Who Moved My Ass?

Forget about your cheese: YOU are next. Are we on the verge of mass movement? For better or worse, we are. As studies of the urban future indicate, more people will be living in cities than ever. This runs against the notion we had only a short while back when e-visionaries were trumpeting the coming of The New Rural Life. Technology advances (especially in telecommunication) would make us enjoy the proximity to nature and wilderness while alleviating us of the need to live in (filthy) cities. But they missed one important factor: no amount of technological revolution is going to change anything unless the same thing happens to transportation. In fact, advances in mobility alone can determine how far we can live from the city. It was the advent of the car (coupled with cheap energy and subsidized highways) that brought us the suburbs.

The question would be then, what kind of transportation 'invention' is necessary to make us really rural? For one, it has to take us from the city center to our rural habitats and back even more swiftly and cheaply than the current car-centric system. The only alternative on the table is what's called PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). But that idea has been criticized beyond recognition. I side with some of this criticism, but only against some of the solutions and applications touted and not against the basic idea. PRT is a sound idea who's time has come. The problem is in not understanding that it's a whole new paradigm that will end up rearranging the very make up of the built environment.

A paradigm change in transportation would very likely bring a change in property values, and nobody wants to see their valuables tumble. Maybe this could partly explain why the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) did not make it after being only within one year of breaking ground in the late sixties. Two hundred thousand people living in a dome with no cars or schools was indeed too futuristic even for that dreamy era. But not enough 'interest' from 'doers' in government and society in general is probably what put it on hold indefinitely. Until now.

Seismic shifts that would eventually affect the built environment are already being anticipated. Namely; the end of cheap oil; the failure(s) of the car on so many levels (even if oil was forever cheap); the water crises; the energy crises; the communication (especially wireless) revolution, and the aging population are only part of what we're heading into. The, then, readily available solutions of MXC and PRT would have been a marvelous mix forty years ago, yet are seen even today as futuristic and not the future. It seems we don't want to move from the corner that we painted ourselves into. We want to have our cheese and eat it, too.