information superhighway 2.0?

You might remember the cookie cutter neighbourhood featured in Edward Scissorhands, with all the men leaving their identical houses and getting into their identical cars for their identical commute to identical jobs, leaving behind, well, desperate housewives.

Last year I visited Maigen’s uncle & aunt in their enormous, luxurious, expensive house in its cookie cutter neighbourhood, a sprawling suburb of Washington, DC.

Developers buy up huge tracts of land, and in the tumbling fray with regional governing bodies, pound out these meaningless clots of dwellings that you have to actually live in to be able to tell them apart.

A writer in National Geographic, describing these sterile clusters littering Orlando, called them exurbs, a term originally coined in the 1950s, according to Wikipedia, for ‘extra-urban’ commuter towns.  Highways and upper-middle class incomes make them possible.  And there are a lot of those out there.

So as the information age paradoxically creates less need to be centralized but far more people that need to be there, we have major arteries that would have long ago killed healthy men by massive coronary.  Jammed roads.  Take over an hour to travel 40 kilometers.  As slow as if you were traveling through downtown anyway.  Makes you wonder why they bother building them.  Seems to me they should just do the smart thing and build up.  Dense population with adequate green space has been proven to be more healthy.  This is why Vancouver keeps winning “most livable city in the world”.

But that’s another story.  Let’s deal with the problem.  People love big houses and big lawns to hate mowing.  Enter the Internet.  Not as wonder of decentralized telecommuting.  But as transit demigod.  Google has its own bus system rivaling any other, municipal or private, in the world.

“They pick up workers as far away as Concord, 54 miles northeast of the Googleplex, as the company’s sprawling Mountain View headquarters are known, and Santa Cruz, 38 miles to the south. The system’s routes cover in excess of 230 miles of freeways, more than twice the extent of the region’s BART commuter train system, which has 104 miles of tracks.” 

Yahoo and Microsoft also have transit systems, if not quite so grand.

There’s irony there.  But anything that results in fewer cars on the road is okay by me.  Forward thinking like that deserves to win.  And if Google ever calls, I may just be American before nightfall.