Frank Lynch Democrat for  President

20 NEW GREEN CITIES

Alexander the Great founded twenty new cities 2,300 years ago! At the very least, America must exceed the ancient Greeks and build at least twenty new, green, uncongested, healthy and livable cities.

One of the worst aspects of our current mode of development is urban sprawl based on single family homes linked by commuter cars and trucks. I actually weep when I drive down what used to by lovely two lane country roads when I moved to Florida. Now they are six and eight lane suburban, overcrowded, nightmares of pollution, surrounded by an endless, endless, endless sprawl of zero lot line houses with lawns requiring insecticides, weed killers and fertilizers which have made it impossible to drink from any of our streams and lakes, or eat the clams. Almost all the birds and fish and butterflies are gone. There is nothing but dirty air, noise, traffic jams and pollution.

We must stop destroying what is left of our environment, wetlands and farmland with this senseless and ugly urban sprawl. In a world that is already overcrowded with 6.6 billion people, with a likelihood of 3 to 6 billion more people before our babies reach middle age, the world's scarcest commodities will be farmland, water, and clean air. And they are irreplaceable.

Frank proposes that we build a 2,000 mile long new superhighway in the center of America where the land is too dry for farming and where few people live today. In the semi-desert lands East of the Rocky Mountains, the federal government may condemn and acquire the land cheaply, without destroying wetlands or farmlands.

America's new green corridor should run from Canada to our southern border. We should build five electric railroad lines alongside the highway, two lines for ultra high speed passenger trains, two for electric freight trains, and one for redundancy/backup and maintenance. The right of way should be ten miles wide and filled with the giant electric wind turbines. A limitation of wind power is that wind can die down, but a 2,000 mile long wind farm will always have sufficient winds somewhere down the line.

Every hundred miles along the highway we should build a new green city for a total of 20 cities. So that the project can supply electricity to the rest of the nation, and so we can stop building carbon based generators anywhere in America, each new city will have a nuclear power plant in addition to the windmill farm. I will ask Congress to exempt these new cities from all the rules and regulations which currently make it impossible to build nuclear plants in America.

People do not realize that nuclear is the safest of all forms of power generation! In the half century of nuclear electricity, there has been only one fatal accident killing about forty people total in Chernobyl. That averages to less than one death per year in all the world combined. France and Japan get 60% of their electricity from nuclear, yet have never had a fatal accident. Hundreds of people die every year from coal mining accidents and oil well accidents. Nuclear is safest and cleanest.

The new cities will start by building ground level electric railways for local deliveries to the buildings, and for subway passengers. The people level will be built above the ground freight level. All buildings will be thirty stories or more.

Buildings will be shaped round to minimize the skyscraper winds  and the wind stress on the buildings. In a time when climate change is increasing both the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and tornadoes, and we have a very real danger of nuclear bombs being exploded inside the US, it is important that buildings be designed to withstand extreme winds and shockwaves. Most of us have experienced the strong winds around tall buildings. Research has demonstrated that round, tapered buildings, actually cone shaped, have the least ground wind distortion. Cone shaped buildings also let more sunlight down to pedestrian levels. Cone shaped buildings have the best ability to survive hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and shockwaves.

There will be no cars, and no single family or low rise buildings. At the people level, all the buildings will have a square shape and build out to the sidewalks to create a city neighborhood effect of small stores and restaurants. Different architectural treatments will be encouraged so that some city blocks are like Paris, others like New York, and other blocks like London.

By having only high rise buildings, the environmental impact is lessened, and without cars, there is minimal pollution. Won't it be nice if we never again see smog? And people stop dying needlessly from the filth spewed into our lungs by evil oil?

Each city will be built around a Central Park like my favorite New York. But even better, each city will not be near any river or body of water, so the cities will be safe from rising water levels. Also, this means the cities can be surrounded on all sides by parks with facilities for every form of exercise. And most other high rise buildings will have exercise clubs and gyms.

At the heart of each city will be a large, free, medical and nursing school, complete with a teaching hospital. To decrease errors and increase the long term retention of learning experiences, interns will not work more than eight hours a day, and must have at least eight hours off between any shifts. Government service is required of all students who get a free medical education.

Adjacent to the medical schools will be absolutely superb biomedical research centers, gathering together not only doctors, but the hundreds of thousands of new 21 year old PhDs in chemistry, electrical engineering, computer sciences, materials science, nanotechnology, and physics which my free college and useful graduate schools will produce throughout America.

Finally, the wind farms and nuclear power plants will provide a limitless supply of clean and cheap energy for new industries in the industrial parks next to the cities, with workers commuting on clean electric subways. These industrial parks will fill up quickly for several reasons. One is the supply of highly technically educated employees. Another is that we will give certain tax holidays to companies that target products currently imported from Communist china and her puppet companies around the world.

The greatest force encouraging new companies to operate in our new cities and to create jobs for our multitude of new college graduates will be the Abraham Lincoln 60% import tax to bring jobs back from Communist China.