Brainstorming

In the Agenda on change.gov, we can see the interconnections as we look at education, which connects in one way to aid to families, and in another direction to increasing spending on R&D.

It’s all connected. We would rather young people help build new rapid transit systems than mark up the old ones with grafitti. We would prefer an efficient mass transit system to gridlock and parking problems. And we would like it if the transportation system made us independent of foreign oil.

It’s not as if the technologies are not already here.

Half a century ago, Disneyworld had the monorail, a quiet, efficient, and lovely system that by now has transported millions without a single traffic fatality. The footprint of each pillar is about a square yard; the noise level allows a quiet conversation even as people travel overhead.

People have recently begun converting their cars and trucks to run on reclaimed vegetable oil; that’s what Otto Diesel had in mind to begin with, a hundred years ago.

The first electric car is also over a hundred years old.

And as for new ideas, all it took was a laying off of aerospace engineers in the 70s, and all of a sudden we had skateboards, Hobie Cats, windsurfers and parasails. It turns out that imagineers don’t all have to work for Disney.

We have all seen ideas that work and that could be expanded on. How about using this space, and the Suggestions button at change.gov, to explore a few, without criticism? That’s what brainstorming is all about; even ideas that seem far out may have a kernel of value, or at least suggest one that does.