Durationality Evolution
This was an interesting evolution of the story, it seemed that by performing the durationality exercise I was able to make the experience feel more coherent. Like an actual story that as being told. By performing the exercise, I was able to fill in a lot of the holes that were present in the original story, so that instead of an experience just being possible, there was an explanation starting to back how that experience came to be. This was also one of the first iterations of this story where I was able to keep some parts the same and start to fill more in versus tearing down the story and building it back up like in some of the other methods. One example was bringing up congestion pricing and how it was used to get cars out of the city. Another example was introducing some new technologies such as augmented reality that helped to introduce how they could design and build such systems quicker. Overall, this was one of the first versions of the story where I started to feel up about where it was going.
The Cascade Connection: From Coffee to Collaboration
In the cool, misty moring of Seattle, a young woman named Sarah wakes, wanting to grab brunch with one of her friends in Leavenworth on the other side of the cascades. She also wants to spend the afternoon in Portland to meet up with some classmates in her Built Urban Environment course to go over a proposal project they are putting together for the city of Portland to improved their park. The year is 2055, and Cascadia has finished the spine of their brand new high speed rail network connecting Vancouver to Portland. Highways that were present from when they were a part of the United States are being ripped out to be replaced with new high speed rail to traverse east to west built by fully automated construction machines. It is a different world than ours that Sarah was woken up into but one that inspires hope of what could possibly be.
She has to start her day off early so that she has time to bike to the cafe that is slightly out of here way on the way to the train station. The only way she can get there is by biking these days, cars have long been banned from being in the downtown core of Seattle, leaving nothing but green tramways, bike paths, and abundant walking space for pedestrians. So quickly she gets ready and starts packing her bag for the big day ahead. She hurriedly packs her e-ink tablet, augmented reality glasses, and laptop in her bag before hopping on her bike to head to the cafe.
Once at the cafe she realizes that she can spare about thirty minutes so she opens up her e-ink tablet and begins to read some of the assignments that she had to go through while waiting for her coffee to be ready. She begins reading some essays by Oswald Mosley and becomes engrossed in them, so much so that even when her coffee arrives she continues to read it, not noticing the time slipping by. When she finishes one of the essays and looks at the time, she panics slightly because she had missed the train that she intended to take. Luckily she does not have to worry much though, as the next train is in fifteen minutes, plenty of time for her to bike over to the station. Since the trains were automated these days she did not have to wait long for the next one, as it was always at most fifteen minute away no matter what the time of day was.
Once at Union Station she quickly boards the next train bound for Leavenworth, stashing her bike in the ample bike storage in the train, which was plenty these days as biking was really the only way to get around. She then settles into the passenger car, takes out her e-ink tablet and goes back to reading, sometimes glancing out the window, reminiscing on how much has changed. Where before she would have seen cars on the highway she was passing by was not land being reclaimed by nature, and being used to further increase high-speed rail capacity. Gone now where the days of being stuck in traffic, like she used to growing up when traveling to Leavenworth, getting frustrated and honking at all the cars that were ahead of them. Soon the train arrived in Leavenworth, just at the right time too! She quickly grabbed her bike and then made off to the cafe where her friend John was waiting for her.
John is there at the cafe waiting for her, so quickly they begin to chat while waiting for their meal. He is actually enrolled in the same class as Sarah in graduate school, so to start off they quickly go over some of the assignments that they had been working on. They quickly exchange stories two reading them allowed to each other to see if there was some improvements that they other could suggest that they needed to make. Soon they sandwiches that they order arrived so they quickly started eating those. After brunch, John and Sarah decided to take a walk around town and explore the fake German village that was meant as a tourist trap to draw in people from around the Washington area. It is amazing how clear the air is in the area, whereas before smoke and fumes from cars and diesel trains would create a haze and blanket the valley the town was in. Luckily they had electrified the rail network nationally a decade ago and banned most cars while making the rest battery electric. This allowed for the air to clear and present the view that they saw before them today of the snow capped cascade mountains. Soon after admiring the view she hopped on her bike and headed toward the train that was bound for Portland from Leavenworth.
While on the train she quickly started making some adjustments to the proposal that her and her group mates were putting together for the city of Portland. She soon was able to finish those up and again began to stare out the window. This trip used to take four hours by train and she was lucky that now it only took two hours. That was thanks to the replacement of regional rail that had been put in place with high speed rail upgrades. Soon she arrived in Portland and quickly went to meetup with her group mates at the water front park downtown.
They had already made it there ahead of her and were reviewing some of the work that she had done on the train that she sent to them ahead of time. She had added a fountain to the new park they were planning to replace the existing one along the waterfront. They absolutely loved the idea, and what was amazing was that they could visualize it through their augmented reality glasses and visualize what it would look like with the rest of their proposed park. This was the same method that engineers and designers were now using all across the country to visualize what something looked like before that had the robots take over and construct it! Sarah soon had to board her train bound for Seattle, so she quickly said goodbye and then headed over to Union Station in Portland. Reflecting back on her train ride home she realized that before this new transit network, this entire day would not have been possible at all because she would have been stuck driving, which took over twice the time to get anywhere that these high speed rail lines did.