Durationality Evolution

Cascadian Revolution: The Rise of a Green Nation

A decade ago the world realized that if we kept at our current pace there would be no world left hospitable enough for humans to inhabit if we continued down our destructive path.  The world had come together chartered an international organization that would dictate standards that cities and countries had to meet.  The UN then gave this body the ability to leverage fines against countries that decided not to comply, and also encouraged each member country to come up with it's own plan to combat climate change.  As a society we decided that responsibility was not only that on the world but a responsibility that must be tackled at every level from the world down to the individual and all levels needed a plan.  One of the countries that came up with one of the most ambitious plans was Cascadia which we delve into now.

In 2030 the Pacific Northwest decided that it wanted to break from the US and Canada to great it's own country, Cascadia, forming one of the first countries based on the concept of bioregionalism.  As part of this they decided to propose a new transit system that connected high speed rail to all the major cities within the region such as Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and Spokane.  However, they realized that this entire plans was not feasible right away and would require a decade or more of construction in order to have this plan realized.  They began by first building out regional rail on the existing lines that were present.  And then after that began to initially replace what used to be I5 with a smaller road and high speed rail.  Relying on the existing regional rail to handle the capacity that was being removed from the highways.  It had taken a lot on convincing to get people onboard with this, but the rapid change in climate in the 2020's spurred people into action to make a difference.  Each city in the area also decided to jump in on the action too, in Seattle there where some big changes happening.

It started in the 2020's when Seattle decided that the city was getting way too jammed with traffic.  To combat this the city passed legislation to implement congestion pricing where they would tax people for driving their car within the city during certain times.  When this was done, they saw a noticeable shift of people switching to the existing public transit such as buses and light rail instead of driving their cars downtown.  The city already had plans to build an interconnected light rail system but realized that they needed a stop gap measure in place that they could do over the next five years since light rail would take decades to built as well as the streetcars that they wanted to serve the neighborhoods.  To do this they built out their existing trolleybus network and took advantage of the rapidly advancing battery technology that was now available to them and a lower cost.  Since the city was moving over to all electric their transit was as green as their source of electricity at this point.  Without the polluting diesel buses within the city anymore as well they were able to have much cleaner air which in Seattle provided amazing views of the mountain ranges located to the east and west of the city.  The real change however was taking place on a much smaller scale within the city, neighborhoods themselves were reimagining what it was like to live an urban life, and looking for ways that they could live a better more climate friendly life within them.

One of the first things that was proposed to do within neighborhoods was to slowly shift towards increasing the pedestrianization of the city.  Slowly but surely, neighborhoods such as Queen Anne were able to shut down streets, as people were giving up their cars due to high cost of ownership and readily having transit available to them when they needed.  The roads were still kept open for the buses but eventually, each trolleybus line that was there was replaced with a streetcar or tram system.  To further enhance the environment people were living on these tramways were built as green tramways meaning they were covered by trees and had foliage and plants around their tracks providing a wonderful aesthetic that livened spirits for people within the neighborhoods that they resided in.  Another plus to switching over to streetcars for each neighborhood was that they were designed to be integrated with the existing and future light rail infrastructure that was going into the city.  This made for easy transfers and potentially enabled longer commutes should a streetcar itself not stay within the local transit network of the neighborhood.  What was even more amazing was that the pace at which we are able to build out these neighborhoods increases every year especially with technology and innovations.  Take Todd for instance, he is an urban designer and lives in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle and over the last two decades has played a key role in shaping it into what it is today.

Todd has been able to leverage several new technologies to do amazing things for his local community in terms of innovative designs that were able to be built quick.  One thing that Todd was able to leverage a decade ago was due to significant advancements that had been made with augmented reality technology.  Before when he made designs he had to communicate to people what they would look like in a two dimensional format, utilizing augmented reality people could now see in place the ideas that he was proposing.  This was able to get people excited around the ideas that he was creating, allowing for him to get more funding for projects because once people were able to see they pretty much almost always wanted it to go that way.  Another key advancement that came about too was that of generative AI.  He was now able to speak to roughly the initial idea he wanted to create and a machine was able to do most of the tedious work and outlines that he did initially.  He now just had to give it only guidance, increasing the amount of designs and proposed changes such as what streets could look like once they were turned into green tramways.  Pairing these two technologie with advancements in robotics allowed projects and improvements for peoples built environment to get done at an unbelievable pace to them.

With all the positive change that is going on it is giving the world a collective vision and hope for the future these days.  Where once we had dread, we now have hope.