The City Today and Your Life as a Flâneur - 1/19/15

As a student at the University of Utah who works on campus and lives near Trax, most of my travel needs throughout Salt Lake City are done by light rail. And as a result, the window seat of a train has become a vantage I spend a lot of time observing and contemplating the city through. As I look out that window on my way to school every morning I am surrounded by three lanes of traffic on either side. Watching people sit in their idling cars alone and struggling to apply makeup, text, talk on the phone, and eat breakfast, I can't help but think of the air.

When living in a city with some of the worst air quality in the nation, where there are week long stretches of living in a haze considered dangerous to everyone especially the young and elderly, you have to be conscious of the way you travel. Not to say that there aren't a lot of people who do travel wisely, by train, bike, and foot, exemplified well by the over stuffed morning commute trax trains, but obviously that is not enough if we are still seeing the same terrible air quality during periods of inversion. And I believe many people would agree that this city's largest pitfall is the air quality and inversion. It damages all of our health, dirties the water, and discourages growth and tourism. Therefore I believe it is paramount that we set a precedent in Salt Lake City to be committed to getting around our city in cleaner ways. Instead of sitting alone in a 4000 pound piece of polluting steel, frustrated by the slow crawl of traffic we could share a train with a few hundred operated by electricity or ride a bike powered by the calories you've consumed. If we could shift people towards being personally responsible for their environment and improve transit ridership there would be a rippling of positive impacts such as; improved social life, improved average health/obesity, clean water and air, economic growth, an overall improvement in the quality of life here in Salt Lake City, and eventually larger and longer lasting infrastructure and policy changes.