Quote of the day:

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
—Frederick Douglass

There was a recent question posed to those WordPress bloggers who use the Daily writing prompt, and I thought it was an especially good one, so I want to try to answer it. Actually, there were several recent daily prompts that I liked that I might try to answer.

Anyway, the question was, how would you design the city of the future?

First of all there would be no cars. No private vehicles of any kind. No trucks nor anything of that sort. Because there wouldn’t be any streets wide enough to accommodate them. People would get around on moving sidewalks. The sidewalks, or strips, would be arranged something like Asimov described them in his Caves of Steel novel with the slowly moving strips advancing up to the more quickly moving ones, so everyone could hop onto the one that best suited them. 

Of course, the moving strips would only be for short distances. For longer trips, there would be the underground shuttlecocks that would zip you to your destination in no time.

By this time everything would be recyclable, so no need for noisy trash trucks. Just drop any waste into the recycling bin where it would get whisked off automatically into the recycling center.

Also, no need for delivery trucks or moving vans. The underground conveyances would handle those as well. This would significantly cut down on the noise in the City of the Future.

There would be no private homes. Everyone would live in high rises, but the walls would be well insulated so no worries about noisy neighbors, plus the architects of the future will have found ways to customize each family’s home in unique ways so there would be no feeling of living in the same cookie cutter space as everyone else.

Naturally, there would be no guns. There would be a force field surrounding the City of the Future that would zap anyone who tried to bring a firearm of any kind into the city. The zap would be carefully calibrated to each individual automatically so as not to actually harm them, but just enough to make sure that they get the message. Smaller zaps for those with heart conditions; larger zaps for big healthy dudes.

Therefore, not even the police would have to carry guns. As a consequence, the police would become known as Boobies, just as they are in Merrie Olde England. [I’m told I don’t have that quite right, but no matter.] 

Anyone who feels the necessity of having a gun for whatever reason could live in one of the many Libertarian communities that have become known as Teller Penns, after a couple of well known Libertarians.

Crime would, of course, be minimal, but anyone who commits violence against a fellow human being and caught in a Boobie trap would be given a gun and sent to the nearest Teller Penn.