Currently I’m living in Casablanca, Morocco. It’s Morocco’s biggest city located on the western coastline. It’s a major port city and home to almost 3.5 million people. The types of neighborhoods that you can find here cover the entire range, though it’s dangerous to use any of the popular modes of transportation. From my perspective, enforcement of traffic laws is almost completely nonexistent, making it very dangerous to be a pedestrian, cyclist, or fellow motorist on any of the streets here. Morocco has vast amounts of farmland outside of the cities that provide their cities with year around produce that is cheap and affordable. Many people that do have jobs within the Metropolitan area work in trade/shipping, banking, and government. This place is full of different culture, it can be very dirty and sometimes dangerous, but it can also be beautiful.

Copenhagen is a much smaller city but Casablanca could learn so much from them. Casablanca could emplace and enforce strict traffic laws that facilitate travel by pedestrians and cyclists and much of the day to day traffic would go away. Changing Casablanca to a ‘bicycle-oriented’ system would be the easiest sustainable change to make because of how little the existing infrastructure would have to change. Morocco also already has great weather that would ease this type of travel. This is a difficult comparison to make though, because the differences in socio economics between the two countries are vast; average household size in Denmark is much smaller than in Morocco, Denmark has a much more favorable GDP, and education standards here aren’t nearly as high as they are in Europe; most of these people aren’t remotely aware of the carbon footprint they leave by living the way that they do.

Curitiba’s population and size is very comparable to Casablanca’s. A mass transit system based on principles established by Curitiba would be perfect for this place. It would cut down on traffic which would in turn cut down on air pollution, providing a healthier environment for the residents. It could save people money in a place where money is already very tight. A reliable mass transit system could even help provide opportunities for people to seek employment in places within the city that they wouldn’t have been able to travel to before. Getting children to education centers would also be streamlined, which would also be good for Morocco’s future. Transitioning from the automobile oriented to a mass transit or streetcar oriented system would be very challenging because of the associated expenses, as well as the major changes and modifications that the existing infrastructure would require.