kolelinio from kolelinia.com on Vimeo.
kolelinio from kolelinia.com on Vimeo.
I think this is pretty genius. Clearly, finding alternatives to the automobile is going to become a huge priority in the coming years. Oil is increasingly not only increasingly expensive and detrimental to air quality and the ozone, but catastrophes like the Gulf Oil Spill indicate that drilling deeper and deeper for this substance is not financially or environmentally feasible. Luckily, a more pedestrian (and environmentally) -friendly trend is gaining momentum across the country. In February, New York's Time Square, once famous for it's gridlocked car-traffic, was closed to cars for good. As a result, traffic on other streets sped up, pedestrians and cars interacted less, and not surprisingly, the number of automobile accidents dropped. However, New York is uniquely positioned for this sort of action, because Manhattan is already such a walkable city, and the Subway offers a reliable, and universal public transit alternative.
Times Square Sans Traffic
The sprawling, car-dependent cities of the Western US would be incapable of creating such pedestrian only zones with similar effects. Furthermore, some cities like Phoenix, Arizona (the 5th largest in the US) have relatively underdeveloped mass transit systems. Until August 2009, Phoenix was the only major metropolitan area in the US without some sort of rail system. That fall, they completed a 20-mile Light Rail line connecting Downtown Phoenix to the Eastern part of the city. However, the Phoenix Light Rail if far from efficient. It's built at street level, so it interacts with car traffic and adheres to traffic lights, and has worsened traffic in some cases. Additionally, the construction costs of building at street level were massive, roads were redone, entire intersections re-shaped, and sections of road closed down for long periods of time. Phoenix has plans to expand the system, but the next sections aren't due until 2015... The zip line, however, could present a far more practical alternative for sprawling cities like phoenix. Under Angelov's Zipline plan, sections of the city could be closed to traffic and become zip line centers, where commuters could transition from one line to another in order to accurately ride the line to an appropriate "stop." These sections of no-car zip zones could be connected to other zones by higher lines that would carry passengers over areas of car zones. "ZipZones" are an appropriate alternative pedestrians in this case, because the density of these city sections are much lower than a typical pedestrian zone on the East Coast would be, and the zip line would provide a similar degree of accurate and universal transportation as the subway. 
ZipZoning Concept
My favorite part about this plan is how minimal it is. Unlike subway systems that require extensive tunneling and reinforcement, or ground rails that require street augmentation, not to mention the actual rails, cars, and electrical systems of each, the Zip Line requires nothing more than cable and towers. There's a certain gracefulness to the idea that juxtaposes nicely with the chaos that typically characterizes urban areas... road rage and speeding would give way to efficient, standardized intervals of the traffic, similar to that of a Ski Lift. Noise would be reduced dramatically, and the absence of roads in large potions of cities could revolutionize our approach to city design. Within the gridded seas of car zones, zip zones could become patchwork islands of green space and buildings... our approach to urban planning could begin to focus less on making a city navigable by car, and more on exploiting the panoramic potential of our cities. Viewing these urban area from the air provides us with a perspective we've not yet exploited... and it could easily be one that revolutionizes urban living for the better. Additionally, I frequent concept art forums, mostly because I enjoy witnessing the creative processes of other people, and analyzing how different people approach the same problem. My favorite forum is the Environment of the Week thread at ConceptArt.org/forums. There, participants are given a weekly task/inspiration, and post their creations to the thread to be voted on. A few months ago, the theme was "Bridge between two cities." On contestant seemingly channeled Angelov in his submission, which intended to represent a a sort of "skybike' line that connected residential cities to industrial ones. It's sort of a weird nerdy tangent, but the similarity is pretty awesome. I think that this is such a simple and genius alternative to traditional methods of public transit, and it would be cheap, would have minimal environmental impact, and would give us an opportunity to connect with our cities on a more personal and individual level... Here that Obama Administration? We figured out. Presents Please!
Courtesy of ConceptArt.Org
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