Breaking the Gridlock: Slate.com Calls for Ideas
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By 2030 it is estimated that the number of people residing in cities worldwide will grow to 5 billion. That's 5 billion urbanites who will need an infrastructure to get them where they need to be--a mind-boggling prospect for anyone who has sat in gridlock or fought for six inches of space in a subway car. So Slate wants your ideas on ways to improve and modernize the strained infrastructures within and between the world's cities.
Here's why:
[T]ransportation already accounts for 28 percent of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, and the number is rising. Transportation is also costing us even more: At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. households spent about 2 percent of their income on transportation. That figure is now around 18 percent, and it's also rising. And then there are the other social costs, not just time lost in congestion but the larger cost in human lives: The World Bank estimates that by 2030, road deaths could become the fourth or fifth leading killer worldwide, a larger threat than malaria.
This brainstorming session is to create more "nimble" cities, says Slate. How can we use the technology that already exists to better our air and our health and lessen the grief of travel?
"Since transportation is such a complex problem—encompassing design, engineering, land use, politics, economics, and psychology—we're expecting a vast range of proposals. Some will geek out on the transparency of transit data; others will gravitate toward the best bike locks; some will go the "supertrain" route; others may fixate on traffic-signal timings."
(Photo credit: Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz Mariordo; C.C. 3.0)
