One community that I highly value is the city of Boston. I am from Massachusetts about 40 minutes away from Boston, in many ways it holds a great place in my heart. One reason is that I have a personal connection with it, my Papa when a long time ago used to give tours of the freedom trail it was his passion he even gave me and every one of my cousins an old book about Boston. Another reason why I value it is the community that has been built within and around Boston itself. After the Boston Marathon Bombing, the phrase “Boston Strong” became a huge support system for everyone in the community coming together to overcome this devastating attack. To this day people still use Boston Strong whether it is in reference to the anniversary of the bombing or something as simple as the Patriots winning a Superbowl. The community strengthened with their sense of support, love, and pride. I also love the Boston community because it is not just subjected to Boston itself but its surrounding communities as well like my own town, or pretty much anyone that is from Massachusetts or close to Boston itself. I wouldn’t want to lose the sense of pride, love, and support within this community I think is what makes it special and so lovable to me.
One technology that I would keep in Boston is the Bluebikes bike-share, it is a mode of transportation within Boston and some surrounding towns where there are kiosks throughout the city that you can rent or get a membership to ride a bike, you can leave the bike in a different kiosk than where you picked it up. considering this tech consists of bicycles there is relatively no carbon footprint that is caused by it. This also encourages people to use a more healthy and environmentally efficient way to travel while also encouraging a healthy lifestyle. Another technology I would keep in Boston is the MBTA also known as the “T”, more recently the T has become more efficient in becoming more eco-friendly based on changing their energy source from gases to more electrically based. much like the bikes, it is helpful in transportation within Boston and as well as connecting to surrounding towns. I believe that using the T is more efficient in reducing the carbon footprint in Boston by creating less need for cars. The great thing about the T is that there are stations much like the bikes throughout the city of Boston, so if you work in Boston it may be more beneficial to you and to the environment to take the T. It also depletes the struggle of trying to find a parking spot and wasting money on ridiculously priced parking garages. Enforcing the use of these other modes of transportation will hopefully decrease the use amount of commuters by vehicles thus creating fewer carbon emissions based around the transportation creating a healthier and cleaner area.
I wouldnt necessarily ban this technology because it would be hard to but I would try to decrease the amount of people commuting and driving vehicles in general within the city. Based on an article I found “Approximately 29 percent of Boston’s emissions come from the transportation sector, and 75 percent of those emissions come from private passenger vehicles.”(https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/01/29/carbon-free-boston-report-takeaways) this means that regarding transportation the most impact of carbon is based off of vehicles specifically single passenger vehicles. Transportation is a huge part of Bostons culture, a majority of people who work in Boston live outside of the city or even people who come to visit the city. One way to fix this problem would be to have everyone change to electric cars which would result in about a 40% decrese in carbon greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. However realisicly speaking not everyone is able to afford an electric car, you can not force everyone to ditch the cars they have now for new electric cars. That would also cause another problem dealing with getting rid of the old cars. By reducing the use of these kinds of transporations would result in cleaner air pollution, I also think that it would decrease the amount of car realted accidents and traffic within Boston itself which can become a big problem most of the time as well as road rage and un- safe driving. Which could alos result in a happier community due to the decrease of rage and annoyance connected to driving in the city.
I think communites should really consider the effects that these technologies have on our ecosystem when decideding which tech to promote and which tech to ban. We only have one planet and one ecosystem, once it is gone there is not much we can do about it. I think promoting the idea and giving the community and public knowledge of the effects of these techs that we use and giving a breif about what they are emitting to the planet could be beneficial to deciding which techs to keep and which ones to ban. I think a democratic way to do this would be through the process is voting, it is the most univeral way to be able to give a fair enough decision amongst a majority which in turn would affect their communities.
References:
https://boston.curbed.com/2018/8/2/17642242/boston-bike-share-dockless-where-to-find
https://www.boston.gov/departments/environment/bostons-carbon-emissions
https://www.mbta.com/sustainability
https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/01/29/carbon-free-boston-report-takeaways
https://www.mbta.com/news/2017-09-27/mbta-sustainability-bond-issuance-met-strong-investor-demand
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