Saturday, January 10, 2009

A food shed on a walking perimeter

City Government has spent the last 60 years building bigger faster roads to the far reaches of the city with all the water and sewer and garbage that can be efficiently and unaffordably moved around. And now we can't walk and bicycling is too dangerous and look: we find ourselves chained to Al Queda and Saudi Arabia and unable to grow old in our own neighborhoods. So lets retire to the Sierras and leave it to another generation to figure out what to do with the bad air water and oil soaked soil.

Council members says that the roads are now too dangerous to bike and can we build separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda. Another network is needed to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.

But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of our jurisdiction? It will be expensive, so do we have to live with what we got? One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these great neighborhoods via bicycles boulevards. Ideally Transfer of Development Rights would restore the food shed on a walking perimeter of a complete neighborhood. I suggest we think big how we want to use the FARTP and use ABAG's and MTC's priority development and conservation areas monies to get us started repairing our world in the next 25 years.