Environmental Science

I was going to my grandmothers house, it was a hot nice day in Mexico City but somethin horribly bad had to happen and that was traffic starting at the Periferico highway, a transit monster that conects south and north of the city.

The clock started moving at slow speed, and our car seemed to have no motion. I then asked my Dad, how much time did it took him to do a similar trip from Las Lomas to San Angel (Grandmas house) when he was around my age, he said “15 min. and at the worst 25 min.” I  could not believe that, because I got so used to the  2 hour or 1. 30 minutes to get to San Angel.

Time went by really slowly, and we had already been locked in that damned Suburban for almost 1 hour without even moving, we were all really pissed at the situation and then to make things even worst the 2nd floor for the Periferico was being built so many of the alternative routes were closed because of the construction (By the way the second Periferico floor, took around 5 years to be completed, and still has not helped the issue of trafic at all).

Finally the traffic began to move and after almost 3 hours of not moving in a car we got to my grandmother house.

This particular event, did caught my attention and got me investigating why is traffic so severe in Mexico City, well the reasons are that there are around 21,000,000 people living in Mexico City and Distrito Federal, the city originally was not planed to hold a number bigger than 10,000,000; but most inmportantly there are 4.2 daily trips in the Mexico City road system and makes this a problem since all the viality installed makes up around 6, 337 miles.

The problem, is that the amount of traffic that happens in Mexico City contributes to pollution and cars are number 1 polluting sources in the area. But the fact is that traffic like Perifericos in which you make 2 to 3 hours to go from North to south, is a signal that something is not going well and that is the fact that “we” are to many people and we have to stop growing, we have to reduce the size of our cities and to create laws that stablish a certain limit of the capacity and length a city can have.

Salida a Cuernavaca.

Near Fuente de Petroleos, Av. Paseo de La Reforma

@  Periferico 2nd Floor in construction

No Comments »

Sweden, Denmark and Finland are ahead of the United States when it comes to both developing environmentally friendly energy sources and using then. Denmark has islands that are completely independent from fossil fuels and are providing themselves with energy from renewable energy sources. Even if they use less fossil fuels and a lot less energy per person their living standard is supposed to be higher than in the United States. How is that possible?

The biggest difference between Scandinavian cities and cities in America is how the public transportation system works. There are reasons why it works so well in Scandinavia. First of all the distances are shorter and they are not dealing with the same  amount of people as in big cities in America, but they are also less dependent on cars. In Sweden the driving age is 18, and that means that in high school, teenagers never have the option of taking the car to school even if they had one. By not taking the car to school they are forced to take the public bus, since school buses and cheap cabs do not exist. From the age of 15 a normal teenager has to walk to the bus stop and learn how to handle public transportation. When people come to Scandinavia from another country their first reaction is often; how do you deal with this? It is so complicated.  The answer is simple; if kids learn how to handle it from the beginning, complication will never be a problem, and when they grow up, It will be completely natural to take the bus to work even if the option stands to take the car.

That leads to education. The fact that environmental science is included as a mandatory course and not an option makes a big difference. Very early kids get to learn why they should turn of the water while they are brushing their teeth and why to turn of the light when they leave a room. It gets to be a habit instead of something that takes extra work and therefore is not worth it.

The last couple of years the transition from fossil fuels to renewable fuels have happened quickly in Scandinavia. Mostly because there are fewer people to convince that  global warming is actually happening and less people to get to use less energy. In a lot of articles and text they do not take this factor in to big enough consideration. They make the US seem like they are going a lot slower because they are not trying hard enough. It is obviously harder to turn around 304 million people than 9 million, which is the population in Sweden. The US is definitely getting there and the world will hopefully see a change within the next 50 years.

No Comments »