Away With the Old, In With The “New Norfolk”

When one thinks of Norfolk, the immediate words that come to mind may be: water, business, university, and elegance.   On the other hand, the words may be more like: traffic, slums, homelessness, and crime.  By the year 2030, the citizens of Norfolk would like to enhance these positive aspects of Norfolk and replace the negative aspects with better ones.  Of course, we want to improve Norfolk, but to take it one step further, let us make a goal to sustain Norfolk.

So, you may be wondering how we should go about this idea of sustaining a new, improved Norfolk.  To begin, let’s start with traffic.  Norfolk pulls in many commuting drivers for business purposes, and the tunnels serve as major bottlenecks that cause most of the traffic that occurs in this city.  Now, for every car that sits for 30+ minutes in traffic means there is 30 more minutes of fossil fuels being consumed and carbon emissions being emitted into our atmosphere.  Now, carpooling is a great idea.  It reduces the amount of cars on the road, which in turn reduces both traffic and carbon emissions.  However, carpooling takes planning, coordination, and sometimes, compromises.  As a result, people bypass the carpooling idea.  Here is the problem: we need to give people a reason to want to carpool by creating a benefit to carpooling.  Now, here is the solution: we will create a new tunnel, which leads directly into the business center in Norfolk and is dedicated to drivers who participate in carpooling.  The idea is very similar to HOV lanes, which have already been deemed a success as shown by their popularity and abundance on many various interstates.

Also, promoting public transportation will also take more cars off the road.  The Tide is innovative, clean, and exciting for the citizens of Norfolk.  So far it has had a great influence on our community.  Why not expand it?   We will build it to run through Old Dominion University’s campus down to the Naval Base.  The students and military make up a fairly significant portion of Norfolk’s population.   Allowing this access to these substantial populations of people will both generate business into the downtown area while taking less cars off of the road.

Moving on from traffic, we will now focus on the more run down (for lack of a better word) parts of Norfolk.  Throughout Norfolk, there are vacated buildings sitting and taking up space without performing any service.  No one would like to buy or rent these shacks, because they are just plain unappealing.  The answer: tear them down.  Tear them down completely, and start again fresh.  You may be thinking, “But won’t it be cheaper to renovate?” Here’s the kicker: start again fresh in a “green” way.

Replace the space that lacks service with green buildings.   These buildings can be customized for both home living and conducting business.  They will have solar panels and small windmills on the exterior (and, also, underwater turbines for waterfront properties), which will generate the electricity to power the building.  Of course, each building will have to have some sort of generator for weather that does not permit the production of electricity by these means.  Large, highly insulated windows and cooling shades will accompany these buildings for natural heating and cooling for the buildings.  Internal gardens will be incorporated by these windows for both decor and internal carbon dioxide uptake and oxygen production.  Appliances, such as sinks, toilets, showers, washing machines, and dishwashers will be generated in ways that dispense less water to promote conservation.  Compact fluorescent light bulbs will be used in replacement of incandescent ones.

The list goes on for how to turn energy inefficient buildings into energy and cost efficient buildings that also help sustain our community.  These are only a few ideas that can help improve and save Norfolk, however, there are many more that can be incorporated into this plan.  These ideas are a feasible answer to some of Norfolk’s big issue areas.  With appropriate funding, this city could take these ideas and turn great things out of them.

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