Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Despite an eventual pricetag of $68 billion and numerous engineering, environmental and political challenges, the California bullet train offers a promising vision of sustainable mobility, posing less impacts and competitive costs than expanding airports and freeways.
Converting freeway lanes to tollways in the name of congestion management, without viable transit alternatives, will only reduce mobility for the majority in exchange for wealthy drivers getting to work on time.
Southern California’s new Sustainable Communities Strategy plan posits that as a region, we have to grow up, not out. That doesn’t mean Hong Kong skyscrapers, but more apartments near light-rail stations and vibrant mixed-use areas like the ones in downtown Pasadena.
With “ambitious but achievable” transportation and land use proposals left off the table, California’s first climate protection mandated Sustainable Communities Strategy aimed high but did not quite achieve setting the San Diego region on a long-term course toward sustainability.
The time is now to invest in walkable neighborhoods accessed by mass transit with opportunities for cultural coming together and societal participation, instead of environmentally-destructive sprawl, cultural intolerance, societal alienation, and personal anonymity.