The city I grew up in is Scranton, PA.  Scranton is medium-sized city, located in the north eastern part of PA, that has a variety of neighborhoods.  From automobile suburbs to an urban downtown, we even have some pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods.  Scranton has a population of 76,000+ (from the census poll of 2013).  Scranton is a pretty comfortable city and it offers a variety of activities and places to eat.  Of course since I’ve been here most of my life, I do find it boring sometimes.  Scranton’s practically like my back yard.  I was always roaming the streets after school and just hanging around with friends.  Even if you don’t find something interesting to do in one part of Scranton, I’m sure you could find something in another part.  Also the local places to eat is a must try if you haven’t already.

The first city I will be discussing is Copenhagen, Denmark.  I chose this city because of their approach on “traffic calming.”  I think the idea behind traffic calming is a great concept.  For the most part the idea of traffic calming was to find other ways to travel instead of using cars or other motor vehicles.  The pedestrians are able to walk without worrying about traffic and they can move as freely as they want.  This allows more communications among the people.  People actually find it unusual to drive places in Copenhagen now.  This is a great approach if we would like to become more sustainable.  By using cars less, people would burn less fossil fuels and also there would be less air pollution.  Although this is a great idea it would be hard since we would need to cognitively recognize this change and put it into motion.

The second place I will be discussing is Rochester, NY.  I chose this city because of how it is very similar to how Scranton is.  Our place of residence has a very strong impact on our choice of transportation.  This affects the air quality in our city.  By having to drive around everywhere and every time we would like to go somewhere; we are throwing pollutants into the air.  This once again ties to what I mentioned above in my Copenhagen discussion.  The trend to become more sustainable is by making a more pedestrian-oriented city where we could be in walking or cycling distance of everything.  Of course this would take a lot of work and planning.  Another problem we’d run into would be the physical infrastructure of Scranton.