The Response portion of my Position Synthesis Paper
Angela Fields
English 1010
10/07/15
The City of the Future
I use Bill Nye in order to show how others have this similar vision of city infrastructures incorporating more bicycles as transportation instead of motorized vehicles. Bill Nye “the science guy” best known for his Disney series by the same title, appearing as a really tall guy on a bike wearing a helmet. Not only does Bill Nye sometimes personally use a bike for transportation, he also used his bike during his show to demonstrate the distance between planets. Bill Nye is also a science educator, comedian, television presenter, actor, writer, scientist, and former mechanical engineer.
He once said, “Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym.” He teases people that it is not sensible and is harmful to the planet to use a car when you could instead use a means of exercise to go exercise. That the idea of using such a costly means of transport is illogical when the process of going can be just as engaging as why a person is going. Cities all over the world have begun to build systems to drive people towards this better way of transportation not only for exercising but in some places (areas in China for instance) frown upon other motorized means due to their high overall cost.
Bill Nye talks in a video made by Big Think about what he believes to be ideal structures in the ‘city of the future’. He speaks of weatherproof tunnels that could have the wind blowing in both direction so that riders would always have a tailwind and how cost efficient they would be compared to current road infrastructures. He tells that roads are like bridges over sand and to put the weight of a car on it verses a bike, the bridge needs to be thicker as well as maintained more often to support the car. Thereby it becomes more expensive for the city and individuals. In the future, space is also a growing concern for a rising population and the amount we waste on parking lots and roadways is an area that will have to be managed more wisely.
I think if our city planners adapted our travel systems more for bicycles instead of cars, not only personal expense such as car maintenance, registration tax and gasoline be saved but also tax base expenses that are put into current road maintenance and construction. Beyond the cost benefit of these road improvements so too would the environmental benefit from the cost in materials we take from it to make roads and the cars that drive on them. With more structures such as the tunnels to assist us getting to places time, cost and space could be saved, discrediting those that say biking takes longer than driving. I agree that bikes are the future and though an entire overhaul of our current transportation system may seem daunting to some, Project Cycle can help apply/modify small changes to them to get our wheels rolling in the right direction.
When I started to lose weight by biking to the gym, I saw firsthand the irony of Bill Nye’s statement and discovered many other benefits by riding there. The energy level, focus, determination, breath and the money I saved by biking instead of driving all greatly increased. At times the long commute into town did catch me in some precarious weather, occasions which may have slowed me down. However if we instead work towards Bills and my vision that would address that problem with the weather proof tunnels, instead of paving and repaving space wasting roads and fixing crumbling bridges, more would join us on the bike path.
Project Cycle helps with some of the first stages of this, providing people with bikes at no cost to them that are willing to use them to get around. In addition the project will start to put bike racks in front of local businesses for people to use as bike parking. For every promise we get towards our project and actively participating person that starts to ride a bike is one less car on the road. Bill Nye may think himself ‘nutty’ having way out there ideas with his tunnels over roads vision, but as he argues it can be done and has already started to be seen in cities that recognize that bicycling is not ‘a trend’ it’s currently the most viable and sustainable option for transportation.