not intended to be tall enough to reach above the new street-level, such as small stores, and markets, would be designed to sit atop their own parking lot, which would raise the building-entrance to the level of the others; they would be accessed from current ground-level by elevators, escalators, and such from their own parking lot, which would eventually become part of the city-wide basement.
The elimination of parking spaces alongside buildings, would reduce the size of property needed for a new market, drug store, or strip malls. At-curb, and parking-lot (wasted) space would gradually become extinct as development proceeds to make current streets subterranean, and free-flowing. New buildings would be built above these lots, so will not require additional property, or add to any current on-street parking problems.
Creating new types of private vehicles and municipal people movers would provide new jobs to replace those eliminated; construction work would proliferate, welfare rolls would plummet. . . . .
New residential communities of single family dwellings would be built atop their own garages, which would be a section of the city’s basement so that there will be no home without it’s own parking - for both residents and guests, eliminating the need for on-street parking. Narrower roads, wider people-spaces, and larger separation of structures for green space ( and private homes with golf-tennis, lawn bowling, practice areas! ) would result.
* Developers of massive communities could design and build such places * right now! *
Golf courses, and large parks would still be at ground-level, with nothing overhead, surrounded by the city’s basement, putting surrounding homes above the highest-flying golf ball. (Well, There’s always some wise guy!)
As time moves along, people would gradually reduce their use of gasoline for local shopping and errands, lessening the demand for oil products, vehicle maintenance, and insurance coverage, thereby lowering the cost of living, and being able to afford a copy of my novel, “The FECMA Conspiracy“ that offers a better election system than we now suffer with.
Areas of a city that need not be converted so radically, would be changed to whatever degree possible, if at all, without effecting the conversion of other sections. Not all of a city can be, or needs to be, changed, but the distant future can eliminate the co-mingling of vehicles and pedestrians to a very extensive degree.
An idea for such sections would be to mandate all future one story businesses to be built strong enough to provide for rooftop parking; no parking lots, no on-street parking, wide streets for vehicles, wider sidewalks for pedestrians. In such neighborhoods, grocery markets, drug stores, and shopping centers should have parking on ground-level, and the store above it. *And* all pipes and wiring for these structures would be accessible from the outside of buildings, rather having to dig to them.< BR>
(In the city of San Diego, California, the intersection of University Avenue and 30th Street- two major arteries - is a hub of pedestrians, retail stores, restaurants, condos, apartments, offices, street-people, and ten bus routes, which makes it chaotic; imagine, if you know the area, what would be the picture if that intersection, two or three blocks square, were duel-leveled, pedestrians above/streets below, with each building accessible at both levels. You just had a sexual experience, didn‘t you?
We could look forward to the slow and sure decrease in the loss of life and limb by the machine that probably kills and maims more people in the U.S. in any year, than in all the world’s military actions during that year.
As the future moves ahead, every redesigned structure and city street will help to free us from Arab oil by the time the Starship Enterprise is christened, and Captain James T. Kirk takes command. (Providing he gives up his law practice in Boston, and so much sex! )
All we need to make this financially possible, is to end wasteful wars, and convert our tax system to the one proposed in my tax brief.
Bear in mind, this whole idea of a 100-year conversion project must mandate adoption of this plan by every state, for new developments, wherever possible, to be above a basement for current roads, and piping/wiring systems. Otherwise it will never happen. A single city could show the way.
The price of gas is at an all-time high, oil people couldn’t care less; they are hauling in billions of excess dollars, and have no intentions of doing what needs to be done to bring prices down; they will not build new refineries-the last one was built in 1976; they cost about two billion dollars each, and they will not assume that burden. There is no real competition, and they are consolidating production as I type.
There is one genuine solution to this problem: the demand for gasoline-powered vehicles must be slowed, eventually eliminated; roads are too full; commuting by personal carriage too punishing; we must stop building new super-roads ( freeways, in California parlance). This is the way to do it, long before any other solution is accepted, and even begins to be carried out.
See the New Yorker Magazine, June 12, 2006, page 56: “The Financial Page, Pumped up”, by James Surowiecki)
Take note: We have families, and work hard at making a better life for our kids, yet we are screwing up the world for them in our refusal to do what will cause us pain. Look at it this way, a *very* gradual conversion of our living conditions will keep us grown-ups as spoiled as we are, and leave to our kids the discomforts that will take them to a better life; each subsequent generation that follows us will deal with adjustments as we ourselves fade into the past, not having had to experience the pain of it all; they will get to enjoy the slow disappearance of the internal combustion engine, and a much lower cost of living. God, that’s beautiful!
Did you know that auto exhaust has been found to cause acidic oceans, as well as raising them by melting the icecaps? - the worlds marine life is being poisoned.
If this idea were to be adopted by just one city, or a private developer of residential, commercial, or industrial, communities, it would happen at a faster pace as other developers and cities see success. I guarantee it!
Rainwater would be easily recycled through piping in the “basement,” repairable without having to excavate; massive floods that destroy neighborhoods and businesses would be much less massive in such re, and newly, constructed neighborhoods, towns, and housing developments.
Wherever nature sees fit to punish us with rain-storms, snow, hale, or heavy wind, the raised-street concept would withstand those attacks, and transport the stuff to common advantage.
Now!!!! About Wal-Mart, el al, and their war on small business, no superstore would fit into new the new style of living, as it produces self-contained living spaces with limited customer bases.
Yes! They bring prices down, and make it convenient to shop in a single place, but they do it at the expense of the lower-class employee with low pay, fringe benefits fit for a cockroach, and the attitude that they, the workers, are fated to that level of subservience, so why fight it? Wal-Mart also forces their venders to sell at starvation wholesale prices if they want to deal with the great Kahanna. The resulting low prices on the backs of their workers, and suppliers, force salaries throughout the retail industry down, and increase the number of workers who cannot make it very far on their salaries. Wal-Mart draws money from other retailers to themselves, just as the oil companies suck up money from all businesses as they increase gas prices; we all have only so much money to spend, and Wal-Mart, seemingly, wants it all; they could decide to lower prices even more because by no costs for parking lots.
I added this as I watched a TV news program talk of a Wal-Mart -invasion of my city by placing ads to provoke people into talking city hall into going for it; after all, low prices and convenience sells big; it’s a drug!
The elimination of regional shopping will save smaller retailers more money than Wal-Mart - the world conqueror, could ever do. I personally think the “mom and pop” business is a better way to go, and a single retailer for the entire world frightens me.
Go ahead! Tear this apart! Enjoy yourself!
On street repairs: If you have ever thought about the many busy streets that go un-repaired because they are traffic-loaded during the day, think about demanding of your city council legislation for a “Graveyard” shift for the street-repair department; just one shift, about 9:00 PM to 5:00AM.
Wouldn’t it be more intelligent for streets to be worked while most of us are not in the way?
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© 1997 burtonridgeway @yahoo.com
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