Storysystems Evolution
This is where the story felt like it began to take on a form of its own and more that of a coherent vision instead of just preaching the type of transit technologies that we should be using in the future. For this part I determined what levels of society that the story was already taking place on which was mostly at the city level. Then to fill in the remaining ones I crafted some short stories for each of the levels that were missing. Those stories where then interwoven, and merged back together in an attempt to create a coherent story from the telling of several different stories. The result was a story that described the different levels of the vision and how they were different a varying levels such as light rail for the city and streetcars for the neighborhood level of transit. Weaving these together though felt like each story was very much still its own, which made the story as a whole feel slightly disjoint in the final version of this evolution.
Rails of Renewal: Cascadia's Carbon Neutral Quest
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. One of the areas that came up with one of the most ambitious plans was Cascadia.
In 2030 the Pacific Northwest decided that it wanted to break from the US and Canada to great it's own country, Cascadia. 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. They also imposed stricter standards on household goods and the emissions that each household was allowed to emit. Luckily, the area had vast water resources so they were able to take advantage of that and leverage it so that they're able to generate emissions free electricity through the use of hydropower and nuclear energy for the majority of their energy needs. From there though they tasked each city with coming up with their own approach as to how they were going to reduce emissions and waste on a local level, while enabling their local economies to flourish.
For instance in the city of Seattle and the surrounding towns, they decided to come together to produce a comprehensive vision of what their future could look like. Inspired by the high speed rail system the connected the major cities of Cascadia, they decided they could mimic that but on a smaller scale locally with light rail. They decided that they should enhance their existing light rail network that had been started by the Sound Transit Three initiative that voters had approved back in 2015. This new version of it would not only connect the suburbs and point but they would also expand it so that it covered substantially more neighborhoods within the city of Seattle. For instance, they decided that they would add a line that went up the old SR99 which when through the middle of the Queen Anne neighborhood. Inlining additional lines like this would allow for better cross connections and for more people do be served by a fully grade separated form a transit. And what does this system run off of, nothing other than electricity that is now increasingly carbon neutral thanks to the direction of the power authorities and the directives given to them by the Cascadia regulators. What's interesting though is now that we had strongly connected neighborhoods, that left people wondering is there something more with transit that we could do to further decrease our emissions and push people out of their cars for even more trips, perhaps even replacing our local bus system at the same time.
In Queen Anne one solution to this was resurrecting their old streetcar network and then building on top of that to connect the neighborhood back together through rail transit. They initially started by replacing the trolleybus routes with streetcars lines again. While also doing that they built the streetcars to the same specifications as the light rail cars so that in the future there was a potential for the systems to be integrated with one another. These streetcar networks now connected the different blocks within Queen Anne allowing for people to easily transit to different locations around their neighborhood such as from the town square at the top to the Space Needle located at the bottom of the hill. Families were now able to leverage this transit network to go do things together without the need for a car.
For instance the Johnson family was able to take advantage of these new integrated transit system to travel from their home in Queen Anne to a Mariners game in the stadium district downtown. There they were able to enjoy the sights and sounds of the game in the shade of the stadium. Since the world had managed to mitigate the effects of global warming and even reverse a few changes it had caused, families were now able to enjoy the mediterranean climate that Cacadia had enjoyed in it's past which is what the Johnson's were doing right now at the baseball game. After the game they were able to head home too and maybe even grab an ice cream treat on the way home.
John as a member of the Johson family was also able to get up the next day and take the streetcar to the light rail hub which took him to the downtown train station. He then transferred to the high speed rail line to get to his job in Portland. He was able to do this all in about 50 minutes thanks to the infrastructure that was not in place. Once in Portland he was able to go to work which was within walking distance of the station then head home at the end of the day. Luckily since the world had shifted to a hybrid work model he only had to do this a few times a week, and since he wasn't driving, it made the trip much easier to do. He could get things done on the way there.
One thing we realized is that all the changes to transit we made in the hopes of improving our planet also improved everything at the same time. It had an effect on every facet of our lives enabling us to live better lives overall. Maybe one day, we can get to a completely car free future, that will be truly freeing.