Changing Transportation Options

It’s been stated on this blog before and is worth repeating.  How can people improve their environment with the continuation of unsustainable patterns? 

Studying transportation aspects of urban development in Western society provides an explanation as to how we’ve reached such a level of societal chaos, to skeptics; the study offers an explanation that at least contribute to behavior patterns in Western Society.  In studying the past, one recognizes every urban development must accommodate a standard form of transportation.  Anthropological studies of civil increase prior to the industrial revolution entails research into an individual’s needs and group actions with municipal development, however, for the topic of this writing: concern is the problematic nature of unsustainable urban growth as it relates to transportation, specifically Western society beginning in the 19^th Century.

The current status of modern Western society began with a race from automobile manufacturers and the oil industry to produce as much profitability as could be obtained.  Prior to the arrival of automobiles in the 20^th Century, societal expansion of urban growth was provided for by 19^th Century train technology and development. 

In original Western society urban development used privately funded train systems as the base of its growth.   Automobile centric urban development is funded through government hands of ever increasing taxation. 

How does one change the method of transportation when our culture, beginning in the 20^th Century, was based on and is completely dependent on the automobile?  Useable modes of transportations are restricted to what is available.  Land-use design coincides with an area’s available transportation mode.  The question then becomes: what form of transportation is available?  In the automobile centric society a transportation mode requires an integrated technique to accommodate individualized destinations.   Street cars and passenger trains carry large groups to travel routes of pre-determined destinations; this type of transportation is compulsory to transit oriented land-use and inadequate for automobile centric land-use.

Traditionally, change of governmental procedure doesn’t happen by hope.  Political incest and a superfluity of public policy force the bureaucracy of governmental agencies into regimented compliance which proliferate unsustainable urban growth.  As an attempt to thwart tradition that perpetuates urban sprawl, California Legislators in 2006, provided a bill to grasp environmentally sustainable urban growth.  AB32 set greenhouse gas target values of 1990 air quality by 2020. Two years later SB375 legislation mandated Metropolitan Planning Agencies to create a sustainable community strategy for achieving AB32 goals.

Originally SB375 had a strict mandate which was later softened to pacify the incoherent pleads from the MPOs (metropolitan planning organizations - who are tasked with the responsibility to design urban growth) due to their inability to figure out a way to comply.  This is a loud statement ratifying automobile centric urban growth is unsustainable and bureaucracy perpetuates unsustainable practices.    

The potential which provided opportunity for modern modes of sustainable transportation systems was squelched by the atrocity of selective ignorance.  This dilemma is resolved by embracing sustainable transportation infrastructure development with private sector investment.

In psychology basics, humans possess an inherent hostile attitude against the unknown of disruptive technology.  Government policies require staff cling tightly to the rigid procedure of maintaining status-quo.  Again, a transition to advanced transit system technology requires private sector implementation prior to New Technology Transit becoming a mode of valid transportation alternative.

Available New Technology Transit systems can be implemented and intergraded into a format that meets an area’s modern transportation demands.  Most of these technology systems, however, are in development phase; lacking system wide implementation.  The advantage of these developing systems is their use of existing off the shelf technology to provide sustainable alternatives from the automobile.

In the tradition of publicly available transportation, the complication to implementing these sustainable transportation solutions is cost. 

There is an existing model which shows financial success with private sector involvement into large scale transportation infrastructure.  The example illustrates that sustainable urban growth requires private sector enterprise and can be without political ties of intrusive government subsidies.  Sustainability is measured in financial value with environmental justice and holds to the merits of social standards.