Preface: ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

The Mission

This is a pro-quality of life, pro-growth, pro-environment website. The mission is to create livable cities and suburbs with convenient, cost-effective, and efficient transportation breakthroughs. With mobility enhanced, the infrastructures of the future evolve from today’s built environment, as they must:

delivered by growing market forces and smarter, capital sensitive, planning.

The Website

This website is organized in Sections. New sections will be added as appropriate. All original ideas will be considered and their proponents credited.

Section 1: MINIHIGHWAYS. Sustainable transportation cannot be achieved with greener cars alone. In large metro areas with congested highways, building new non-sprawl roadway systems (minihighways with minilanes) for new vehicle types (minicommuters) is the most convenient, cost-effective, and efficient breakthrough.

Section 2: TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT. Congestion pricing: No, it’s a tax. Congestion pricing/crediting: Yes, it rewards productive behavior.

Section 3: MASS TRANSIT TWINS. Sustainable transportation cannot always be achieved with new mass transit. In large modern cities with old mass transit, transforming the rail systems already in place for greatly increased capacity is the most convenient, cost-effective, and efficient breakthrough.

Section 4: BULLET TRAINS, US STYTLE. America is not Europe or Asia. High-speed trains work here, but not as developed in other countries. (This section is under construction.)

I’m an architect and sole author of The Locomotion Initiative. I have a progressive market-driven vision for transportation. Few if any fellow architects envision a true metamorphosis of America’s transportation infrastructure and the megacities transportation create. Most favor increased subsidies for more of the same; mainly, more for mass transit, more for highways, more for airports.

This development strategy is not productive anymore. Mass transit, highways, and airports were the essential (and at their prime self-funded) growth infrastructures of the cities and suburbs of the 20th century. But development with these three infrastructures alone is not sustainable today because mass transit, highways, and airports are increasingly expensive requiring growing subsidies.

Sustainable development requires sustainable transportation. And sustainable transportation can only be achieved as it has been achieved before:

when a growing number of people and products move about with shrinking costs, both economic and environmental, and with less congestion than an earlier smaller population enjoyed.

This is what “smart growth” is really all about. It requires a changing mix of transportation infrastructures and technologies: New transportation solutions that are more convenient to use, more cost-effective to build, and much more efficient than the status quo.

My Most Important Qualification

This website could have been conceived by any other architect. Except for one thing: I believe that my professional class is seriously underperforming creating great buildings for increasingly dysfunctional urban environments. I know of no other architect proposing that today’s megacities can be transformed into superior living environments as a direct result of new and mostly self-funded adaptations within the transportation infrastructures.

My Brief Bullet History

• My name is Alfredo M. Gonzalez.
• I was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
• I have a 5-year Bachelor of Architecture degree (1970) from The Catholic University of America’s School of Engineering and Architecture.
• I settled in Puerto Rico after college becoming the youngest partner at Toro & Ferrer Arquitectos, at the time the island’s most prestigious design firm.
• I opened my own practice after that—AMGonzalez Associates—and later moved to the mainland.
• I last worked in New York with Hillier Architecture (now RMJM Hillier) as partner for Puerto Rico projects until early 2006.

• I study the transportation breakthroughs of the past—technologies, infrastructures, and how they co-evolve—because the solutions of the future begin there.
• I’m a practicing urban environmentalist. (Yes, I gave up my car. No, it wasn’t easy. But it can be. Read on…)

Top of Page ↑