The fundamentals of sustainability and its urban growth

The basics of understanding urban growth is knowing that transportation is its foundation. Since the development of all urban growth is based on its source of transportation, transportation is the root of sustainability. This understanding is vitally important to Western Society since the primary source of its transportation is automobile centric. Then comes the realization that the automobile is wholly unsustainable.

The automobile

The automobile is unsustainable, yet, the media broadcasts its support for a political directive to make its unsustainability irrelevant. There’s a forlorn frustration to watch the masses being led to believe an intentionally deceptive political narrative. Things like: banning a plastic straw will change the weather. A majority of students in modern institutional education; are convinced that plastic grocery bags are the cause of unsustainability. And, cow poop is the source of poisonous methane: destroying Earth’s breathable air. Western culture says smoking cigarettes are bad but, smoking pot is okay. Here’s a practical question: can a person ride a unicorn with a saddle? The level of intriguing and culturally profound questions ask: how do elephants pee? The point of this paragraph is satire; mocking society for eluding the consequence of cognitive presence. 

Regardless of how a car’s motor is powered, automobiles are unsustainable environmentally, economically, and socially.

Sustainability

Discovering the basics of sustainability includes comprehension of its components. There are a lot of pieces to sustainability. Food grown in a person’s garden is sustainable; after the food is eaten and processed, manure nourishes the soil. Most things we use in modern life are packaged in disposable containers. When people are concerned about whether a product’s packaging is sustainable, the fact that its purpose of packaging is to be thrown away; identifies the packaging as unsustainable. The concept of package marketing for a product renders that marketing process to be unsustainable. This is an important issue when considering the sustainable ideology. Tagging sustainable labels on products is strictly a mode of increasing product sales.

Sustainability includes: economic, environmental, and social parameters.  An urban area’s economic sustainability relies-on the source of its local economic production. Also, the ability for the area’s currency to remain in circulation within the influence of that area. Again, things like product packaging are predominantly waste. Another piece of packaging is the behemoth of marketing. Labels are designed to generate emotional interpretation. Social identification is based on emotional response. Personal interaction and public contact are intimately tied to social sustainability.

Many of the CATTCC blogposts contain details of environmental, economic and social impacts of unsustainable urban growth. CATTCC’s purpose is for sustainable transportation solutions.

The greatest component for increasing sustainability into society is injecting the use of common sense. 

Importance of transportation sustainability

In 1988, the UN developed a paper which established an understanding of how to address sustainable development. The Brundtland Report, the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. This report established the identity of environmental, economic and social issues as pertinent to sustainability and urban growth. What were the impacts from cars as the primary source of transportation? The automobile was identified as unsustainable.

In the 1930s, Viktor Schauberger identified chemical explosion propulsion-driven transportation; as a terribly inefficient method of transportation. He defined it as being against nature.  

What is sustainable transportation?

What has the most significant environmental impact on the planet? Transportation and its interaction with urban development.

Most people agree that merely by the mass of numbers, cars have the greatest impact to the environment. While this may be an accurate assumption, what is most susceptible to weather influence? The sky. Does an automobile leave a trail to show where it’s traveled? How about airplanes? Are the trails of a passenger jets visible from a distance? Dependent upon each day’s atmospheric wind and moisture content, some days reveal heavier vapor trails more than others. Hundreds of planes producing intensive heat vapors on take-off is likely to have an effect on the area’s regional weather.

In contrast to what the general opinion of what people are led to believe, electric cars are automobiles. All cars, whether electric, hydrogen, autonomous, or just regular petrol powered; cars are still cars.

As outlined in the Brundtland Report, there are three areas of concern regarding urban growth: environmental, economic, and social. This specifically points out the vital importance for an area’s primary source of transportation to be sustainable. Not only environmentally but, economically, and socially.

Sustainable transportation solutions

What’s the best way to reach economic and environmental transportation sustainability? With efficient energy use. It eliminates chemical explosions as a source of propulsion. This includes modes of transportation for both long distance and short distance. It disqualifies rockets and automobiles as viable transportation.

Since combustion driven transportation is an inefficient source of transportation, what is the alternative?

There are two types of transportation. Short distance and long distance. Short distance travel is restricted to land-use design; either transit oriented or the sprawl land-use of automobile centric design. Transit oriented land-use can be addressed efficiently with maglev technology which requires the addition of a guideway. Automobile centric land-use design needs an alternative to the automobile.

Fundamentally, the basic structure of transportation in Western Society’s land-use design is unsustainable. The solution for transportation is the discovery and development for a brand-new mode of transportation. The key word of focus: discovery. Then development.

For long distance travel, a replacement for rocket technology is imperative. The rational for discovering a brand-new mode of long-distance travel (space flight) is essential for the practicality of speed. With the massive inefficiency of current rocket technology, its locked into a maximum speed of 25,000 mph. With today’s rocket-ship speed, it would take about eight months for a rocket-ship to reach Mars. At a speed of one-tenth the speed of light, a spacecraft could reach Mars within three hours. Efforts on the razor’s edge of fringe science theorize this fast speed is plausible.

CATTCC is involved in research for advanced transportation discoveries.