Can Oak Ridge adapt to the world of the future?
I can’t answer my question “Can Oak Ridge adapt to the world of the future?”
Obviously, I hope the answer is “yes,” but I know there will be unanticipated challenges. (Life is like that.)
I do know that our city was largely built around the needs of American society in the middle decades of the 20th century. In particular, most of our street system was built around the private automobile as the primary means of transportation. I’m glad that we don’t have the incredibly narrow streets of older towns that were built when horses, donkeys, and human feet were the main means of transportation. However, I wonder how well Oak Ridge’s layout will adapt to a future in which people are trying to reduce their reliance on the private car — perhaps due to the scarcity of liquid transportation fuel or the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Karl’s observations on drive-up windows designed for SUVs (to the exclusion of sedans) suggest that design for the automobile may be more profoundly embedded than I imagine — if the Oak Ridge Starbuck’s is designed so that a person must drive an energy-inefficient SUV or a pickup truck to be able to conveniently buy coffee from the drive-up window, are we thinking clearly enough about the significant challenges of future adaptation?
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Adapt? Is this something new? I have always heard it to be afford, but new council members mean new thinkers.
Thank you for putting Oak Ridge in such a wonderful light that only an attitude change would help, but I believe as long as the few people who continue to offer TIFs to retail business without thinking of bringing well paying jobs with those TIF are putting Oak Ridge on a For Sale list to have only citizens cover the tabs of our escalating crime and traffic problem.
Where is the citizen’s break of taxes to having a safe city? Doesn’t retail business believe safe cities are an asset?
Comment by Ray Kircher — January 1, 2008 @ 2:49 pm