Friday Roundtable: Ecotopia Transit
Excerpts from the 1975 novel Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. Twenty years earlier in 1955, California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the US to form a sustainable environmentalist utopia. Since then there has been a cold war and little contact between the US and Ecotopia. Now an American journalist goes to Ecotopia to report on its conditions and the possibility of reunification. (There's no possibility.) This article takes a look at Ecotopia's transportation and urban forms, a retro-future vision from fifty years ago. The rest of the book has much to say about Ecotopia's industries, economics, politics, education, and family structures, but this article won't get into that.
William Weston flies to Reno, and takes a taxi across the border to Lake Tahoe. He has gotten special permission to bring an internal combustion engine into the country 20 miles to the nearest train station. He rides a train to the capital, San Francisco, and emerges from the main train station.
Market StreetNew TownsWhat I found, when I had gotten over my surprise at the quiet, was that Market Street ... had become a mall planted with thousands of trees. The street" itself, on which electric taxis, minibuses, and delivery carts purr along, has shrunk to a two-lane affair. The remaining space is occupied by bicycle lanes, fountains, sculptures, kiosks, and absurd little gardens surrounded by benches....
Scattered here and there are large conical-roof pavilions, with a kiosk in the center selling papers, comic books, magazines, fruit juices, and snacks.... The pavilions turn out to be stops on the minibus system.... These buses are comical battery-driven contraptions, resembling the antique cable cars that San Franciscans were once so fond of. They are driverless, and are steered and stopped by an electronic gadget that follows wire buried in the street.... These buses creep along at about ten miles an hour, but they come every five minutes or so. They charge no fare. When I took an experimental ride on one, I asked a fellow passenger about this, and he said the minibuses are paid for in the same way as the streets - out of general tax funds.... Down Market Street and some other streets, creeks now run....
Ecotopians setting out to go more than a block or two usually pick up one of the sturdy white-painted bicycles that lie about the streets by the hundreds and are available free for all. Dispersed by the movements of citizens during the day and evening, they are returned by night crews to the places where they will be needed the next day....
As I waked about, I noticed that the downtown area was strangely overpopulated with children and their parents, besides people who apparently worked in the offices and shops.... The great downtown skyscrapers ... had been turned into apartments! ... The former outlying residential areas have largely been abandoned.... The residents now live downtown, in buildings that contain not only apartments but also nurseries, grocery stores,and restaurants, as well as the shops and offices on the ground floor....
I saw a group of hunters, carrying fancy bows and arrows, jump off a minibus, on which they had loaded a recently killed deer.... The group had been hunting just outside town - where, apparently, deer are numerous.... [-Chapter The Streets of Ecotopia's Capital"]
While the inherited cities are still used and have to some extent been broken up into neighborhoods, the ideal pattern are the new minicities such as Alvisio, a former village on the southern shores of San Francisco Bay.
Intercity transportationYou get there on the interurban train, which drops you off in the basement of a large complex of buildings. The main structure, it turns out, is not the city hall or courthouse, but a factory. It produces the electric traction units - they hardly qualify as cars or trucks in our terms - that are used for transporting people and goods in Ecotopian cities, and for general transportation in the countryside. [Individually-owned cars are prohibited in dense city areas, which are served by minibuses.]
Around the factory, where we would have a huge parking lot, Alviso has ... restaurants, a library, bakeries, a core store" selling groceries and clothes, small shops, even factories and workshops - all jumbled amid apartment buildings. These are generally of three or four stories, arranged around a central courtyard of the type that used to be common in Paris. They are built almost entirely out of wood, which have become the predominant building material in ecotopia, due to the reforestation program. [A small amount of steel is produced for vehicles and such. Plastic and synthetic materials are not produced at all.] ... The apartments themselves are very large by our standards - with 10 or 15 rooms, to accommodate their communal living groups....
Alvisio streets ... are hardly wide enough for two cars to pass; but then of course there are no cars, so that is no problem. Pedestrians and bicycles meander along. Once in a while you see a delivery truck hauling a piece of furniture or some other large object, but Ecotopians bring their groceries home in string bags or large bicycle baskets. Supplies for the shops, like most goods in Ecotopia, are moved in containers. These are much smaller than our cargo containers, and proportioned to fit into Ecotopian freight cars and onto their electric trucks. Farm produce, for instance, is loaded into such containers either at the farms or at the container terminal located at the edge of each minicity. From the terminal an underground conveyer system connects to all the shops and factories in the minicity, each of which has a kind of siding where containers are shunted off. The idea was probably lifted from our automated warehouses, but turned backwards....
The entire population of Alviso, about 9,000 people, lives within a radius of a half mile from the transit station. But even this density allows for many park-like spaces.... Trees are everywhere - there are no large paved areas exposed to the sun. Around the edges of town are the schools and various recreation grounds....
We toured the factory, which is a confusing place.... Certain aspects are automated: the production of the electric motors, suspension frames, and other major elements.... The assembly of these item is done by groups of workers who actually fasten the parts together one by one.
[However,] much of the factory's output does not consist of finished vehicles at all.... This plant chiefly turns out front ends", rear ends", and battery units. Individuals and organizations then connect these to bodies of their own designs. Many of them are weird enough to make San Francisco minibuses look quite ordinary.... The motor drivers are capable of no more than 30 miles per hour....
It appears that a ring of such new towns is being built to surround the Bay, each one a self-contained community, but linked to its neighbors by train so that the entire necklace of towns will constitute one city. It is promised that you can, for instance, walk five minutes to your transit station, take a train within five minutes to a town steps away, and then walk another five minutes to your destination. My informants are convinced that this represents a halving of the time we would spend on a similar trip, not to mention the problems of parking, traffic, and of course pollution....
After leaving Alviso we took the train to Redwood City.... Three new towns have sprung up there along the Bay, separated by a half mile or so of open country.... In between, part of the suburban residential area has already been turned into alternating woods and grassland. [-Chapter Car-Less Living in Ecotopia's New Towns"]
The train Weston took from Lake Tahoe to San Francisco travels at 225 mph, and runs hourly. Most intercity travel between cities in California, Oregon, and Washington is by train. There are no domestic airlines. International flights to all countries except the US (with which Ecotopia has no transportation links) fly from airports located forty miles outside major cities, and the flights must go around the cities' airspace to minimize pollution.
This is an open thread.