Assignment 6 - Thomas Noll

     Oddly contradictory to most of my other interests, I have a strong desire in city planning. Not the parts of painstaking dance with local bureaucracy, or the the formalities of law precedents, but specifically with the design of an environment. I want to understand the logistics of traffic control and waste management systems. How to efficiently build a dense urban landscape with the maximum quality of life possible. I can't credit a class or major life experience, rather it was my somewhat trivial discovery that you could, in fact, download google earth to your computer. In literally picture-perfect detail you can see layers of streets, transit routes, traffic patterns, demographics, everything, from almost any city in the world.
     With access to this data, I cant help but compare it to the features I see here at home. Biking from home to downtown I can encounter beautiful creek-side walking paths, dull and lifeless roads with a gross amount of wasted space, local squares with busy shops, and large industrial parking lots never filled to capacity. What could make these places better? Perhaps dedicated biking lanes guarded by parking spaces, narrower streets to reduce speeding and add more trees, and a bigger emphasis on safe and easy public transportation to take people off the road. Obviously it is easier to dream a perfect city than actually find the budget to make it happen. However, with population still rising, solutions to urban sprawl and common quality of life become increasingly relevant: environmentally, socially, and aesthetically. Because lets be honest, unless you live somewhere elegant like Chevy chase, no one truly likes the suburbs.